Ark's Ark

Star Trek Online Open Beta 20100123a.1 Patch Notes, January 23rd

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

Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 12

Continuing on from Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 11 – Patch Edition.

Or you could return to the beginning of our STO Open Beta coverage with Part 1.

2:17 pm GMT, Day 12

I took the day off yesterday, dealing with Jack Steel related things, and Cryptic have been busy with the patches.

Update 20100119a.10

Update 20100119a.12

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.

Star Trek Online Tutorial 52 Badges Of Exploration

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.

Star Trek Online Nova Class Science Ship 300x177

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.

Muck Later

After a little rest, we finish up with the End of Beta Bonanza!

Star Trek Online Open Beta 20100119a.12 Patch Notes, January 22nd

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 Mogai â€“ Added Plasma Turret, Dual Beams, Rapid Fire, Attack Pattern Alpha and Evasive Maneuvers.

Improved Romulan/Reman D’deridex â€“ Added additional Aft Plasma Array, Viral Matrix, Photonic Shockwave, and increased its used of Heavy Plasma Torpedoes.

Improved all Hirogens shipsâ€“ Added Transphasic Torpedoes

Improved Klingon Neghâ€™Var â€“ Added Boarding Party at higher levels

Improved Cardassian Galor â€“ Added Evasive Maneuvers, and Feedback Pulse
Fixed Borg shipWeapons (Itâ€™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.

Fixed a crash when using the Tailor

Additional server performance updates

Jack Steel and the Starblade Season 2 launching Monday

Not going to be much posting today, as I have to get ready for, and attend, the launch party for the new season of Squadron Leader Jack Steel and the Starblade. I get quite ridiculously nervous before these things. We’ll be hearing the show for the first time, and I’ll be wincing at my own lines throughout, as I always do!

Jack Steel is a little radio-play type podcast that I’m lucky enough to get to be in, providing the voice of everybody’s favourite zombie-sixing alien-zapping Squadron Leader. For anyone interested, here is last years production, covering how Jack and friends defend 1930’s Britain from an existential threat.:

The incredibly awesome Jack Steel song by Bill McSweeney:

Season 1 of Squadron Jack Steel and the Starblade:

I’ll be posting our all-new episodes from Monday.

Star Trek Online Open Beta 20100119a.10 Patch Notes, January 21st

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.

Highly Illogical – Leonard Nimoy

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.

Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 11 – Patch Edition

Merrily tripping our way onwards from Star Trek Online Open Beta LiveBlog Bonanza Part 10.

Or you could start at the beginning (It’s a very good place to start) with Part 1!

2:02 pm GMT, Day 10

Last night we finally had the major patch that we’ve been waiting for. Patch notes here. Amongst the highlights, the beta level cap has been removed, and all zones have been opened up for visiting. Today I’m going to go in search of the changes the patch has wrought.

The first thing I notice when logging in is that I now have another character slot to use, a 3rd. This was supposed to unlock when you unlocked Klingon, but had not been doing so until now.

Logging Arkturos Reh in to the Vulcan Sector I am greeted by Leonard Nimoy giving me some backstory to the area. Pretty cool.

Many of the NPCs you speak to have changed in appearance. Admiral Quinn is looking much smarter in his Admiral’s uniform as he offers me some more missions that he did not have for me yesterday, both of which, I note, make a point of saying that Starfleet is not all about combat.

I also have a new contact called “Bridge Officer Requisitions” who gives me two new Bridge Officers. They have green names, so I assume they’re somehow superior to the white names ones you acquire through normal channels. I don’t have room for that at the moment, and I am unwilling to delete any of my current crew, so they’ll have to sit in my candidate section for a bit.

Star Trek Online Tutorial 47 Admiral Quinn And New Bridge Officers 300x175

The Patch has changed much.

You can also see in that picture how the general UI has been shifted about, especially the top right area. It’ll take a bit of getting used to, but I think it is an improvement. Many skill and inventory icons have changed for the better.

I’ve popped back to Sol’s Spacedock to see if it has changed. The NPCs are a bit more chatty, and I see them talking about other players. Previously I only saw them speaking about me. They do seem to be having trouble figuring out peoples genders though, calling a passing male human officer “she”. Their uniforms seem to have improved also.

Next, there is somewhere else I must visit. A pilgrimage if you will.

2:43 pm GMT, Day 10

The various NPCs you speak to for travelling between sectors have also been properly dressed and equipped now, and there are much improved loading screens between each zone.

The maps too are far better. The Galaxy map actually tells you where you are, and the Sector map is properly labelled so you no longer have to click on a star or POI to find out what it is. Other players and enemies also appear of the Sector map.

Arriving in the Beta Ursae Sector Block, I find myself on the far western side of it, as if I had entered from the Zeta Andromedae Secotr Block. I should have appeared on the far eastern side of Beta Ursae.

And I’ve arrived!

Ba Ba Ba Baaa, Baaaa Ba Ba Baaa!

Deep Space 9, home to my personal favourite Star Trek Show. It looks more or less right, though I was slightly sad that it didn’t play any themes from the original opening when you entered the zone. Lets make up for that oversight now.

Imagine hearing that as you approached the station. It would be beautiful.

Once on board, I excitedly run about the Promenade, looking for things I recognise. They’ve tried, I think, but the limitations of Cryptic’s engine really show through.

For instance, Quark’s Bar, once I found it, is instanced rather than part of the station. That’s OK, but Quark’s was also on three levels. You might remember the spiral stairways that wound up and down between the levels. they were within the bar itself, and often used for scenes. Unfortunately the engine can’t deal with something like that, so they’ve been removed, and replaced with this: a huge passageway that is the only way between the three levels, winding its way in lonely fashion around the outside of the bar.

Star Trek Online Tutorial 48 Quarks Tunnels 300x177

Stairs are hard.

I guess that is a small point, but it does demonstrate how poor the engine is when this is the solution to a problem as simple as going up some stairs.

To be fair, they have tried. I suspect the artists just ran up against engine limitations.

Quark's Bar on Deep Space 9

Nobody sits down at Quark’s these days. Maybe business was so bad they has to sell all the decent chairs. Even Morn’s stool has gone :(

The promenade is better done, but like everything in STO, it is as if it they doubled the scale. Jake and Nog would break their necks if they fell from up there!

Deep Space 9 Promenade

Oh well. That’s what I get for expecting things to be like they look in the shows. Let us return to game related things.

4:40 pm GMT, Day 10

One of the new quests Admiral Quinn gave me, “Scientific Mandate”, is to speak to Lt Commabder E’genn at Memory Alpha in the Teneebia Sector in the Alpha Centauri Sector Block. It is only a level 4 mission, so I’d better go sort that out. May well be a part of the tutorial.

Missions in your mission journal now have an expected rank, rather than just a level number, which is a nice touch. As I enter the Alpha Centauri Sector Block for the first time, Spock gives me some backstory on the Romulans.

Beaming down to Memory Alpha, the first person I meet is Lt. Kirayoshi O’Brien, son of Miles and Kaiko. Good to see the O’Briens are still hard at work!

Oops, turns out E’genn is back at Earth’s Spacedock. I was only supposed to talk to him ABOUT Memory Alpha. Oh well. While I’m here I have a look about. It looks like this is the main site for turning the bits and pieces we get from anomalies into upgraded gear. It’s a nice looking place, though like most locations so far it suffers from being too big and empty.

I pop back to Sol to see E’genn, and he gives me some samples to deliver to Memory Alpha! Gah! That’ll teach me to read my missions properly!

I deliver the samples to Commander Jenna Romaine at Memory Alpha. I think until this patch she was standing in the middle of Sol spacedock, as she seems very familiar, and has the same recipes for anomaly-fueled upgrades.

Alpha Centauri Sector Block is otherwise much too advanced for me, so I head back to Sirius Sector Block to sort out the other of the Admiral’s new tutorial missions which involves heading back into the Delta Volanis cluster and doing a few more explorations. I won’t bore you with the details of those unless something has changed.

On arrival in Delta Volanis I am surprised to see a great number of player ships, but no anomalies. Ordinarily most of those ships would be inside exploration missions, but it seems something has been done to the anomaly spawn rate, or perhaps they are just single use now before despawning. Now when an anomaly appears, everybody has to race to it to be the first person to go where no-one has gone before. I manage to get into one after a few minutes, but this aspect of the game has become much more frustrating now. (Update: This is apparently a bug and will be fixed!)

Scanning is vastly improved (unless you enjoy roaming empty space looking for the last objective that you just can’t find.). Now when you use your scanner, it points vaguely in the direction of the nearest objective to you. Like so:

Star Trek Online Tutorial 51 New Scanner 300x176

There's something on the long-range scanners Keptin!

As I find out on down on the planet, it works just as well there too. I’m on a forest world, and I’m quite taken by how nicely done this particular planet map is.

When we're done with the Orions, let's have a picnic!

Next I do a space combat exploration. It *might* be luck, or my imagination. These things are very subjective. But I am finding space combat much easier than I did yesterday, and loot seems to be dropping more often. Not sure if that is a good thing in the long run.

7:32 pm GMT, Day 10

As things stand, today’s patch has increased the chances of me playing through my free month. What there is to STO is more polished now. I still suspect that I’ll find the lack of an economy, and the repetitive nature of the missions to be a block to me subscribing further.

Looking through the STO forum, it seems that the perception that the game has been made too easy by the patch is shared by a lot of people. Since the patch I have not needed to use any of my shield boosting powers, rendering them a little pointless. As usual, there are some people who think that the new difficulty setting is much better, but in my experience they are not the sort of people that stay with a game for very long.

Much Later

There has been another patch, hopefully sorting out the anomaly situation in the exploration clusters. Patch notes can be found here.

A bit later than that.

A further patch, this time to rectify the overly easy combat.

As ever, this Liveblog continues in Part 12!

Patch Notes

Known Issues

Alexa