Trekking Online

After having a productive posting month in January, I’ve been pretty quiet so far in February. Partly because I was taking care of my son, who got strep throat, but mostly because I’ve been spending my evenings in the Star Trek Online headstart and then launch.

Basically, I’ve either been working, parenting, or captaining (with a little sleep and food occasionally). So this is a little later than I’d luck, but better than never right?

Headstart

I know lots of people had a pretty rough headstart, but I wasn’t one of them.

My playtime runs starts around 7 pm and runs until midnight (GMT-5), once my son is asleep and my wife is occupied with a book or television. So I didn’t get into STO on the Friday headstart launch until late. Which is good since I wasn’t part of the initial rush of players when the server went live in the afternoon. I bought the digital delux edition from Direct2Drive, so I also managed to dodge the Steam issues with re-downloading the whole client. All in all, I ended up playing 9 hours Friday night (until 4 am) and don’t remember having any issues.

Saturday was a little rougher, I did experience some longer loading screens and rubberbanding right up until late Saturday night when the server crashed, but I figured better get some sleep anyway since it was 2 am.

In total I put in about 20 hours of play time (according to my Raptr profile) from Friday to Sunday. I had one server crash, but I was busy with other stuff during most of the queues, hanging loading character lists, and other problems.

Even better, I met my goals for the headstart by reaching Lieutenant Commander as a science officer and requisitioning a Nova class science vessel. Here’s my alien Bryn Aen, a Kae from Nalyl-6, at his promotion ceremony and his ship the U.S.S. Grace.

Lt. Commander Promotion Ceremony
U.S.S. Grace, Nova class science vessel

Launch

Launch day seems to have been pretty smooth for everyone, it definitely was for me.

My one complaint getting started was that D2D didn’t bother to email me that my key was available until nearly 6pm, by which time I’d already checked my D2D account page, registered the retail key, and was in the game playing. I had no problems logging into the website and registering my key from the link on the home page, although it is odd that the same link isn’t on the account page. The redemption method through the in-game store is a bit odd, but I was already used to this from playing Champions.

Bryn in his Original Series era uniform.

The whole week has been pretty smooth up until Friday and the weekend. While I still haven’t seen any queues, I did get some pretty frequent disconnects during missions (mostly Sunday for myself), and there were several unscheduled maintenances (which means the server crashed). All in all a typical MMO launch, although definitely toward the LotRO end of the scale and not the Anarchy Online end.

Hopefully the hardware upgrade Cryptic has been promising is in place before this coming weekend and resolves their stability issues.

Second Impressions

While definitely not a review, these really aren’t first impressions either since I was in the closed and open betas. That said, I have started to get into content I hadn’t experienced in the betas including spending more time with the Tier 2 ships. The game really starts to get more interesting once you upgrade from the light cruiser everyone starts with. The episode missions also start to develop more story. Of course if you just click through dialogs looking for the objective, you’re missing out on a good portion of the experience.

In the end, I’m having fun. When I sit down to play, I always seem to end up in Star Trek before any other game. Of course this is pretty regular for my during the honeymoon period for any game. Long term I can easily see spending time popping in to play some fleet missions or deep space encounters just for the fun of blowing some ships up.

TGIF

Couldn’t come up with a witty title, especially since this is a real ramble of a post. Lemme know if you have a title suggestion. So…

Lord of the Rings

Turbine has announced their next book release, Volume 3 Book 1: Oath of the Rangers. Aside from the advancement of the epic story quests, it seems to be all skirmishes and crafting recipes. I don’t know what I was hoping for but that wasn’t it. I did read a rumor that Volume 1 will be completely solo-able though which is nice, I only wish I remember where I’d heard that or how reliable the source was.

Star Trek and Champions

Despite what my Twitter says I didn’t actually play STO last night. If you look at my Raptr profile you’ll see I spent 3 minutes in the game because I launched the patcher last night and decided to click on Engage since the launcher said the server was up. I did get the game to launch to a “No logins authorized at this time,” which was enough for Raptr to think I was playing. The best part was a message I got from Blamefulgecko wanting to know how I got in so soon, was accidental but very funny.

No real news on the Champions front as far as the expansion controversy. I played a bit last night and had one disconnect early on but that was it. Crafting still seems to be a problem but only for some specific items (can’t remember which, sorry). The only major irritation from my play session was the camera spin bug. I’m not sure what causes it, but occasionally the camera would start to rotate wildly around my hero. It seemed to happen most often when I was flying. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to stop it by using the mouse look, but still I will be glad when it gets fixed.

Last thing I wanted to mention is there’s a follow up from the STO team regarding upcoming features. Lots of interesting stuff there, especially for Klingon players. For me, the IP location additions are the most interesting. All of the high level stuff is something I won’t be ready to see for quite a while. The most interesting bit though is the last paragraph under the Engage heading.

These updates are entirely free to Star Trek Online subscribers.

Obviously this was included in response to the Champions drama going on. I wonder how much communication is going on between the two teams, because PR-wise they don’t seem to be on the same page. I’m imagining Craig having a little hallway conversation with Bill about his timing.

Champions Patch, Lag, and Controversy

I took the day off from work yesterday because it was my birthday and played video games all day. With a wife, a 16 month old son, a job, a home, and two dogs, this was a big deal to get a whole day (guilt free) and was very very fun. It isn’t often that you can give yourself time, but that’s what it feels like I did yesterday. I played a about 2 hours of of LotRO and and hour of EVE, but most of my time (nearly 7 hours) was in Champions Online. There also happened to be a big patch yesterday in Champions and it caused some issues.

Lag? Lag. Lag!

I started in Monster Island and was having a lot of problems with rubber banding, freezes, and stutters. I found Millennium City to be a lot smoother (which is counter to some peoples experiences based on the forums). I also did a little crafting and didn’t have any of the item loss some people were complaining about. I don’t remember the client patching anything, but the lag issues did seem to be mostly solved by yesterday evening. I’m planning to pop in tonight and see if Monster Island is still having issues.

As a side note, even in the middle of the day on a week day there were plenty of players on the server. I was able to group up several times for missions within minutes of asking in zone chat.

Paid Expansion Already?

Besides the patch and lag issues, there was also a State of the Game released two days ago. Most of it was interesting to me but not exciting until I got to the part about a new zone, Vibora Bay. I’m not at the cap yet, my main is at level 34, and I’m still doing Monster Island content. I haven’t done the crisis mission for Lemuria yet. Still, new content is always a good thing. The expansion wording that Roper used didn’t even click for me until I was reading through the forum follow-ups and say this one from Daeke. Paid expansion before the game has been out a full year?

Of course the nerd rage on the forums has gone super nova.

My initial reaction was disappointment. When I read the SoG message I assumed that this was a free update. I think partly because Champions now occupies the same position in my mind that City of Heroes used to and CoH always had a lot of free content updates. After some thought though, I’ve gone from disappointment to wait and see. First, I realized that I just paid $20 for a mini-expansion from Turbine. Second, I had skimmed Daeke’s post the first time and missed  a very important not that he used. This expansion is not going to be full box price. Third, there are way too many details still missing to have any kind of valid opinion. All we know right now is Vibora Bay has content for levels 37-40 and that it will cost some amount of money.

So, I’m just going to wait and see. The only thing I’ve really decided in the last few days is I need to not read forums for MMO’s, with the exception of the Dev Tracker, in order to preserver my sanity and positive outlook on life.

Maximum Warp

The Star Trek Online beta is done, the head-start is tomorrow, and I can’t wait to enlist in Starfleet. I think I remember a forum post saying that the final retail patch would be posted today, so I’m going to run the client tonight and hopefully avoid any long waits for tomorrow. Hey I can dream right?

My previous thoughts on the game haven’t changed. I wasn’t expecting a virtual world sandbox game. I wasn’t expecting Mass Effect style dialog trees. All I wanted was an emotional response when firing a photon torpedo or sending my ship into warp, and I got that. The game has improved a lot since I first started testing in late November. There are still bugs and rough edges to things, but Cryptic has been able to show a lot of improvement in two and a half months. My only disappointment with the game is the linearity of the non-combat missions, I would like to see a little bit in the way of options instead of just: read, click, read, go here, read, click, read, beam out.

I had already decided in December that I was going to play at least the first six months, but based on my open beta experiences I’ve decided to go all in, as they say in poker, and I bought a lifetime account (my third, the others being LotRO and Champions).

Is it a risk? Oh yeah. Will I regret it? Maybe, but not as much as I would regret it if I was still playing in a year and hadn’t bought one. Of course I could have taken the one year sub and then switched to a lifetime next year, but then I would miss out on the playable Borg captain and be paying $60 more for the lifetime plus the $120 for the first year sub. So I’m taking a gamble that I’ll still be playing this time next year. That is a pretty safe bet for me. I’m still not at max level on my first hero in Champions and I didn’t get my first max level in LotRO until a month before Moria came out, so I don’t chew through content that fast.

So, I’m in it for the long haul and if Cryptic can make good on Zinc’s State of the Game from yesterday, then I’ll be a happy player for quite a while.

Woot, 36!

It is that time of year again, I made level 36 in Real Life.

I mentioned last year that I’ve never really felt like an adult, despite having been supporting myself for more than a decade. I always expected to feel more mature (somehow) after college or after marriage.  I thought becoming a parent would finally be the change that did it, and I do feel more adult now, in some ways, but I’ve also come to appreciate my childishness more. Being a father has given me more responsibility, but it has also given me a chance to re-experience the world from a fresh perspective.

Now I’m off to enjoy my vacation day and play video games. Yup, I’m totally an adult.

Nvidia Stutter is Gone

So back in October, I mentioned a problem I was having with my GeForce GTX 275 in Champions Online after updating to the (then) current drivers of 191.07 from 190.62. Since then I have kept an occasional eye on the Champions forums and gone to the Nvidia site once or twice to see if there were new drivers, but I’ve stayed at 190.62. At least until I caught this twitter status from Daeke. Even though I wasn’t having problems with the 190.62 version, I do like to stay up-to-date, and I’d had no problems rolling back the drivers before. So….

I downloaded the new 196.21 drivers, which were released on the 19th, and did an install. I haven’t had a chance to play Star Trek Online’s beta with them yet, but I did get into Champions Online and did some very informal testing (I’m a developer after all, not QA). So far, I’ve noticed none of the stuttering I’d been having with the old drivers and performance seemed just as good for me as always. We’ll see how it holds up this weekend when I get a chance to play more.

One to Beam Up

In case you’ve been away from the internet for a few days, Star Trek Online went into open beta. A lot of good information has already been posted, so I’m not going to repeat it here. Instead I just wanted to give my impressions from the closed beta and my expectations for open beta, and my plans for launch and the live game.

My Bias

Like Werit and Pete, I’m a fan of Star Trek. I’ve seen all of the shows (although I’m young enough to have watched TOS in reruns only) and the movies. My favorite two series are TNG and Enterprise (except for that crappy opening theme music they did). My favorite captain is Picard, my favorite character is Data, and I never hated Wesley Crusher. I’ve played (I think) all of the Trek computer games, but I most enjoyed Star Trek: Armada.

U.S.S. Grace

Closed Beta Experience

I got my CB invite on November 24th, and have been able to play in most of the testing sessions the Cryptic has held between then and now. I played a Tactical Officer up to Lieutenant 6 (level 6 basically) twice and did a variety of patrols, episodes, and open missions. The space combat has been exactly what I wanted from day one. The ground combat was just ok, I didn’t hate but I didn’t love it.

Again if you want more details there are already quite a few good posts linked above.

Open Beta Expectations

Open beta started on January 12th, and two days in the game is under some epic level stress testing. For a game so many people claimed not to care about, there are a lot of players logging in. This makes for an excellent test for the February launch day flood, but I’m sure is frustrating for people getting their very first impression of the game. I hope and expect that the lag issues will clear up during the first week, both from players who were more interested in sight-seeing leaving and from Cryptic improving the code and server infrastructure.

I never saw any of the open beta day 1  issues of loading into a planet instance as your ship, or into space as your captain, or beaming to a surface without your away team, in closed beta even when a new influx of players was causing lag and disconnects. My assumption is that these issues are caused by a massive influx of open beta players. This seems to be correct, since on the second day of open beta most of these issues weird loading seem to have gone away. Now I’m just seeing disconnects, some slow loading screens, and some rubber banding.

Plans for Live

I am happy with what I’ve experienced so far in closed and open beta. There are still bugs and rough edges to the game, but it feels no less complete or buggy to me that Fallen Earth was when it released a few months ago. Based on my closed beta experience, I’ve pre-ordered the Digital Deluxe edition from Direct2Drive. I’m planning to spend at least six months on the game, maybe more depending on what kinds of subscription deals Cryptic offers. The only thing I haven’t decided is if I’m keeping my EVE subscription during that time.

If you’re in the open beta feel free to send me a tell or a friend invite, Captain Kae@bluekae.

Leave me a comment if you have any questions about the game or are curious about how it compares to another MMO.

Epic Volume 2 Marathon

We had a kin event scheduled on Saturday to get a those of us you just finished Volume 1 through the Drums of the Deep (2.5.5) in Volume 2. The instance runs went very smoothly, thanks to Gorandir, Azzbuk, and Mortermeer (from the Weathertons kinship) for helping out.

After finishing, Tele, Phebe, and I decided to push on into Book 6. We got all the way to the next big fellowship instance, and we must have been feeling especially motivated because we picked up Berniard from our kin as guide/healer and recruited Thomborn and Mercatio from lff chat.

Even with a full party of 65’s and one 64, we wiped twice getting to the end boss but strangely had no problems with the last two big fights. The Cloak of Flame and Shadow dropped and I lucked out to with the roll (which usually never happens). Unfortunately Mercatio was bugged somehow and didn’t get credit. So we may be getting a rematch against 2.6.8 sometime soon.

In the end, I stayed up playing until nearly 5 am and finished Book 7 up through Chapter 6.

Questing for Fun not Profit

Grey quests get a bad wrap. Lots of players don’t understand why anyone would “waste” time on a grey quest since they don’t get any XP or likely any item upgrades, but I think that grey quests can still be rewarding. You still get to experience the content and occasionally you can still be challenged (if you’re into that sort of thing). Plus if you’re MMO offers cosmetic slots, like LotRO and EQ2, you can also still get some use out of any quest rewards that you just like the look of.

Sometimes a quest will go grey while languishing in your quest log because you need a group and can’t find one. Sometimes you move to  another area and forget to come back soon enough. Sometimes you find  an area you missed while exploring. This happened to me in LotRO once with Echad Candelleth. I’m not sure if I just missed it since I didn’t spend much time in the Trollshaws beyond traveling to Rivendell and doing the epic quests there, or if Turbine added it to the game after I had out-leveled the area. Regardless, I was exploring the Trollshaws and saw a quest icon on my map which led me to the camp of Echad Candelleth. All of the quests were grey to me, but I decided to pickup them all up and see where they led me. I’m very glad that I did too, because if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have bothered with The White Hart, which starts out pretty generically, but begins a quest chain culminates in the first appearance of Gollum in the game (that I’m aware of).

The epic quests in LotRO are another good example. There is a lot of story told through quest text, in-game cut scenes, and session play (to allow for alternate points-of-view), making it well worth completing at least once, even if you’re 15 levels above the quest level like I was when I finished.

So if you’re the kind of gamer who enjoys lore, story, and experiencing content don’t just skip a quest because it turned grey. You might be missing out.

Skirmishes

Sometimes I have pretty limited time to play LotRO. Before the Mirkwood expansion, I would have picked out a quest or deed on my main character that I could finish quickly, or maybe logged in on an alt. While I’ve always had fun doing that, any traveling required or remembering where I was at with an alt would cut into my already limited playtime. Now I can run a skirmish instead. Skirmishes add another option for secondary activities, just like crafting or going to the Moors for creeps versus freeps.

So last night, when I logged in to see what was going on in the kin, I ended up joining in a small (3-player) fellowship running Skirmishes.  With an hour to play, we were able to complete Ford of Bruinen and Stand at Amon Sûl. When I was done I had a bunch of Marks to use on upgrading my dwarf protector, who had been ignored and neglected during my recent quest to finish Volume 1. Doing skirmishes also meant we didn’t have any logistical issues of meeting up or traveling (even though that’s rarely a problem for a hunter). Just join the fellowship and then insta-travel into the skirmish instance.

Skirmishes still feel fun and fresh to me, which is good since I’ve run through maybe a dozen total, and I have no intention of grinding them. I’ll keep using them for quick play sessions when my time is limited or when I’m waiting for a kin event or raid to start and have some time to kill.