Fleet Action Organizing

screenshot courtesy of Longasc

The members of the Federation News Service are organizing a fleet action for this weekend.

Since most of us are now somewhere between Commander and Read Admiral, Longasc was thinking it would be a good time to get everyone together for a Fleet Action since those are now scaling to player level. We have a few options, personally I would prefer a space one such as the Gorn one in Tostig system or the Klingon one in Laurentian system.

So, leave a comment with your preferred day (Fri/Sat), time, and mission. I’ll update the post as we get close to a consensus.

I’m not sure how the scaling works since I haven’t done a fleet action in a while, but I would say any ranks are welcome to join, you may die a lot though.

Captain’s Log 87868.74

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87868.74

Captain Bryn Aen of the U.S.S. Lukas

At long last, I’m being promoted to Captain. The subspace message just came in from Admiral Quinn to return to Earth Spacedock in order to take care of the formalities. I am excited about the advancement, but also a little sad about moving on.

Becoming a full Captain means I’m going to be given a new command, which also means that I’ll no longer be flying the Lukas. The Akira class heavy escort has been a real challenge for me, and it has been only recently have I gotten comfortable with the proper strategies and tactics required. She’s a beautiful ship, both fast and powerful, but more delicate than I was expecting. It was a large adjustment from the Grace, which was a Nova class science vessel, and even though I could be getting a tactical escort, I’m pretty sure that Quinn will be putting me in command of a long range science vessel. My duty record aboard the Grace was much better than it’s my time on the Lukas, there have been quite a few trips to Spacedock for repairs and refits.

Captain’s Log, Supplemental

Captain Bryn Aen of the U.S.S. Auryn

The meeting with Quinn went well. As I expected, I’ve been given command of a Discovery class long range science vessel. In recognition of my Starfleet service I was allowed to christen the ship the U.S.S. Auryn. An auryn is a bird of prey from my homeworld known for it’s intelligence, grace, and curiousness.

While I will miss the Lukas, Auryn is a gorgeous ship and the first few shakedown cruises were very smooth. It did not take me long to switch my tactics back to what I’d used aboard the Grace, and I’ve quickly become comfortable with the science vessel.

The crew has settled in well. Prya and V’lel are missing the additional tactical capabilities, but are adjusting. Imaria and T’Rasu are very happy to have expanded roles on the bridge, although Imaria did have to do some retraining. Nayl and Meelok are also pleased, apparently they’re expecting easier duties now that they won’t be constantly working on repairs. While Auryn’s shields are impressive, I’m still expecting to pick up some scratches soon.

As per our tradition, we paid our respects at the monument in Wolf 359 before returning to the Tarod sector in Iota Pavonis. Our mission there was nearly completed before I received the order to return to Sol from Quinn, so we won’t stay there long.

I’ve already received a message from Captain Kurland at Deep Space 9 requesting assistance in the Bajor sector, once we’ve finished our investigations into the current Romulan issues we’ll set course for the Beta Ursae sector block.

U.S.S. Auryn, Discovery-class long rang science vessel

Founded the Federation News Service

The yesterday’s fleet forming attempt was a success! With Tipa as the Senior Editor, meet the founding staff of the Federation News Service.

Pictured from left to right: @Caylinn, @Aurangzeb, @BlueKae (me!), @Tipa, @khaaaaaaan!, and @Vannikar. Not pictured: @camenecium. These are all character handles so you can look us up in-game for an invite if you’re interested in joining.

I’m looking forward to having a group to fleet up with for a change and doing some task forces,  if I ever get promoted from Commander. My career has been stalled a bit and I’m not sure if it’s because of blowing off Admiral Grigori Yanishev when he requested I investigate a Romulan attack on a dig site or just coincidence.

Upate: Caylinn also has a writeup over at MMO Gamer Chick. Also, I wanted to mention that even though a lot of the current members are bloggers and Twitterers, that’s not a requirement.

Fleet Forming

Interested in joining a fleet? Tipa, Longasc, and myself are planning to form a fleet in STO soon (hopefully tonight). We’ve been making due with a custom chat channel up until now (stotwitter, if you want to join), but we’re missing out on a second uniform slot (which I want so I can toggle between modern and TOS era uniforms) as well as building some community for missions and taskforces.

Send me an email if you’re interested (it’s on the contact page), leave a comment below, or look me up in-game Bryn@bluekae.

Obsess Much?

I saw this Twitter status earlier today from Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer for Star Trek Online:

As of 2/8 midnight PST: Most time spent in #STO by a player: 182.21 hours. Yeah, that’s right 7.58 DAYS of playtime.

That’s an incredible bit of trivia, and not a healthy achievement for whoever that player is.

Keep in mind that the headstart launch was 1/29 and the retail launch was 2/2. Just to make the math easy, ignore  the following:

  • the servers didn’t come up on 1/29 at midnight, so that was not a full 24 hours of playtime
  • the server have not had 99.9% uptime

So let’s just say that an absolute maximum amount of time a headstart player could have played is 11 days or 264 hours. That means someone has been playing for at least 69% of the time the game has been live.

Star Trek Miscellany

Some interesting reading from today, that I wanted to share.

Great STO Blog

The Engines Cannae’ Take It is still pretty new, but is already an excellent resource for any Starfleet captains interested in the details of how best to command their ships and plan their careers. An excellent example is BigBadB’s latest article about Skills, and some very detailed analysis of how to get the best use of your skill points.

Check out his blogroll for some other good STO focused blogs.

Van Hemlock STO Episode and Zink Interview

Randomessa mentions two things that I wanted to highlight.

First, Van Hemlock has an excellent episode about Star Trek and Star Trek Online. They talk about the different series and how each set a different tone, and some of the most popular episodes in the franchise and whether or not they would make good missions in the MMO. It is a good in-depth discussion of the IP and the different strengths of the mediums (television, movies, and games).

Second, there’s also an interesting interview up on Fidgit.com with Craig Zinkievich. These were some of the things I found most interesting in the interview:

  • The team is planning to add more exploration and non-combat activities (like diplomacy) over the next year, specifically mentioning first contact missions.
  • Some bridge officer AI quirks, “don’t give your bridge officers food, because right now they eat it right away. That’s disappointing if you’re trying to use them as extra storage bags.”
  • Acknowledgement that the skill system could use more in depth explanation.
  • Respecs should be out in the next one to two months and available through the C-store and earnable in-game.

Most of the interview is stuff I’ve already seen asked and answered other places, but this is the first interview where I’ve seen Craig talk about plans for non-combat missions.

Captain’s Log

Captain’s Log, Stardate: 87710.36

Lt. Cmdr. Bryn Aen, Captain of the U.S.S. Grace

I have returned to Sol and been promoted to Commander in recognition for my exemplary Starfleet service in the Pi Canis and Alpha Centauri sector blocks. In order to better perform my continuing duties in Alpha Centauri, I have been given command of the U.S.S. Lukas, an NX registered Akira class heavy escort.

After making a stop at Wolf 359 to pay our respects, the crew and I have returned to Alpha Centauri. We are continuing our standing mission is to patrol Federation systems threatened by the Romulans, as well as our on going investigation into –classified–.

I am looking forward to seeing what the new ship is capable of. (more…)

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.

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.