The latest big update for STO is out. There’s the announcement on the main site and the patch notes in the forums. There’s some big things that some people have been waiting for and a lot of small things that are going to be great for fixing some small nit picks I have.

The big additions: Cryptic has added a death penalty and a difficulty slider. Neither of these things were anything I was looking forward to, beyond hoping that that wouldn’t affect me. The difficulty slider has three settings: normal, advanced, and elite. On normal difficulty the game remains the same as pre-1.1, no change to missions, and no death penalty. The higher difficulties include the death penalty and offer better rewards. I am more interested in exploring and experiencing the content, than in figuring out how to beat a tough encounter, so I’ll generally stay on the normal difficulty.

They’ve also done some balancing on Feedback Pulse, Subnucleonic Beam, and Viral Matrix. Of the three, Viral Matrix is one I use often and it’s switching from a straight hold to a power that knocks weapons, engines, and auxillary offline. The trick is they go offline in a random sequence and not all at once. This seems to me like a PvP related change, and I’m not quite sure how much it’ll impact me in PvE but it’ll definitely require some changes to my tactics.

Turn rate for ships has been switched from auxiliary to engines; now auxiliary is just for deflector, probe, and sensor powers.

The rest of the notes include some great quality of play improvements:

  • Players now get info about what types of commodities are needed in nearby clusters.
  • Commodity types needed within a cluster have been reduced from 5 to 3.
  • Commodities can now be replicated on-board ship, but they’re more expensive that way.
  • Commodity tool-tips now give information about where they can be purchased.
  • Commodity missions now provide a gift in addition to the normal rewards.
  • Exchange UI now allows sorting by price or item name.
  • Items on the Exchange now expire after 1 week.
  • You can drap and drop an item from inventory to the search box to look for similar items.
  • Starships will now adjust their heading on warp-out so they don’t warp through planets.
  • Removed some of the bas spawn points in Deep Space Encounters

I’m looking forward to getting patched up tonight and seeing how the changes play.

Star Trek Online Season 1.1 Update
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3 thoughts on “Star Trek Online Season 1.1 Update

  • April 29, 2010 at 4:08 pm
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    The many lines about commodity aka “Aid the Planet” mission are misleading. Actually, it now works this way: 1.) Get a random “Aid the Planet” mission 2.) see what they want 3.) use your replicator to generate the needed goods 4.) finish quest and get a “chest” reward that may contain random rare items.

    Now the mission is more a random bonus for energy credits, so it is only this extrinsic reward that makes the still rather poor mission interesting.

    • April 29, 2010 at 7:05 pm
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      If you have the energy credits to spend, sure. Depends on what the differential for energy credits is between replication, trade ship, and base vendors.

  • April 29, 2010 at 9:52 pm
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    The commodity missions haven’t really been on my mind. I did encounter one when I was grouped with Longasc and another when I was with him and Tipa, but it’s been weeks since I’ve gotten one of those while I’m off doing exploration on my own. I’ve actually been hoping to get an “Aid The Planet” missions, since I’m sitting on a mountain of commodities I’ve picked up on my travels!

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