CAG Star Trek Online Fleet/game discussion thread

I'm getting the impression that many people here plan on jumping ship once f2p goes into effect. I bought this shortly after it came out, but I didn't enjoy it. I had thought about checking it out again after the transition...but geez after everything I've read I'm wondering if I should even bother. Dilithium for everything including tradeskills?! Sounds like a huge grind fest or buy to win scenario.
 
That about sums it up. I'll admit it's not nearly as bad for veterans who have already leveled up and obtained most/all the high end gear they want, but for people starting out it's grindy.

Last night I refitted my ships/boffs due to the forced respec and I tried some STFs. It was kinda fun using a new ship and a re-done powerset from what I had before.
 
Star Trek Online F2P Early Access starts tomorrow for former subscribers.

http://www.startrekonline.com/node/2756

Starting tomorrow (Thursday, January 5th), anyone with a lapsed subscription to Star Trek Online will be able to log into the game and play as a Silver member. This means that any account that has in the past subscribed to the game, even if only for the initial month, can come back and play for free!

For those of you not familiar with the difference between Gold (subscriber) and Silver (non-subscriber) membership, you can refer to the features matrix.
Click to expand...

We still don't know exactly how the conversion will work, but assume that you will lose some Boffs, inventory slots and bank slots and have the items locked (or put in some kind of overflow).
 
F2P Early Access is now online for past players and it seems that you do keep all or your old ships, Boffs, inventory and bank slots.
 
Ok... so I logged back in yesterday....the revamped the skill tree :| uh oh...this feels like it's gonna pull a NGE in SWG.
 
The new skill tree is actually a good thing I think since the original tree was unbalanced and broken. The new tree is a lot more understandable.

What IS disappointing is that the executive producer has come out and said there will only be 2 FE series this year. That's about 2 too few, and totally flies in the face of their claims that the PWE aquisition and F2P was supposed to hearld an unprecedented outflow of new content.
 
[quote name='KingDox']New players should all get a CD key off alien ware before joining. It gives you free costumes and a free ship that s worth around 15 bucks.

http://www.alienwarearena.com/giveaway/star-trek-online-subscription-bundle/[/QUOTE]

HMMM

We were unable to complete your request as you do not meet the requirements for activating this product. Some products can only be activated once per account. If you believe this is an error, please contact Customer Support.
 
[quote name='ITDEFX']HMMM

We were unable to complete your request as you do not meet the requirements for activating this product. Some products can only be activated once per account. If you believe this is an error, please contact Customer Support.[/QUOTE]

hehe that code is only for new ppl so you don't qualify ;)

I've made the first round of F2P-relevant changes to the first post. Please post links to helpful STO pages in the Links section. Things that explained crafting, DOFFs, etc. are the general idea.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So the Odessy (sp?) class ship is out (Enterprise-F). How do you get it? Also it seems they require you to have enough diliathium plus 1 ship acquisition to get a new ship? argh...where do I get more diliathium?
 
No all you gotta do is be lvl5 as fed or 21 as kdf and you can start the "shakedown" mission. The mission itself is pretty dumb but only takes a few mins. The reward is the ship, in the form of an item in your inventory. You can't inbox it till you're lvl50 though. If you are lvl50, you need a free ship slot to inbox and use it.
 
Quick questions:

1. Are there any good skill guides for STO? I'm playing as a Tactical officer, and I have no god damned idea what I'm doing with skills. I have a feeling I've spec'd myself horribly.

2. What class of ship is best for tactical?

There's so much to this game, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.
 
[quote name='JustYourAverageJoe']Quick questions:

1. Are there any good skill guides for STO? I'm playing as a Tactical officer, and I have no god damned idea what I'm doing with skills. I have a feeling I've spec'd myself horribly.

2. What class of ship is best for tactical?

There's so much to this game, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.[/QUOTE]

Just take it easy. I personally like the retro-fitted Defiant with cloak.
 
[quote name='JustYourAverageJoe']Quick questions:

1. Are there any good skill guides for STO? I'm playing as a Tactical officer, and I have no god damned idea what I'm doing with skills. I have a feeling I've spec'd myself horribly.

2. What class of ship is best for tactical?

There's so much to this game, it's easy to feel overwhelmed.[/QUOTE]

The skill tree got a pretty deep overhaul last month with the release of F2P. Therefore, any skill guides that do exist are probably out of date. Read up on the STO Wiki or STO forums is probably your best bet.

There is no one best ship for any one class. It all depends on your play style. Although the 3 classes of player (tac, eng, sci) roughly seem to line up with the 3 classes of ship (escort, cruiser, sci vessel), it's better to think of your character as having a class, and your ship allowing you to focus on a second sub-class in space. In fact it may be argued that your ship type serves as your primary "class" in space and your character class serves as your "secondary specialization".
 
[quote name='Ruahrc']The skill tree got a pretty deep overhaul last month with the release of F2P. Therefore, any skill guides that do exist are probably out of date. Read up on the STO Wiki or STO forums is probably your best bet.

There is no one best ship for any one class. It all depends on your play style. Although the 3 classes of player (tac, eng, sci) roughly seem to line up with the 3 classes of ship (escort, cruiser, sci vessel), it's better to think of your character as having a class, and your ship allowing you to focus on a second sub-class in space. In fact it may be argued that your ship type serves as your primary "class" in space and your character class serves as your "secondary specialization".[/QUOTE]

Normie makes a solid point. Every ship meshes with each class differently. There are still benefits to going "pure" ship/captain alignment (i.e. engi/cruiser, tac/escort, sci/sci). For example, you can't beat the pure DPS of a tac/escort (but your ship will be on fire constantly). Engi/cruiser is aces for pure survivability (my engi/cruiser basically can't be killed but must grind out kills). That being said, they're not necessarily "the best" ways to go.

Here are some common hybrid combos: I have seen a lot of success with engis flying escorts, since their engi skills allows their escorts to survive quite a bit longer than a tac (which sometimes makes all the difference). A sci/cruiser is an excellent healer and tank as well. Sci's shield heals and debuffs translate pretty well to survival. Many tacs have been known to fly cruisers since they can kill better while still being very durable in a cruiser.

As for the skill tree, it's much more straight forward than before. Obviously, the energy/torp skills are a no brainer. I actually would recommend you don't spend all your points right away if they're not no-brainer skills (like weapons or power efficiency or something basic like that). I know it's spendy to respec now so being conservative before you spend is a solid idea. You should try out skills to see how they function in action and then commit points to them afterwards. For example, I was initially enamoured with charged particle burst with my sci and used it for a long time. I tested tractor repulsors on a whim and found that it was far more useful to my play style. Anyway, spend on the basics first and then only commit to others only after having tried them out, even if it slows your leveling.

I added a skill tree planner link to the first page. It's a good place to select your skills and it'll show you which skill category boosts those skills (including boff skills).
 
Last edited by a moderator:
So what's everyone's take on the Galor spam fiasco? It also seems that Captain Gecko (one of the top guys at STO) and some podcaster for massively have kind of joined forces to mock and insult the community on their twitter accounts. I have no idea what's going on with this game. Every time I think about spending more meaningful time in game, it seems like something else explodes.

I'm really regretting that lifetime purchase now...
 
I havent played for a year

though still have a lifetime subscription lol

is this game worth getting back into?
 
Honestly, I wouldn't if I were you. If I had kicked the game for a year, I would just keep going and not look back. Unfortunately, I'm one of those saps who feels like he needs to make that lifetime sub worthwhile despite the pain and suffering. A few nice peeps from here still play too so I keep on.

The game itself has improved some. The ground gameplay is slicker and faster. There is new content and some of it is quite good.

Free to play brought in a lot of new people and it looks like they're dropping cash, which in turn made cryptic a bunch of money grubbing ferengi. They've made the game super grindy and have tried to monetize every aspect of the game. Subscribers don't really get any perks. That's all fine in itself, but the general vibe isn't great right now. The outstanding executive producer before has since departed and the leads at STO are a bunch of vapid asshats.
 
I'm right there with you manlai. Galor spam can suck my balls. There have even been suggestions that the "XYZ@ABC has won a Galor!" are falsified in an attempt to get people to gamble. People claim to have seen names of their alts or friends receive Galors, but who have not actually gotten one. I haven't seen proof, but really with Cryptic's reputation, I wouldn't be in the least bit surprised.

I can understand the economic necessity of the lottery boxes, but the disturbing trend I see is that anything meaningful added to the game is now going to be locked behind this type of scam. They won't just release new ships on the C-store anymore, rather make everyone gamble for them. It's one thing to not agree with the lotto and not participate, but if everything new is going to be added in this manner...

I also hate how everyone still pulls for Cryptic. "I want to like STO so much the devs are awesome and the game has real potential, too bad the higher ups keep making bonehead decisions.".

No. Even if these guys were swimming in money, they couldn't make this game the Star Trek MMO we all want. The devs too are mediocre at best and can't write code to save their life. The art design, while for the most part technically competent, barely looks like Trek. Nobody on the team knows how to properly balance gameplay, so they fool around in the dark nerfing anything and everything hoping they happen upon a workable combination.

Literally almost every time they patch something, another totally unrelated and previously working part of the game breaks. Just look at how many problems the audio engine has had over the past 3 months. There were no problems with audio in season 4 or before. F2P beta (season 5) comes out and all of a sudden all the sounds are crackling left and right. A month later they seem to fix it, but then everything sounds like you're in a bathroom wearing earmuffs. Another "fix" later, now half the sounds in combat don't play. Patch that up and now there's this crappy buzzing reverb in DS9. I mean seriously, it's time to let that audio programmer go already! Autofire, which has been totally working and fine since beta, somehow gets screwed up in a recent patch.

The sad part is I'm going to go log in now to try the new FE lol. Guess I'm a bigger trekkie than I thought. Except oh wait, the server's down and I can't play. Who didn't see that coming?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
It's just too bad, you know? The ground/space combination is really quite innovative (even if flawed). Having a ship to fly and having a toon is a rare thing. It's too bad they still haven't figured anything out yet.

As for the lottery ships, I've heard the rumors as well. I don't think normal faction stuff will be in lottery boxes. They have a pretty established record of just making cstore ships up until the last 2. I believe CBS had an issue with how many jem hedar and cardie ships there might be so they all probably cooked up this scheme to get the cash and satisfy the Trek IP overlords.

Anyway, I agree with you normie. My cloaking device is still broken from season 2 (that whole speech box decloaks me disaster). I still get that power misfire problem where the power doesn't activate but the cooldown starts. The lead programmer is an asshat and it just filters down from there. He slyly deleted his insult to the community tweet btw! I think all the issues can be summed up as 1 thing. The entire vibe of the game just isn't good right now. The thing is when Dan Stahl was still lead, there were still problems but the whole vibe was positive and seemingly moving in the right direction. This group there now is awful.

Honestly, the biggest reason I still bother to log in at all is because you, metaly, kingdox and a few others still play (OK I do love my ship a little bit too). If all of you migrate to another game, I'd uninstall STO in a heartbeat.
 
The game spams a message in the chat box and posts a message in the middle of the screen every time someone "supposedly" wins a Galor from the lockboxes. While you can disable the chat box spam by turning off the [system] channel, the onscreen spam uses the same mechanic as when people choose need/greed or how mission rewards used to be displayed on screen (before they moved it to that little popout above the chat box) and is thus not possible to disable. The whole time you play you are constantly bombarded by "ABC@XYZ has won a Galor!" right in your view. People who have actually won and had their name broadcast have reported that they then get inundated with tells and spam ranging from offers to buy it, all the way to hate for being lucky.

It's supposed to entice you into thinking "hey! Look at all the people winning! I too could win one of those! Let me grab my wallet and throw cash at Cryptic!!!!1!1!"

And the entire game is being inundated with lockboxes. It is easy to accumulate 20-30 boxes within a single play session, even if you are rolling "need or greed" with a team of 5. They seem to drop more often than any other item. There are so many floating around that they are selling for as little as 100ec each on the exchange.

I played the new FE mission today. What a letdown. With one or two exceptions, the voice acting and writing are pretty mediocre as usual. Then again, maybe it's hard for me to say since for the majority of the mission, I had to suffer through the ridiculous and unacceptable buzzing problem that exists on DS9, so I could barely hear the voiceovers at times. The cutscenes are still awkward due to primitive character animation system the engine has, and feel like they came from a game made 10 years ago. The mission even has some pretty severe gameplay bugs (engineer players cannot use their kit powers in one critical segment of the mission because it takes place on what was designed as a "social area"). How the fuck did THAT not get caught by playtesting? Oh right, I bet not a single cryptic employee actually played through the mission as each character class. There also was another bug relating to class-specific optional objectives I ran into that while not as severe in gameplay, should in no way have been missed had they actually bothered to playtest their shit before uploading it to the server.

A lot of the mission is the typical run-around "be someone's whipping boy for a few minutes" type of thing, and another portion is little more than a thinly veiled "kill 5 mobs" type of structure. There was one part which I thought was semi-cool
when you first get into space and you have to defeat the Jem'Hadar attack ships flying around the station, and in the distance a large fleet of dominion capital ships is bearing down on the station
but hardly anything special.

There are zero new art assets in the entire mission save for a single room that you spend 3 minutes in, and while I won't spoil it here, the ending of the mission is so laughably out of context with the game world that it's downright embarrassing. If you're really curious:
the end of the mission results in DS9 being taken over by the Dominion, and you are forced to abandon the station and end the mission in orbit of Bajor. But when you return to sector space, you can travel right back to DS9 which is still occupied by the federation as if nothing had happened. Why could they not block off access to DS9 for the duration of the FE, and give the events in the mission actual meaning?

If I were to give the mission a rating. I'd give it a B-. It gets a D from me right now though due to the sound bug in DS9 totally ruining the experience for me.

Compared to other FE missions, it is pretty standard fare. But considering the amount of time we have had to wait for this, and that this is in particular the very first impression of a current FE series that new F2P players will likely see, I was hoping for far more impact and presentation for this opening mission than what is really there. They had a real chance here to "wow" everyone with a high quality opener, and what we got is decidedly less than that. THIS is what we've been waiting a full year for!? Give me a break. I'm sure there will be some more "standout" missions in the weeks to come, but even in the previous FE series with the Remans, each mission took place in all-new locations. The point remains that if even half of each new FE is standard fodder like this, why on earth does it take them 6 months or more to make each series? Oh right, cause they're incompetent and have no talent at making a quality game.

P.S. manlai, I'm pretty relaxed about names, but there are very, very, very few people who I allow to call me normie. And sadly you aren't one of them :)
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Is the Odyssey-class still available? I read it was a limited time thing. Hopped on STO last night briefly to check things out and there was a lot going on with that skill tree. Unless they took them away, I should have a ton of respec tokens as veteran rewards. Just wanted to get the new ship for kicks. I saw that Galor spam and realized it was from a C-store item. I went to the C-store and it wouldn't display teh amount of C-cash or whatever nor would it let me buy more. It was weird. Tonight I'll try that Shakedown mission and see if they are still giving the ship away. Is it an auto-mission that they give you or do I need to hunt some NPC down?
 
No the (free) odyssey was only available for the weekend of the anniversary event. The NPC who gave the quest is gone.

However, they will be releasing a "+1" version in the c-store next month. Price...? Dunno but I would expect ~$25+.

As for the Galor, you cannot buy it direct. You can get it from opening cardassian lock boxes. It costs 100cp to buy a key to open one box. Each box has a 0.5% chance to give a Galor. Good luck!
 
Or wait till they drop to 25m. We're only one week in to this Galor crap which will run another 4 weeks. The supply of ships is only going to increase.
 
so it looks like they're not going to do anything about the spam, thus my embargo continues. How are you guys dealing with it? Playing a fair amount?

On a side note, I was watching Abrams Trek on tv the other night. Anyone else notice the insane amount of lens flares there are in that movie? It's like every 10 seconds. :p
 
manlai I salute your resolve.

I'm definitely playing less. I logged on both saturdays to play the new missions (1-2 runs through each time), and then maybe a few STF runs on STF wednesdays. I am pretty busy in RL and don't have much time to play anyways, so the galor spam just helps me say "no" to logging on to run some STFs, and getting more work done.

I wonder if it's possible to bring this to the attention of the wider gaming press? A few stern articles from some gaming sites outside of the MMO-genre may give their bullshit wider exposure, and hopefully drive more players from even trying the game. I'd love to see someone like Ars Technica "re-review" the game and give it the reaming it deserves. Unfortunately they seem almost like the only site that would be honest about the piece of shit that this game is, instead of selling out to cheap favors by the devs like joystiq or all of the STO podcasts do.
 
I thought DStahl left STO? I guess he just got demoted. I have no idea who's in charge now but the Geko guy seems to be the most vocal (at least on chicken sh$% twitter).

They kinda fixed the messages now. You can turn off the center screen galor spam notification but it still shows it in the chat box. I guess that's something...

@metaly - yea it's pretty brutal. But then again, I don't recall a good looking ship coming from Cryptic ever. I still throw up in my mouth a little every time I see a heavy escort or a durvish. The great John Eaves has some hits and misses, but at least he hits, you know?

I'm adding a new section to the first post wiki: REVIEW. It'd be great if active players would write one in order to entice or ward off people to STO. It should be very brief. A same format would be:

Recommendation: YES/NO
Why: a couple of sentences explaining your reasoning

It seems like something good to do in case people pop by the thread looking at the state of the game. If you happen to change your mind about it at any point, you can just edit your own review.
 
DStahl left Cryptic to work for Zynga. Like 2 months later he quit that job and came back to Cryptic, but was hired on to work in the Foundry section of STO while D'Angelo was still the temporary EP. Anyway about 2 weeks ago he took over the position of EP again. So he's back in charge except probably still serving under his PWE overlords.

Looks like they are finally removing the galor spam. I don't mind so much the messages in the chat log since I disable system chat anyway (or at least run it in a separate tab). So with the new change, the UI will effectively be like it was before (At least with regards to galor spam).

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=257126

BTW gotta love point #2 on that. They can't even type in "Announcements" correctly without catching it before it goes live. They even know about it before it even goes live yet still fail to fix it lol. That QA department at Cryptic is a real crack team :)

Did you guys jump online and get your tetryon-plasma engines? They screwed those up too (surprise surprise!) and initially they were not bound, so you could claim your runabout and then sell the engine on the exchange. I got 3, and didn't have to pay any Cpoints for the useless and hideous runabout. Then they "fixed" it so that if you sold your tetryon-plasma engine, you couldn't get another one (what will happen to those who did? I don't know). I think a more permanent solution is coming in tonight's patch, don't know if it will bind everyone's engines or if it will just bind newly created/purchased ones. Mine are sitting in my mailbox so if they do bind I can at least log on as my alts and claim one for each.
 
It's true, even I'm not too fond of Cryptic's ship designs. They seem to end up on extreme ends of the spectrum with either random chunks and angles jutting out everywhere, or tapered down until they look like a flatworm. Luckily you can work some miracles with the ship editor.

I'll try to leave a review at some point. I still think the game is pretty excellent for fans, even though I don't like some of the recent developments. Now that the Perfect World/F2P transition is long done, maybe development will get back on track. And hopefully with DStahl back as EP we'll get a little more transparency on the state of the game.
 
missed the engines thing. I don't have much use for ship parts that don't have a set to go along with them so I'll get over it. I hardly ever catch the exploits before they're patched (still kicking myself for missing the deferi outpost sale thing). The only one I've taken advantage of is having a pimp cane for all my boffs.

Cryptic to Zynga? Then back to Cryptic? If there's ever a person who needs a good career counselor... He just needs to work for Bioware/EA DLC department and his circle of evil will be complete.
 
Running elite STFs nets you healthy amounts of dilithium too. Not to mention the other STF rewards like EDCs, of which I have now around 350 banked up :).
 
I avoid kerrat like the plague... I seem to be avoiding STO altogether like the plague. Don't have much reason to jump back in aside from a few minutes of exchange flipping every now and again.
 
Man... I logged on for half an hour to do Operation Gamma and Heskolt won a Galor ship. He said it took 90 keys. :cold: That guy is the hardest of cores.

I think OG was the best episode of this series, but that's not saying much. Please, impress me with the next two.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
bread's done
Back
Top