Even though Rift has been dominating my playing time lately, I still follow the STO news pretty closely and there’s been lots of interesting news recently about Star Trek Online.
The April Engineering Report came out today. A lot of what Stahl talks about in the report we already knew a bit about from the Ask Cryptic earlier this month. Still there’s tons of interesting information, although I’m a little disappointed that there’s no mention of the warp and nacelle animation issues on the Vice Admiral science ship refits. Such a small thing, but so very very irritating.
Besides the Engineering Report, Dan was also on Episode 77 of Stoked. If you have any interest in the Foundry, I highly recommend giving it a listen. Dan gives some stats on how many missions have been started, published, and completed. He also does a shoutout for the top three rated authors.
There was also a detailed dev post regarding the Duty Roster system that’s being added with Season Four. The short version is we’re getting a Duty Officers (Doffs) which we’ll be able to send on assignments to do offline things for us like crafting or missions for rewards. Some of the Doffs will also provide special passive abilities (similar to how some Accolades give passive bonuses, I think). This is just the initial feature, it’s going to be expanded later with the ability to assign Department Heads and a First Officer.
It’s not all sunshine and roses though, I saw this via Longasc on Twitter:
oh cool, people start playing the #STO Foundry… Vice Admiral in 11h was not enough, now it’s possible in 2h!
I suppose it was only a matter of time for someone to figure out how to tweak a Foundry mission to help level characters faster. I’d thought based on what I saw on Tribble that Cryptic had managed to correct for some of the problems that COH’s Mission Architect ran into, but never underestimate the ability or inclination for some players to optimize the fun out of any game. Of course, the real test of the Foundry now is how the player community reacts to these missions and what, if anything, Cryptic does to the Foundry to keep these kinds of missions from being created. Interesting times ahead.
Wow, you can really hit Admiral in 11 played? I sure as heck wasn’t leveling at anywhere near that pace the last time I played STO. I hope they don’t do anything really drastic like cutting all XP from missions. As it stands, I think the foundry is a great way for the content on the Klingon side to get filled out by players. Of course their missions have to be pretty combat heavy to reward decent XP (since there is no completion bonus in a foundry mission), but combat heavy missions actually make quite a bit of sense for Klingon characters so I don’t see it as a problem.
That’s the rumor, I haven’t bothered to check out any of those missions to see for sure. Cryptic had already set it up so you such get points for kills and nothing for finishing the mission, I imagine they’ll maybe change that around a bit. I know there were some Accolade missions on Tribble that were setup so say Orions spawn continually with no way to complete the mission, in order to get the kill Accolade.
Min/maxers just make me feel tired sometimes.
Well, the exploitive missions are clearly labeled as such in the mission description AND got lots of 4-5 star ratings and only few 1 star ratings complaining about their exploitive nature.
It is interesting how many good reasons people find to justify exploits as legal, okay and a good thing. /sarcasm
Longasc, this might not interest you, but I’ve recently started up another blog — Scan Complete — where I try to review and publicize good Foundry missions. If you’ve not played it, I highly recommend dixonium’s “Brains Before Bounty.”
I totally intend to check out “Conjoined”, but its starting location is so deep into Romulan space that I haven’t had the chance to trek (harhar) that far north yet. Also, I made a rather short mission of my own — “Old, Unhappy, Far-Off Things” — which has had generally positive reviews commending its “Trekiness.”
I’m not sure it’s worth playing through the missions just so I can rate them 1 star.
You don’t actually have to play; if you accept a Foundry mission then drop it, you still have the ability to leave a review and rating. I guess its for commenting on a mission that is unfinishable.
Hmmm. That’s tempting bit feels a little dishonest somehow.
This said, the new Oberth class ship will be ugly as hell – well, Oberth-class, which is by default an odd ship. But it will come with a VERY special and quite good if not too good console. Seems to be a trick to make people buy it even if they don’t like the looks of this ship at all.
Enough with the focus on the negative sides though, I found some missions like “Conjoined” and others I mentioned on Twitter to be top notch and a few even better than the Feature Episodes we had so far.
Edit: The console got “balanced”, at the moment it turned to worthless. Still the question remains if this new trend of selling special gear only as part of not-so popular ships is good for us players.
God, the Oberth is ugly — but if it were tier five, I’d almost certainly fly it; I kind of like its terrible, terrible look, and by all accounts Cryptic has done a great job rendering it.
I’d definitely fly it before touching the Olympic-class science vessel, but that’s not actually saying much.
Are those the turkey-baster ships? Oh how I hated those. I ended up switching to an Akira-class for my tier two ship even though it didn’t fit my play style very well.
I don’t care if they put an “I Win” console on the Oberth-class ships, they’re ugly as sin and there’s no way I’d pay money to fly one. I didn’t by and Excelsior or a Nebula or a Galaxy X either because I don’t like the way those ships look, regardless of how they play.
You break my heart, Blue. Why you gotta go hating on all of my favorite ships?
Sorry, I’m very picky about ships and except for the NX haven’t been at all tempted by C-store items.
If the Galaxy X would turn better and have better stats it would be my favorite.
Galaxy X or R and stats of the Excelsior would be my favorite.
The cryptic made Tier 2 cruisers are very pretty, Vesper or whatever they are named.
Maybe the “Ambassador” class will become a dream come true: It’s like the missing link between the old TOS Constitution and the Enterprise D / Galaxy: Not as fat and bulky but has the shiny lights and nacelles.
I’m actually looking forward to the Ambassador-class myself. My Engineering Officer is flying a modern Constitution-class cruiser at the moment. After spending so long with my Science Officer in a Discovery-class, the more iconic look of the Constitution does feel pretty good.
Yeah, the top of the “Hot” chart is quickly being populated with exploit/grind missions, thanks to their incredible popularity and the propensity of players to give them four or five stars. It’s getting harder to find good missions in all of the mess.
I’m not certain about long-term solutions, but as a temporary stop-gap, I’d love the ability to hide missions of my choice from the “Hot” list.
That sucks, but at least I’ve go a paper list of missions to check out based on recommendations from tweets and blogs.