Anyway, as Justin says in his article, lock boxes are gambling. You are paying real and/or in-game (varying by MMO) money for a chance to win a prize. That’s no different from a slot machine in Vegas, buying a state lottery ticket, or buying a raffle ticket at a school fundraiser. But like many other activities, gambling itself isn’t wrong, it’s that it can be abused.

I take issue with Justin’s second point though, where he mentions that the house always wins. This is the point where I think lock boxes diverge from other examples of gambling, since it’s not costing the developer anything to “pay out” like it is a casino. I also don’t see any sinister intentions behind not publishing odds. Truthfully, I don’t think developers know with any certainty what the odds are on winning a particular item from a lock box. Random number generators can be a little goofy at times, and I guarantee if they did post odds that there would be lot’s of players double checking those odds and raising a ruckus if their results were at all different.

I also disagree with his comment about feeling like deleting a lock box was a waste. I have the opposite reaction. I enjoy deleting lock boxes in Star Trek Online because I know I won’t be opening them, the Exchange is saturated with them so they don’t sell, and they take up valuable inventory space.

I do agree that the legality issue is in its early days, and hopefully the practice doesn’t get any games banned from some countries. Like F2P itself, I think lock boxes are a trend that’s going to be around for a while and if you can’t ignore or tolerate them, then you’ll need to take a break and wait for the direction of the industry to shift again.

Lock boxes are tacky, but in my opinion they are more jarring to see in Lord of the Rings Online than STO. Fair or not, Middle-earth is a more serious setting in my mind and I have less tolerance for commercialism in it than I do with STO or any other MMO. But even as tacky as they are, I don’t see lock boxes as tarnishing the F2P model. Personally, I find Turbine’s habit of putting items in their store to fix not-fun gameplay mechanics rather than actually fixing them much more tarnishing than lock box keys. I can ignore and delete boxes after all, but it’s much harder to ignore the progressively ridiculous number X of monsters I have to slay for deed Y.

As far as public sentiment and private actions, I think it’s really a wash. It’s the same reason why no one can really gauge the overall reaction to the end of Mass Effect 3. Unhappy people are motivated to be vocal, and happy people have moved on. Lot’s of MMO players claim to hate lock boxes and post daily on forums about how much they hate them. But forum goers are a small percentage of players in any game, and I would bet money that a size-able number of those haters still buy keys and open boxes. In the end, all a developer has to go on is their metrics. They know how many accounts they have, how many players that have on a nightly basis, how many boxes are dropping, how many keys are being purchased, and how many boxes are being opened. Apparently those numbers point to lock boxes being worthwhile, otherwise they’d be gone.

Honestly, I’ve gotten bored with the entire topic and its surrounding drama. It’s been beaten to death and nothing new’s been added to the conversation recently except for one thing. Lock boxes are only one step removed from RMT. So far MMO developers have been pretty careful to make sure that money only flows into the system, and I assume that’s to avoid government regulation and taxation (not/never been/don’t want to be a lawyer so I could be wrong). Blizzard though has started to experiment with that in Diablo 3, and I’m sure if that goes well then we’ll see the practice tried out in MMOs as well.

Star Trek Online dev unconcerned with losing global playability for the sake of lock boxes

Uh, what? That sounded incredibly out of character for any of the developers from the STO team, so of course I clicked through to read the whole thing, and then I covered my face with my hand and sighed.

Basically, Jeremy Randall (Borticus) was chatting with some players on the Jupiter Force fleet forums (of which he’s a member as well, or was before he joined Cryptic, I assume he still is) about the lock boxes and what might happen if some countries decided they’re illegal. Jeremy’s opinion was that STO would become unplayable in those countries rather than lose the boxes, because the revenue from them is apparently that good.

It was immediately apparent to me that this is just Jeremy’s opinion being expressed in a discussion among friends. It’s not news. Were this in a press release or on the official forums, then it would be news. Had someone at Massively wanted to use this as fodder for an editorial that would’ve been valid. But it wasn’t posted in an editorial, it was posted as a news item, and that is crap in my opinion. Plus, the wording of the title and the flippant tone of the article (as well as the appended update) make the whole thing feel like link bait to me (and I really considered removing the link above at this point).

What really irritates me is now either the Jupiter Force forums will go closed for fleet members only, or Jeremy will no longer be able to take off his developer hat when chatting with friends. Both of those outcomes suck. The Star Trek Online team is among the most communicative of any MMO live team that I’ve seen, and I really hate to see events that make that seem like bad policy.

Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should, or that you have to.

The Enterprise-D will be the largest model I’ve worked on yet, so the detail paining and assembly should be easier. Although, it may just provide a different set of challenges. The decals for this one will likely be more difficult.

The NX-01 is my favorite and the model I’m working up to. It’s a 1:1000 scale so it’ll be the biggest of any of the models I’m planning to work on. I’ve also bought a painting mask for it so I’ll be able to skip doing a lot of the larger decals.

I’m not particularly proud of black highlights on the front of the nacelles, but I’m hoping that the decals that cover most of the part will help clean up the edges.

The Constitution-class refit is going to be staying in spacedock for a while, I’m planning to get back to the Excelsior model and do the decals next. After the TOS model’s tiny decals I want to practice on a larger model and the A is about midway between the two.

Turns out I was worried about the wrong things. My childhood memories of model building include lots of instances of getting stickers applied crooked and then torn or bent as I tried to peel them off and reapply them. Modern models do it a little differently and it wasn’t clear until I started how they really worked.

The instructions state you need to cut a decal from the sheet and then soak it in water for about 20 seconds. Then you slide it from the backing paper and apply it. For most people, that might sound pretty clear but for me it was confusing. Do I lay the whole thing on the model and then slid the paper out from under? How would I pull on the backing paper and still keep the decal from moving? The application process sounded pretty iffy. Thankfully the reality of applying the decals was much simpler.

After trimming a decal from the sheet with a knife, I dropped cut piece in water and waited until I could slide the decal around on the sheet. Too long and it detaches and floats, which isn’t too bad but some decals are pretty delicate. Apply a decal is super easy, just put it next to where you want it to be and slide it off of the backing paper onto the spot. The best part is a decal won’t stick until it dries, so I was able to shift them around as much as needed to make sure everything was placed and aligned correctly.

The one thing I hadn’t counted on was the extremely small size of some of the decals. For instance there were small red and green dots for the top and bottom running lights of the saucer section. These were about the size of a pin head. Not having a set of tweezers or probes, I found that toothpicks I’d bought for applying glue worked great to manipulate even the tiniest decals. Plus the decals didn’t stick to the wood like they did to my fingers.

One adjustment I made was for the windows on the bridge dome. The decals wouldn’t lay quite right and they were just a series of tiny white dots anyway, so I decided to paint them on instead.

You can see in the front view that the nacelles are not aligned within Starfleet tolerances.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how she turned out. The size of the model made it a good cheap starter project, but it also required a lot of skill to handle all of the tiny parts which made if more of a challenge than I expected and thereby much more educational.  I’ve really learned a lot from this first model (or first in almost thirty years), and I’ve already seen my Enterprise A and B attempts turn out better in the painting and assembly stages. So as a test, I bought a second kit of the 1:2500 TOS, A, and B models and started on version two of the 1701.

Enterprise A in Spacedock

I’m glad that I did this model the last of the three since it’s smaller than the Excelsior, although a bit larger than the original Enterprise. I haven’t decided yet if I’ll do any of the detail painting before assembly or not, but there’s not much as much painting required as there was on either the original or Enterprise B.

There’s also a bit of detail painting needed on this model as well, although less actually than on the first one (means more decals). Just the neck, deflector, and impulse engine housings in a medium gray, impulse engines in red, and the shuttle bay in a light gray.

I got a little sloppy with the red, but it was easy to correct after letting it dry over night.

Fast forward a bit and I got the model, assembled it and started looking over the decal directions. This is when I realized two things. First there was no decal for the impulse engines at the back of the saucer. Second there were an awful lot of decals. It turns out that there is some painting needed if you want the model to match the picture on the box, and I really wanted it to match.

That weekend I took my son and made a trip to the local hobby shop to look around at the paints and see if they had any cheap model kits for me to practice on. I figured I needed to work up to a Sovereign-class ship. I ended up finding the perfect thing too.

Not only was this kit inexpensive, but it had three tiny ships to practice on. Plus, neither the original Constitution nor the Excelsior are ships I especially like, so if I screwed them up badly I wouldn’t feel bad about throwing them out.

Over the last few evenings, I’ve learn quite a bit about what order to do things in, or more specifically what order not to do things in, and how to correct mistakes. Well mostly correct them.

Stupidly, I laid out my Original Series model on a shop towel and laid down the paint way too heavily. Not a good idea. I ended up with a real mess had to strip off all of the paint, breaking the nacelles, dish, and struts off in the process. I managed to get the pieces up and glued everything back together, but the nacelles are a bit crooked and I don’t see a way to fix it. Despite the issues I had, it didn’t turn out too awful and I think the detail painting I did turned out pretty well.

Wrong

Better

She'll break apart at warp speed.

She’s not done yet though, I still need to add the decals which will be an entirely new learning curve to tackle.

There really are a lot of people playing STO since the F2P relaunch.

Now, I pretty much already knew this because there’s been a noticeable bump in the number of ships orbiting Earth Spacedock and DS9,as well as a major increase in sector space traffic. But seeing how fast the outage thread grew last night really highlighted for me how much the playerbase has grown.

Judging by the number of messages I’m seeing in game announcing when someone wins a Galor, there are a lot of players spending money or dilithium on keys. I’m sure that having lock boxes as drops and keys in the store generates more sales than just having the boxes in the store. A player might not think to buy a box from the store, but if their in the game and loot a lock box then they’re more likely to purchase a key.

I’m still not a fan of the practice but there are a lot of people in game having fun with it. Besides, the more money that Cryptic and Perfect World makes, the more they can reinvest in the game. More money means more content designers creating story missions, more programmers adding features to the game engine, and more systems designers working on new game features.