This weekend’s Star Trek Online featured episode was really good. Which made the technical problems that much more irritating. First, there was a re-occurrence of the server stability issues from last weekend, although they weren’t as severe in my experience I know other people had some real problems with lag and zone transitions. My major gripe was a flaw in the mission design.
If you want details on the server issue, go check out this very detailed post by Dan Stahl on the forums, it’s an excellent accounting of what they did to resolve issues from the first episode and why they continued to have during episode two. My favorite tidbit from it was this:
I counted at least 500 players entering the Hfihar system within 60 seconds of the episode being released…
Now for the mission glitch.
Without going into any spoilers, I can say that there’s a moment in the mission where you have the opportunity to get past an obstacle either diplomatically or via phaser. Naturally I chose the diplomatic route. Unfortunately Bryn is only an Envoy not an Ambassador, so I wasn’t able to complete the conversation diplomatically enough. That in and of itself is fine, the problem is that failed conversation caused a bug which kept me from completing my next set of objectives. After beaming out and back in a few times with no luck, I ended up logging out and coming back that night (missions reset after 15 minutes) so that I could redo that conversation (and by that I mean I shot first, just like Han did).
That was the only issue I had in the mission. I hope that they fix the design so either you’re not given the diplomatic option if you’re not an Ambassador or they make it easier to fail out of the dialog without bugging the objectives.
Outside of that glitch, the mission was excellent. The mining colony looked great: gritty with an active population. The voice work was very good and there are some excellent cut-scenes in the mission as well as a great cameo/accolade you can pick up while in the mine.
If you don’t mind spoilers go check out the mission debriefings by Gamerchick and Tipa.
[yframe url=’http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Z5dFEiyCMc’]
Wow that is like the most in depth explanation from a member of a dev team I have ever seen. It’s amazing how just a little transparency can help diffuse the situation, I see so many people in that thread who are like, “I gotta admit was really pissed when I got disconnected, but after seeing this…” People who go off when things like this happen often forget that the devs are probably just as frustrated as they are. I mean, it’s not like they’re scheming behind their desks going, “Muahahaha, I simply LOVE screwing our customers!” When you read about what they’re going through on their end, you can’t help but forgive hiccups like these. So many networking issues are unforeseeable after all.
If they got 500 players in the first minute, it sounds like STO must be doing well. Certainly in my time there it seemed pretty active, but I assumed it as due to their single server shard system.