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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.

After the Cloaked Intentions Featured Episodes finished most of my interest in playing STO faded. I did manage to log in enough to finish the FE on both alts, but felt like more of a chore to do than a joy. At least to login and get started, I always have fun once I’m actually playing. It just seems to take a lot to overcome the gravitational force that the Rift icon exerts on my mouse pointer.

Saturday though, I had no problems playing for a couple of hours. I logged in to do the shuttle daily as I work towards crafting my very own Delta Flier (daily has to be done ten times and each time requires twelve anomalies scanned). But after I’d finished, I ended up running quite a few other missions and taking a tour of Longasc’s TOS ship interior.

A quick side note: Cryptic did an amazing job with the TOS interior. I’m not much of a TOS fan really, I used to watch the occasional rerun growing up but it wasn’t until TNG that I became a fan.

So where did this resurgent interest in playing STO come from? I bought the Enterprise Owners Manual on Friday from a Borders that’s going out of business. Reading it peaked my Trek interest and motivated me to play. The same thing happens after watching one of the movies or TV episodes or reading the novels. I guess that’s one of the benefits of using an existing IP. Just imagine if there was a new TV series. Even if it wasn’t tied directly to the game, I can imagine a lot of fans logging in to play after watching episodes just because they want to stay in the Trek universe longer.

It’s old news now, but in the latest Engineering Report, Dan Stahl stated the teams intent to change their schedule and possibly staff up more in order to do nine or ten Featured Episodes a year instead of five like they previously planned. I’d say that’s ah excellent indicator of how popular the FE’s are and how much interest in the game they generate. Hopefully the STO team is given the resources to make it so.

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’]

This month’s Ask Cryptic has some especially good tidbits of information.

One of my wishlist items for 2011 was to have ship-wide uniforms. It looks like that feature is in the works for Season 4 (maybe) or Season 5 (definitely). Even better is that Season 5 is also planned to include the ability to use the Foundry to customize your ship’s interior.

Even more exciting was this goal:

Our goal for Feature Episodes in 2011 is to get out at least 5 series while still working on other parts of the game. If we can do more, we absolutely will.

If they can manage five series this year, I’ll be a very happy player.

There’s a ton of other good information and some interesting hints that cover KDF, if/when the Romulan faction will be added, possible new ship classes, new uniform pieces, and much more. I highly recommend reading it if you want to get an idea of where the game is headed this year.

Cryptic had a bit too much success over the weekend. The combination of the One Year Anniversary and the long awaited return of the Featured Episode series really brought out Starfleet Captains in droves.

Unfortunately the massive turnout of players was a bit more than the servers could handle. Tipa, Thamupp, Longasc, and myself were mid-battle within the abandoned Romulan Vault when the servers crashed. While I was able to log back in right away, I wasn’t able to load back into the game.

The crash was disappointing. I expected Saturday to be a busy day, but I don’t think anyone anticipated game launch numbers of players. According to a forum post by Executive Producer Daniel Stahl, that is the level of activity they saw:

Just to add some statistics – we had more players on Holodeck this a.m. for the new Feature Episode than we’ve had in game since the launch of Season 2 back in June. A huge number and it definitely triggered an issue we haven’t seen in months.

I wasn’t able to sit down and reattempt the mission until about 11:30 pm on Saturday evening. By that time the servers had settled down and I was able to finish The Vault without any lag or other problems. Hopefully Cryptic learned enough from Saturday’s outage that further episodes won’t have problems. Although if you’re going to have a problem, too many players is a nice one to have.

Regarding the mission itself, let me just say, “Wow!” I don’t want to go into spoilers, especially since Tipa has already done a much better job of summarizing the mission (warning there are spoilers there), but it’s very good. The mission itself puts a new spin on things since you’re limited to a shuttlecraft, the story is very good and includes voice work for two of the main characters, and the visuals are amazing. Flying through the interior of the secret Romulan base was breathtaking.

I can’t wait to see what’s in store for episode two, Mine Enemy.