star trek

Daniel Stahl’s released the May Engineering Report and it’s got some really really exciting information in it. Season 4, especially Ground Combat 2.0, has been on the horizon for so long, that it felt like it was never going to make it into the game. Now suddenly it feels like it’s almost here. Stahl has announced a tentative, let me repeat that tentative, date of July 7th for Season 4’s release, with features starting to show up on the test server in early June.

Stahl also gives a short summary of what the new ground combat is like by saying that it is going to be faster. There’s a new optional over-the-shoulder aim reticle mode which eliminates tab targeting and leads to some cool new mechanics:

It also means being able to drag weapon fire across an area an hit multiple targets, or dumb throw grenades in a general area.

Weapon stats, ranges, firing modes, reload times, sound effects, and visual FX had all been updated. Mobs HP scaling has been adjusted when changing mission difficulty, this is something I’m very interested in since I like space combat on the advanced difficulty but ground combat at that level is very tedious.

I’m starting to get excited again now that it feels like we’re more than halfway through the lull between Featured Episode Series 3 and the Season 4 update.

I’ve been keeping an eye on Heretic’s latest forum thread on the Duty Roster and there’s been some more good information posted besides the work-in-progress interface.

First, the STO team isn’t happy that duty officer names can’t be customized either, but it’s a technical limitation. I’m sure this is primarily a database issue. Because a character in STO is more than just a single individual, it’s always had more restrictions on the number of characters you could have without paying for additional slots in order to offset the higher storage costs.

The species traits I commented on yesterday will combine with a duty officer’s assignment to affect mission outcomes. Heretic give the example of “Aggressive” duty officers having a better chance of succeeding in military category assignments. Also in that same post, Heretic confirms that duty and bridge officers are completely separate resources (at least for now), so you can’t take surplus bridge officer candidates and convert them to duty officers.

Duty officers can’t be promoted and their rank contributes to the effectiveness of their passive abilities as well as the chance of success on away missions. Promotion is technically possible but not on the schedule currently. Civilian duty officers cannot be place in the active roster list, they are solely for mission assignments. Heretic give examples of: traders, advisors, and holodeck characters (which sounds very neat).

Clarification that the duty officer system is a precursor to the department head system, where you’ll be able to select a Chief Medical Officer, Chief Science Officer, etc. from among you existing bridge officers.

Cryptic developer Heretic posted a sneak peek of the work-in-progress Duty Officer interface today on the forums today.

Obviously the interface could still change quite a bit before Season 4 launches, but it does give you an idea of how Duty Officers fit into the game mechanics. There are limited positions to fill within each department, and each officer assigned adds certain passive bonuses. The traits, shown as icons in the list and detailed on the personnel file, are new to me. I wonder if those are intended as flavor text or possible have something to do with what kinds of missions you can send them on.

Season 4 looks like it’ll be amazing, since not only will I have another subsystem to play with in the game, but there’s a (much needed) revamp to ground combat, and some really cool new environments coming based on images Dan Stahl has been tweeting.

Cryptic’s been starting to address some of the grinding missions in the Foundry by un-publishing some and in some cases revoking some players’ Foundry access, see Wishtone’s post for an excellent summary. I like that they’re policing the published missions, and I originally though revoking player access is a bit heavy handed until I saw Wishstone’s post which implies that only players who were republishing removed missions were affected. She doesn’t say, but I assume that it’s a temporary measure until fixes are applied to Tribble and Holodeck.

Speaking of which the first patches to remove the exploitive mechanics that are now on Tribble:

Ship explosions will now only effect a maximum of 5 targets.

Apparently some of the missions that allowed players to level quickly relied on spawning a ton of ships on top of you and then blowing up as a result of the warp core breach from your own ship dieing.  Someone further down in the thread asks if this is related to Foundry exploit missions and Salami_Inferno, the associate producer, confirms that it is.

I’m very please to see them addressing these issues. I hope that some of the suggestions regarding adding categories and tags to missions to help with searching will get implemented quickly as well.

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.

I have an Andorian Tactical alt named Khynalas Aveni, or Khyn for short, that I’ve been working on sporadically for months. He was in limbo for quite a while until I got motivated recently to get him up to Lieutenant, grade 6, and send him through the Cloaked Intentions featured episodes. He was pretty successful in his mission and had been promoted to grade 10 by the time he finished the mission Cutting the Cord.

Along the way, Khyn received a transfer request from an Andorian engineering officer. I had a little chuckle when I looked at the request sent to Khyn. Poor Ensign Tytis. She look’s like the saddest Andorian in the quadrant.

I may have to given her a makeover before I let her onto Khyn’s. She looks like she’d just be depressing to work around.

Over the weekend I finished the Delta Flier crafting mission. The mission required one to scan anomalies while in a shuttle to acquire special data samples. The daily needed twelve samples, you get one per scan, and had to be repeated ten times in order to acquire a schematic. The schematic mission is repeatable as well, so I could conceivably craft Delta Class shuttles for my alts or fleet mates if I were willing to collect all of the samples in order to get another schematic.

There was nothing really difficult about the mission. It wasn’t particularly interesting or tedious, at least the first time, and I did feel a bit of accomplishment at having crafted my Delta Flier rather than buying it from the C-store.

It is a sweet ride, I may have to head back to the Vault and revisit that mission.

There’s a device on the crafted shuttle that can be transferred to your main ship and used to launch a Delta Class shuttle pet.