Star Trek Online Catch-All

Serengeti wrote:

Actually, my original character was still a member

Anyway, the fleet bank is now 69,900,000 energy credits richer.

Surely that means we can grab another bank slot or two, yes?

Or can we buy our own moon yet? Can we, can we, can we?!

That's no moon...

Kehama wrote:

That's no moon...

+1

Massively has their review up for the last episode of "The 2800," titled "Boldly They Rode."

A pretty good ending, I thought. More space combat this time around, which was a welcome change. If you want spoilers, check out the article linked above. One interesting note though, for those that haven't been playing. Could be a spoiler, but it's a "limited time" sort of deal, so if you were planning on putting off the series until you were of later level, you may want to reconsider.

The series reward is very unusual; it's a ground device called the Shard of Possibilities, and it apparently produces a couple of clones of the player to assist in battle. This is the rare reward for completing the missions during their initial run, and I understand it will be pulled from the reward list next week.

So yeah, I haven't tried it out yet, but if you want such things, it's probably worth your time!

Overall, I'm very pleased with the initial offering of Episodes after STO went free to play. Keep it up, Cryptic!

So they released a new patch today, with a daily to mine dilithium at 5 nodes on an asteroid near DS9.

I went out there, got the free suit on two of my characters, and tried it out. Using the arrow keys like the waveform game, you line up a triangle, over and over, as it randomly changes position/size on you. My top score was up around 750.

They say you have the possibility of "striking it rich", but committing about 15 minutes to fly out, go out the airlock, head to each node and play this 60 second mini game 5 times all for a little over 300 dilithium seems a bit... meh.

Aw hell. Is the new episode reward gone? I was so caught up in ME3 I never have went back to check...

Stele wrote:

Aw hell. Is the new episode reward gone? I was so caught up in ME3 I never have went back to check...

I tell you things and you never listen. All in the name of a silly Bioware game. Seriously.

I have no clue if it's still up. If it is, post it here so others know! I imagine you're not alone. I've been (slowly) playing through ME2 and watching "Doctor Who's" most recent season, so I haven't been hitting up STO much recently, either!

LOL, I've been playing a lot of ME2/ME3 as well. I just started logging back in yesterday, and played a bit today after the servers came back up.

The Jem'Hadar featured episode has been slightly modified, yes. It has not been reduced from Featured to another-tab status, but they took out the item in the final mission that makes the holograms of yourself. You can still get everything else, like the Jem'Hadar tactical officer candidate.

The new patch, since no one has mentioned, drastically changes the duty-officer mission system. Now, instead of seeing all the available missions on the DOFF screen, you must go into your ship, walk to the particular person for that category (engineer, doctor, chef, etc.) and then see what they've got available. There are still sector-block specific ones and some "personal" missions that you can see from the DOFF window. While it is great if you're trying to gain accolades in a particular field, it SUUUUUUUCKS for being a huge time-waster and terribad if you are trying to get as many accolade points in as little time as possible, because whereas you could compare time v. points across categories instantly, now you must enter the ship and walk between all the mission vendors. I'm contemplating telling a big f*ck you to all doff missions entirely because of this change.

Wow. That's incredibly bad. I really enjoyed the DOFF system before; it was a lot like sitting in the ready room and sorting through a ton of stuff that needed to get done and divying it out among your crew. But having to run people down? Screw that, no CC is going to waste time on that magnitude. Bad RP change and bad useability change all in one, GG Cryptic.

Yeah I'd be ok if they made you go to your ready room and use your captain's terminal. But walking around the ship? That's just silly.

And I hope that means they've fixed the bug where you would get multiple copies of your BOFFs at multiple stations on the bridge that they had a few months back.

Keithustus wrote:

The Jem'Hadar featured episode has been slightly modified, yes. It has not been reduced from Featured to another-tab status, but they took out the item in the final mission that makes the holograms of yourself. You can still get everything else, like the Jem'Hadar tactical officer candidate.

The new patch, since no one has mentioned, drastically changes the duty-officer mission system. Now, instead of seeing all the available missions on the DOFF screen, you must go into your ship, walk to the particular person for that category (engineer, doctor, chef, etc.) and then see what they've got available. There are still sector-block specific ones and some "personal" missions that you can see from the DOFF window. While it is great if you're trying to gain accolades in a particular field, it SUUUUUUUCKS for being a huge time-waster and terribad if you are trying to get as many accolade points in as little time as possible, because whereas you could compare time v. points across categories instantly, now you must enter the ship and walk between all the mission vendors. I'm contemplating telling a big f*ck you to all doff missions entirely because of this change.

Um, none of my bridge officers can even interact with me, and the DOFF screen seems to offer the same variety it did before.

What I have noticed is a much higher rate of failure, and much, much lower rate of critical success.

The bridge officers do nothing when you're in your ship. You need to enter either your captain's quarters off the bridge, or take the turbolift to the engineering or crew decks. Yes, the current DOFF screen dies work as it used to, but there are more missions available if you are walking around inside--Cryptic must have forgotten that everyone has comm-badges. I don't think there's been any changes to the random tables or anything like that, so it sounds like you've just had a string of bad luck on your DOFF missions. And for anyone looking for the last featured episode missions, theyve been placed into one of the prior tabs on the episodes screen, I believe Cardassian.

Keithustus wrote:

The bridge officers do nothing when you're in your ship. You need to enter either your captain's quarters off the bridge, or take the turbolift to the engineering or crew decks. Yes, the current DOFF screen dies work as it used to, but there are more missions available if you are walking around inside--Cryptic must have forgotten that everyone has comm-badges. I don't think there's been any changes to the random tables or anything like that, so it sounds like you've just had a string of bad luck on your DOFF missions. And for anyone looking for the last featured episode missions, theyve been placed into one of the prior tabs on the episodes screen, I believe Cardassian.

As somebody who strongly advocated this when I first started playing, I'm a bit stuck. On the one hand, making the ship interior useful is okay, even if they are hopelessly ugly/out of scale. On the other, it should be super easy, not complicated. Sit down at giant desk, look at big LCARS interface, make assignments. Ta-da!

Note I never said accessing missions from the ship interior were an improvement.

InspectorFowler wrote:
Keithustus wrote:

The bridge officers do nothing when you're in your ship. You need to enter either your captain's quarters off the bridge, or take the turbolift to the engineering or crew decks. Yes, the current DOFF screen dies work as it used to, but there are more missions available if you are walking around inside--Cryptic must have forgotten that everyone has comm-badges. I don't think there's been any changes to the random tables or anything like that, so it sounds like you've just had a string of bad luck on your DOFF missions. And for anyone looking for the last featured episode missions, theyve been placed into one of the prior tabs on the episodes screen, I believe Cardassian.

As somebody who strongly advocated this when I first started playing, I'm a bit stuck. On the one hand, making the ship interior useful is okay, even if they are hopelessly ugly/out of scale. On the other, it should be super easy, not complicated. [b] Sit down at giant desk, look at big LCARS interface, make assignments. Ta-da!

[/b]

There are several of us in agreement with this. Ship's Captain should not be running around after other people to go 'Hey, can you do X'? If anything, they should be at said desk, hit comm badge, 'Ensign So-and-So, please report to my ready room'.

If ALL Duty Officer missions were handled in the captain's Ready Room, I'd be okay with that.

They should also let you go from sector to sector in there, picking up sector specific missions.

The problem for me is flipping between the two views and also heading to all these different sectors. What a waste of time.

(says the guy waiting for an instance to reset)

Having to head from sector to sector doesn't bother me too much; subspace comms strikes me as something they really only ever used in an emergency to contact Starfleet.

Massively is reporting a re-launch of STO in Europe.

More importantly for those of us in the US, though, is that a "Double XP" weekend comes along with it, so if you have an Alt you're trying to level up, you've got from right now (!!!) until April 2nd at 1:00 am EDT.

Of course, this happens on a weekend I go out of town...guess I'll be playing tonight, then!

YEA, today's patch lets you talk to your department heads from sector space, so you can get most of those missions without walking around inside. With the DOFF panel up, just hit the DEPARTMENT HEAD tab then there is a new "assignments" button for each. The one problem is that some missions, notably the 7-part colonization missions for star clusters, sometimes appear in the shipboard OPS-officer list but not on the department-head list (and sometimes vice versa but that's less annoying). Also if you want to do anything like make a hypo or upgrade a strange alien artifact you still need to go inside for that.

I really like the DOFF missions now.

I can get all of my DOFF mission slots filled without having to travel hither and yon. That's consistent with the shows, where they often show characters returning on runabouts or shuttles from extended missions away from the ship.

I also had my first in-mission DOFF missions, which was interesting.

I still say it's failing you more than it should, though.

17 completed missions. When I assigned them all, the odds of failing any single mission were less than 5%. I had 4 failed mission, one with fatalities. What the hell, Star Trek? This happens almost every time. I assign crew with an eye towards making that failure percentage shrink, and even so I fail more missions than is statistically likely, and get far fewer critical successes than I did a few weeks ago.

I'm liking the DOFF mission diversity. But I utterly despise all of this make-work bullsh*t the game puts me through to try to get them done.

And yeah, the failure rates are ridiculously high now.

Some interesting stuff going on this week in STO, according to Massively.

There's a new Klingon mission being posted that's supposed to be pretty awesome, according to this author. I don't have any Klingon characters, so I can't really comment further, but needless to say, they could use a few more missions over there.

For the rest of us Federation folks, however, "First Contact Day" is April 5th, which will kick off a 4-day event at Utopia Planitia, which will be a new map that debuts.

Many Trekkies will recall that April 5th, 2063, is known as being the day Vulcans made first contact with Earth.

To celebrate First Contact Day, the Federation will be having a four-day event that will include the ability for players to visit the Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards in orbit around Mars. There, they will be able to "meet" the new crew of the recently introduced U.S.S. Entrprise-F as well as retrieve a special replica of Earth's first warp-capable vessel, the Phoenix.

The Phoenix will be a non-combat pet only, which is good considering it's only supposed to go warp one and doesn't have any weaponry on it. It's my understanding that the pet, as well as the access to Utopia Planitia, will be limited to the four-day event (from April 5th to 9th), so be sure to log in with all of your alts before then. (A hint has been posted that the map may return, but more information will come out later this week.)

So yeah, if you have any interest at all in a "Ship Pet," be sure to log in sometime in the next four days. Yet again, I'll be out of town this weekend (stupid Easter...), so I'll have to hop on tomorrow night to check it out.

It'd be nice if Cryptic could plan these things for non-holiday weekends...grrrrr...

Hey First Contact Day can't be moved. :p

Interesting. I have the Delta Flyer pet that I grinded out with days and days of missions on my main. But I didn't bother on my alt. This will be nice.

Tamren wrote:

I'm liking the DOFF mission diversity. But I utterly despise all of this make-work bullsh*t the game puts me through to try to get them done.

And yeah, the failure rates are ridiculously high now.

I've noticed a number of silly ones mixed in though. I had a DOFF mission to assign a team to fight in a snowball fight on the holodeck.

And I don't know what's doing on with you guys, I still have about an 80% success rate on DOFF missions. Given I'm only 22, and don't have many good DO's, I'd say that's pretty damn good.

PurEvil wrote:
Tamren wrote:

I'm liking the DOFF mission diversity. But I utterly despise all of this make-work bullsh*t the game puts me through to try to get them done.

And yeah, the failure rates are ridiculously high now.

I've noticed a number of silly ones mixed in though. I had a DOFF mission to assign a team to fight in a snowball fight on the holodeck.

And I don't know what's doing on with you guys, I still have about an 80% success rate on DOFF missions. Given I'm only 22, and don't have many good DO's, I'd say that's pretty damn good.

That's abysmally low if you actually look at the chance of failure on each screen.

So assign your officers, but don't click on the "Start Assignment" button yet. It has a chance of failure, which is rarely - RARELY - above 5%. If you assign the right officers you'll get it much lower.

So if it's never above 5%, I should never average higher than 1/20 missions failing, and yet every time I let all 20 DOFF missions finish, I usually get 3-4 failures.

Also - where are the recruitment DOFF missions now? I cannot find them at all in Earth Spacedock, talking to Bridge Officers, etc. I also cannot find a "Relocate Colonists" mission and I have an assignment I cannot complete because of that.

Like I said, I'm fairly low level, and that's mostly with white level DO's, many using failure traits (because I haven't invested the time to get better DO's yet). And given that I've pulled in two levels for just assigning those missions, without playing at all, I can accept that failure rate.

I could accept it better if it was just accurate on the mission screen.

The biggest problem with STO for me is how ROUGH it is, even more than 2 years after launch.

You can (and I did) get all the way through the game without it ever explaining important, interesting, or useful game mechanics. Missions released 18 months ago are badly, badly glitched (as in, NPCs disappearing through walls, triggers not working, etc). Various game systems like weapons sometimes not being explained very well at all. Animations missing or frozen, etc.

The DOFF missions are just one example - if I'm going to average 3-4 failures out of 20 missions, than just make the screen show a failure possibility of 15-20%, not 2-4%.

I don't mind failing them, you don't lose anything. Even when you lose DOFFs, you just recruit more. I just wonder how nobody catches stuff like that.

I really enjoy the game, mostly for the space combat. If it weren't the only Star Trek going these days, though....

Just got my pet. It's okay. Lame because you can't attach it to the action bar.

Also, I realized I have been confusing "Disaster" for "Failure" on DOFF missions! So, all that stuff above? Disregard.

Any clue where the DOFF recruitment missions are?

They're not in Earth Spacedock anymore. I have tried looking for them everywhere I can think of.

I need more duuuuudes!