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I started this thread to suggest a game change on the STO boards which I’m going to duplicate here:

One of the reasons I play STO is to put myself in the Trek-universe. While I accept a lot of the compromises Cryptic had to make to design a fun Star Trek game, there’s one that’s always bugged me: non-captain ranks. Starting out as an Ensign and getting command of a ship has always seemed quite a stretch regardless of how badly the wars with the Klingons, Borg, and Undine may be going. Of course the game does need to have some form of progression, some Trek-like way to advance. So why not make all players Captains and change the Rank/Grade system to refer Security Clearances instead?

When you start out with a new character, you could go through a promotion ceremony and get assigned your first command: a Miranda-class ship. Then you pick one (or more) bridge officers and start through the normal tutorial events with slight alterations.

In the game proper you would still collect skill points and merits, only instead of increasing in Grade from 1-10 on your way to the next Rank, your Captain would increase their Security Clearance starting at Alpha-1 through 10 and then Beta-1 (which would allow for tier 2 ships), and so on. After all, Starfleet can’t give command of their most advanced ships to just any command officer. Only the most trusted Captains would have access to high-level technology. This would make a VA-1, which is basically level 51, a Captain with Epsilon-1 Security Clearance.

The SC system would be functionally the same as the existing Rank system, but the new terminology allows for quite a bit more expansion through the remaining letters of the Greek alphabet, plus it’s less jarring from a lore standpoint.

The Admiral ranks could be re-purposed for a secondary system for Fleets (as in guilds) or fleets (as in handling multiple ships), similar to how the Ambassador ranks are used for the diplomacy system.

While there’s no major mechanics changes, this would still be a sizable change to all of the mission dialogs and UI, but it would be a huge boon to immersion and also give Cryptic more room at the top-end of the game to expand further without getting into more Admiralty ranks.

If you like the idea, or you have suggestions to improve it, then go over to the forums and leave a reply.

When accolades were activated back in Season 1.2, I had a one minute and forty second flood of Accolade notices the first time I logged in. One of the things I’ve heard about Duty Officers is that some will be earned Accolade awards. I wonder, am I going to be buried under an avalanche of transfer requests when Season 4 goes live?

Some good news and some bad news today, let’s start with the bad news first.

Up for Sale

Interesting news day for Cryptic, Champions, and STO today. Apparently Atari has decided to get out of the development business and is putting Cryptic Studios up for sale. I have to admit I’m surprised, but I really shouldn’t have been. There’s been a lot of movement towards social and mobile games, so it’s not too surprising that Atari’s headed that direction.

Naturally Twitter, game blogs, and STO’s forums have been buzzing with the news. I was pleasantly surprised by the mostly positive reaction on the STO forums. There were two dev responses I wanted to highlight:

Wishstone - The headline is chosen a little unfortunate by the colleagues at Gamasutra and makes it sound like we’re a kicked puppy standing in the rain. That’s not the case. 

Right now I have no further details other than what has been mentioned elsewhere. Support for Champions Online and Star Trek Online will be continuing as normal, our staff is working hard on their projects (and the folks from the Champions team deserve an extra cheer for their new stuff by the way) and there are no planned changes to the way any of our games and projects will operate.

So Stormy is here, I am here, Dan and the gang are here, your GMs and QA staff are working hard. It sounds way more dramatic than it actually is.

Dstahl -btw… several of STO’s new devs are starting in June – so that is one reason they haven’t responded yet.

Now of course the dev team is always going to put a brave face on things, so we’ll have to wait and see how the situation pans out. Personally, I’m not sad to see Cryptic and Atari part ways but I’m even less happy about the thought of EA or Activision acquiring the studio. There’s been some chatter on the forums about CBS, and I guess if Warner can get into the publishing business then so can they. There are lots of open questions about the situation though. Cryptic owns the Champions IP and CBS owns Trek, but I’m not clear on what Atari acquired when they bought Cryptic or who CBS actually granted their IP license to. Plus there’s the who question of Atari Points vs. Cryptic Points for the C-store currency. Interesting times indeed.

Regardless, I hope that Cryptic’s future gets resolved quickly and leaves the company in a stronger position to continue improving their games.

Update – Sente over at A ding world has some good background on the fiscal aspects of the situation.

Ground Combat

Aside from all of the corporate drama, there’s a new thread related to ground combat prompted by comments made by Al Rivera (Captain Geko on the forums) in the latest Stoked podcast (it’s an excellent interview by the way, you should watch it). Salami_Inferno jumped in on the thread and offered to answer any questions (have I mentioned recently how much I love the STO team’s communication?) and yielded some interesting tidbits:

• The optional aim mode will probably be something you want to turn off if healing, otherwise you’ll have to aim first to determine who gets affected by your Medical Tricorder. post link
• Pressing ‘Z’ will swap weapons and ‘X’ will switch aiming mode (from shooter to RPG and back). post link
• All weapons have a zoom, no head shots (maybe later, just didn’t work with their current code). There’s no cover system like Gears or Mass Effect 2, but they’ve made line of sight more significant. post link

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.