That's really surprising to me. After how much quality VIL had, I expected them to go all-in trying to cash in on Discovery stuff. Maybe they specifically have to pay CBS a portion of Discovery-related sales and decided to try and hook new players as cheaply as possible?
I have two keys for the Humble Trekkie Pack.
Not sure what it entails just going to drop them here in case anyone wants to make use of them
I believe they're the same thing, so just take one. Loading...?
Google tells me 3 phoenix boxes, mercenary uniform, small XP boost, and the female liberated borg officer. Going to pass for others, since I have the officer from a long time ago and the uniform from a previous giveaway.
+1
shanisLCDR, US NavyMaryland, USARegistered Userregular
Anybody out there still running Arcadian Defense Fleet? I am on semi-regularly (can't seem to get away from this game, so I dabble) and I noticed a lot of our fleet holdings don't have ongoing projects. If someone wants to give me permissions, I can mind the store from time to time and keep the projects going (I can't say I'll fill them myself, though, I don't play enough for that). Multiple toons @Shanis281 -- Shanis (main), Shanis of Borg, and Sha'nis
Origin(BF4) - hunter28100 / Steam - Shanis
"Uh, I have never said that you are not good at what you do. It's just that what you do is not worth doing." -S.C.
Elite Starter Pack, an extremely useful 1500 zen account unlock has been removed and replaced with Elite Services Starter Pack which costs 1000, is a CHARACTER unlock, and does less.
Bit of a dick move. Between that and the mission structure changes, I'm starting to regret my LTS.
9th Anniversary event stuff and Mirror of Discovery update:
Ship: Vulcan Scout Ship from Discovery (no pics yet)
Two missions (instead of the usual one - not sure how this will impact the ship grind), USS Discovery gets time displaced to the modern era, and the ISS Discovery (captained by Captain Killy, the mirror version of Tilly) does a thing.
Time travel, Mirror Universe, and Discovery... Two things Victory is Life was supposed to take us away from and one that they really faceplanted with Age of Discovery.
And the Personal Endeavor system that they posted and then deleted a dev blog about way back for ViL, which comes with another new experience bar and unlocks account-wide boosts. If that dev blog is still accurate (and the feature's been pulled back for most of a year, so who knows) this system was the epitome of power creep - permanent account wide and uncapped, limited only by your willingness to jump timegates for random arbitrary tasks (in addition to all the timegates for specific arbitrary tasks that the game's already full of).
And the Personal Endeavor system that they posted and then deleted a dev blog about way back for ViL, which comes with another new experience bar and unlocks account-wide boosts. If that dev blog is still accurate (and the feature's been pulled back for most of a year, so who knows) this system was the epitome of power creep - permanent account wide and uncapped, limited only by your willingness to jump timegates for random arbitrary tasks (in addition to all the timegates for specific arbitrary tasks that the game's already full of).
Until I can make a new captain and one-shot the Undine dreadnought at the end of that first Vulcan mission with my hand phaser, I've not Endeavored enough.
I don't usually post about grind events, but the Kobayashi Maru weekend event is back this weekend, and has some new additions of the HOLY FUCK WHAT NEXT kind.
In my one run tonight, I encountered:
Wave 1: Romulans
Wave 2: Borg and a Doomsday Machine
Wave 3: Discovery-era Klingons and Badlands fire tornados
Wave 4: Romulan Republic and Fluidic Space blobs
Wave 5: Vaadwar. Just Vaadwar. Seemed anticlimactic at this point, not even the bioneural launchers activated on this wave.
Wave 6: All the Iconians that have ever existed and the fucking Crystalline Entity
Added bonuses like Doomsday Machine automatically unspawn when you kill the main parts of the wave, but have to be managed somehow in the meantime, as they can oneshot the Kobayashi Maru if ignored. Supposedly shiled suppression fields, sensor interference, and all kinds of other crap can show up to add extra twists to waves.
This is the kind of no win scenario that Deke Slayton described in his book about the early days of NASA - every possible thing goes wrong forever and if you somehow manage to beat the simulator the controller says, "Sorry, your instruments were giving you inaccurate readings, you're dead anyway."
New anniversary double feature is better conceived than AoD, but not by much.
ISS Discovery tries to come to the prime universe and ends up in 2410, Captain Tilly (aka Killy) immediately requests asylum, which apparently in Federation vernacular means, "Kill everybody who is inconveniencing me, fix my busted ass ship, and then plunge yourself into unrelated danger on my behalf before even confirming that your government will consider said asylum." Oh, and it's a trick. Everybody's betraying everybody and in the end everybody you don't explode you just ram backwards through the rift they came from.
Far less slipshod and better production value than AoD, some new and quite well done environments and animations, but... I still can't shake the feeling that this Discovery stuff is rather forced, because this ends up being a rehash of stuff we did already.
Endeavor system is iterated a bit from the old out of date dev blog:
You get three account-wide endeavors every day - you can earn skip tokens or just let them expire with the daily reset if you don't like them. Server-wide endeavors are still the same, but now primarily focus on multiplayer content, while personal ones run a wider range. Personal endeavors give the same range of numeric rewards as the old server ones, with hard ones giving more "rolls" from the system. All endeavors also now give exp, every 20k exp you get a perk point.
Instead of uncapped power creep, there's just "a whole fucking lot of power creep." There are 16 space perks and 14 ground perks (various damage types, defenses, resistances, hull, shields, kits, and so on - basically everything gets a good 30% boost if you take this all the way), each with 15 levels. Every time you earn a perk point, you're offered 3 randomly selected perks and can pick one of them to advance. You get a free perk point when you log in to get the idea.
Mathematically, if you hit every single endeavor every reset, you're looking at right around two years to max this out, but some fairly beefy stats out of it. Perks and endeavors are account-wide. You can't double dip the system with alts, but every alt shares the same exp bar and gains the same perk benefits.
I decided to give Star Trek Online's XB1-port a go but the character creation is VERY laggy. It feels like it's running around 10 FPS rather then 30 or 60 and I have to push a direction on the stick or a button multiple times for it to register. Is this normal for this port?
Weird, must be a new thing because I don't recall running into that and I rolled several characters when I played. Not even my Victory is Life char performed like that.
Seriously wish they kept supporting this game with achievements like they did wiht NWN
tastydonuts on
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
Actual gameplay seems to run fine, but ps4 creation also runs VERY slow for me. Exactly as described. Move to an option, then wait 5 seconds for everything to render...
The Foundry is being permanently removed on April 11. Because..reasons.
This is definitely bumming me out. Every once in awhile I would find a few Foundry missions to liven things up, plus they're so incredibly useful for endeavors.
Someone on the STO-Reddit wrote up the big points from a recent dev-stream.
Earned Zen Ships
Earn tokens over multiple featured TFOs to unlock coupon for a ship.
"Any" zstore ships. Account unlock as usual with store ships.
These coupons will also be used to create a gifting system so you can gift ships.
Ships leveling with you
All T6 ships will level with you
Looking into price changes for T1-T5 ships since T6 ships will be usable from start to finish. No details/plans in motion right now.
New playable ships
Multiple new ships coming starting in April.
Section 31 ship confirmed.
Discovery D7 confirmed.
DSC Connie image is in-game and is essentially done.
DSC Connie, D7, S31 ships well underway and/or done but release being held until after Season 2 is finished in case there are any changes or surprises. No word on DSC Defiant.
No word on how DSC Connie/D7 will be added to the game.
Rise of Discovery
Confirmed Season 17
Confirmation that AOD/MOD/ROD are all separate and are S15, S16, S17. In case anyone still refuses to believe that.
New Halloween Festival
Announced that work has begun on a new Halloween Festival. No real details yet other than they are looking at 'Catspaw' TOS episode for inspiration. Dividian haunted castles, and things like that. Featured TFO with festival most likely.
Future Content
Discovery content is coming to a close and they want to get back to trek as a whole but also they are excited to bring us content with the Picard show, Section 31 show, and whatever else CBS makes.
Looking into making events using battlezones/adventure zones and updating older content.
Entire romulan arc being redone with updated dialogue and cut-scenes.
Possibly, eventually Romulan characters will be given a free T6 ship while leveling. Not a guarantee that it will happen.
Plans to remaster more TFOs based on player feedback.
Future QoL Updates
Dedicated EV suit slot in the works for player+boffs. When done, more EV suit content.
Tags will now no longer say enemy or ally but say what it is no matter the distance.
Minimap ping system.
These updates will launch when ready, not bound to any season.
It sounds like they're gonna make it that if you buy a T6 ship, you can use it right away on a new character. They'll likely set some limiters on it that'll slowly come off as you rise in level. They have something like this already I think with one of the ships in the Discovery package that goes as high as Lv30 so I guess that was a test-run for this now. Naturally that means they'll have to do some price tweaks on the T1-5 ships since it's unlikely someone will buy one at the current prices when you can just get a T6 ship that'll last you throughout the whole game.
It sounds like they're gonna make it that if you buy a T6 ship, you can use it right away on a new character. They'll likely set some limiters on it that'll slowly come off as you rise in level. They have something like this already I think with one of the ships in the Discovery package that goes as high as Lv30 so I guess that was a test-run for this now. Naturally that means they'll have to do some price tweaks on the T1-5 ships since it's unlikely someone will buy one at the current prices when you can just get a T6 ship that'll last you throughout the whole game.
You can do that currently with the T6 ship from the anniversary event, too. The console and weapon slots unlock as you level but the bridge officer seatings are fully open from the start.
It's still OP as hell by comparison.
0
HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
If I recall I was using a "tier-5u" ship the last time I played which is a tier5 with the 6 abilities bolted on or something like that
Kind of. They have the scaling hull (from 40 to 60) and an extra console slot, but not the extra bridge power and only part of the mastery scale. So a T5 fleet ship becomes the equivalent of a T6 non-fleet ship, but minus a bridge power. T6 later got a fleet level which was just entirely above T5-anything, and then got specialization bridge stations. T5U are more than capable of anything in the game except PVP because power creep has buried almost everything, but the fake parity they used to soften the blow of the tier increase has worn off.
Now they're scaling from level 1 all the way to endgame, so basically why should any ship exist at lower tiers at this point.
STO's giving players a chance to earn a free T6 ship but only if you put the time in.
Operation Riposte is the first major Federation offensive of the Klingon-Federation War of 2256-57. After nearly a month of crushing defeats, the Federation initiates a bold new plan to regain initiative in the war. The planet of Priors World has recently been conquered by the Klingons, but the Federation counter-attack aims to not only wrestle control of that world back into Federation hands, but also to deliver the first major defeat to the Klingons and thereby inject a much needed morale boost back into the ranks of Starfleet.
This event will last for 3 weeks starting on April 18th for PC players, and on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 in mid 2019. All players level 10 and above will be able to participate, and can earn a TFO Commendation once every 20 hours.
This event will also debut a brand new system for Star Trek Online. Earn progress toward a Free Ship by participating each day in the Featured TFO Events that will be running from now until Fall of 2019. By playing these three Events, you can earn Coupon Progress Tokens each day, allowing you to eventually claim a '100% Discount Coupon: Tier 6 Ship' that will allow you claim a free Tier 6 Starship of your choice from the Zen Store.
When you play the 'Operation Riposte' Featured TFO Event, once per day, you will receive 50 Coupon Progress Tokens. Progress will be rewarded across your entire account, so you need only participate once per day to max out your potential progress. Keep an eye out for Featured Event Coupon Bonus Days, which will double any progress that you earn while they are active! After you've earned a total of 3000 Coupon Progress Tokens, head to the Reputation menu to claim your prize.
That's a whole lot of grinding and probably slower than dilithium grinding but hey free is free, and if the TFOs aren't awful that's still a good thing.
I beyond love my escort carrier. It's on the old side and has no spec seats but it's great fun and for semi-RP reasons I won't leave it behind. I use it with the spire swarmer pets.
The console on the T6 version is meh, but it makes a set with the consoles from the tier 4 and 5 Akira variants, both of which are fun. The torpedo spread one isn't amazing, but the phaser one is amazing, just erases any mines, heavy projectiles, or fighters within 5 km and chews through frigates, adds decent DPS on a hard target as well.
If you're looking for something more in the current meta, you either want some command spec cruiser or pilot spec escort.
It really depends on what you're after. If you're after a cool escort, the Tactical Escort is very solid and fun plus you can use the Defiant skin on it. The Arbiter Battlecruiser has a great weapon setup and arguably one of the best starship traits in the game but like most of the Cryptic designs it isn't exactly pretty.
Been sinking some time into this, and it's pretty damned fun- and let's face it, can't get much better than free.
I'm on the main storyline- I'm almost done with the fifth series, and just made Captain yesterday.
Honestly, from everything I've played so far, I really liked the first three storylines- but then they hit me with New Romulus in series 4 and all its dungeoncrawling (Hey dog, I saw you just finished a run through that instance- do another one for this incredibly stupidly-placed flag system!) and now the Dyson Sphere (fuck you with a phaser bank, Tower Control mission- no matter what you call it, trying to force people into grouping can die in a fire). I'm hoping things get better, though- I liked the first three because the story was pretty good, and I'm admittedly a sucker for games with a decent story and/or solid roleplaying scenes, but New Romulus (Really, guys, what the fuck did you THINK was going to happen when you decided to mess around with the ancient Iconian device that nearly killed the planet 150,000 years ago? *sigh*) and the "Oh, look at these stupid minigames we're masking behind important quests!" bit of the Dyson Sphere... yeah, not exactly high points of the game.
High points? The fact that you can keep attempting missions even if you get downed and continue where you left off is amazing, and I don't mind rolling for everything I can because I can always spend energy credits at the exchange for the stuff I do need. The fact that we don't see much of, if any, RW-moneytraders (unlike other Cryptic properties).
New Romulus, the Sphere, and to a lesser extent Nimbus are kind of blips in the campaign - they're guided tours of what's otherwise non-campaign content. There's another series like that on Kobali Prime.
Nimbus and Kobali Prime are a lot better at it, since the zones were created with the intent of them being embedded in the campaign, where the other two were tacked on a few expansions back to help pin their events to a point in the story instead of lost in the sea of endgame. Kobali Prime is actually one of my favorite parts of the campaign - bit by bit you're fed conflicting information that, if you piece together, actually makes sense in a really bad way. By the time you get to the big plot twist, you'll probably see it coming, but there's two more coming shortly after that are both real punches in the dick.
Money traders are pretty much starved out of STO because there's a cheap in-game way to get EC for real money: Buy lockbox keys and sell them on the exchange. It's cheap enough to do that a farmer can never get enough EC to compete, and since any potential customer can do this themselves without your markup there's no profit margin in getting EC that way and then selling it for more dollars.
Don't be afraid to use the skip button. I always skip the TFOs, "go back to the place you just were for the datapad" thing on New Romulus, and the non-Kobali battleground stuff (since in that case it actually ties into the story).
I kind of like the TFOs with others- since everyone's fighting at the same level, and there are usually some players with really really super-powerful ships that blow the hell out of everything else that moves and I just roll for loot (hey, I can recycle/sell pretty much everything for ECs and buy what I want off the exchange). I'm not really super-seriously thinking about endgame stuff yet- I'm just cruising along and looking at RP fleets and having fun and stuff. Maybe I'll write something, I don't know.
Was that the one that RPs that Orville is produced in-universe and Dr. Finn is played by Cassidy Yates-Sisko? Because that is the coolest thing I've heard and I couldn't remember who posted that.
I actually might look into that myself. Don't really feel that I fit where I am currently. My current fleet has both RP and non-RP sides and both feel too constrained.
I can't group with the non-RP side because my build is godawful, being tailored around the story of my ship before gameplay considerations.
But then the RP side has rules against non-phaser weapons on a Starfleet ship and incorporation of alien technology (which my chief engineer is always bolting something somewhere). Damnit as long as I'm abusing my power as an admiral to monopolize my favorite ship and sideline my old first officer in her first command (hey also don't like this but it's not against the rules) I'm going to fuck with the power distribution nodes any way I want to.
Posts
Not sure what it entails just going to drop them here in case anyone wants to make use of them
I believe they're the same thing, so just take one.
Loading...?
"Uh, I have never said that you are not good at what you do. It's just that what you do is not worth doing." -S.C.
Bit of a dick move. Between that and the mission structure changes, I'm starting to regret my LTS.
Ship: Vulcan Scout Ship from Discovery (no pics yet)
Two missions (instead of the usual one - not sure how this will impact the ship grind), USS Discovery gets time displaced to the modern era, and the ISS Discovery (captained by Captain Killy, the mirror version of Tilly) does a thing.
Time travel, Mirror Universe, and Discovery... Two things Victory is Life was supposed to take us away from and one that they really faceplanted with Age of Discovery.
And the Personal Endeavor system that they posted and then deleted a dev blog about way back for ViL, which comes with another new experience bar and unlocks account-wide boosts. If that dev blog is still accurate (and the feature's been pulled back for most of a year, so who knows) this system was the epitome of power creep - permanent account wide and uncapped, limited only by your willingness to jump timegates for random arbitrary tasks (in addition to all the timegates for specific arbitrary tasks that the game's already full of).
Until I can make a new captain and one-shot the Undine dreadnought at the end of that first Vulcan mission with my hand phaser, I've not Endeavored enough.
In my one run tonight, I encountered:
Wave 1: Romulans
Wave 2: Borg and a Doomsday Machine
Wave 3: Discovery-era Klingons and Badlands fire tornados
Wave 4: Romulan Republic and Fluidic Space blobs
Wave 5: Vaadwar. Just Vaadwar. Seemed anticlimactic at this point, not even the bioneural launchers activated on this wave.
Wave 6: All the Iconians that have ever existed and the fucking Crystalline Entity
Added bonuses like Doomsday Machine automatically unspawn when you kill the main parts of the wave, but have to be managed somehow in the meantime, as they can oneshot the Kobayashi Maru if ignored. Supposedly shiled suppression fields, sensor interference, and all kinds of other crap can show up to add extra twists to waves.
This is the kind of no win scenario that Deke Slayton described in his book about the early days of NASA - every possible thing goes wrong forever and if you somehow manage to beat the simulator the controller says, "Sorry, your instruments were giving you inaccurate readings, you're dead anyway."
Far less slipshod and better production value than AoD, some new and quite well done environments and animations, but... I still can't shake the feeling that this Discovery stuff is rather forced, because this ends up being a rehash of stuff we did already.
Endeavor system is iterated a bit from the old out of date dev blog:
You get three account-wide endeavors every day - you can earn skip tokens or just let them expire with the daily reset if you don't like them. Server-wide endeavors are still the same, but now primarily focus on multiplayer content, while personal ones run a wider range. Personal endeavors give the same range of numeric rewards as the old server ones, with hard ones giving more "rolls" from the system. All endeavors also now give exp, every 20k exp you get a perk point.
Instead of uncapped power creep, there's just "a whole fucking lot of power creep." There are 16 space perks and 14 ground perks (various damage types, defenses, resistances, hull, shields, kits, and so on - basically everything gets a good 30% boost if you take this all the way), each with 15 levels. Every time you earn a perk point, you're offered 3 randomly selected perks and can pick one of them to advance. You get a free perk point when you log in to get the idea.
Mathematically, if you hit every single endeavor every reset, you're looking at right around two years to max this out, but some fairly beefy stats out of it. Perks and endeavors are account-wide. You can't double dip the system with alts, but every alt shares the same exp bar and gains the same perk benefits.
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Seriously wish they kept supporting this game with achievements like they did wiht NWN
This is definitely bumming me out. Every once in awhile I would find a few Foundry missions to liven things up, plus they're so incredibly useful for endeavors.
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
All ships have a mastery thing now?
Will they finally fix the Borg planet?
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
You can do that currently with the T6 ship from the anniversary event, too. The console and weapon slots unlock as you level but the bridge officer seatings are fully open from the start.
It's still OP as hell by comparison.
Now they're scaling from level 1 all the way to endgame, so basically why should any ship exist at lower tiers at this point.
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Let's Play Final Fantasy 'II' (Ch10 - 5/17/10)
Any recommendations for federation tactical?
The console on the T6 version is meh, but it makes a set with the consoles from the tier 4 and 5 Akira variants, both of which are fun. The torpedo spread one isn't amazing, but the phaser one is amazing, just erases any mines, heavy projectiles, or fighters within 5 km and chews through frigates, adds decent DPS on a hard target as well.
If you're looking for something more in the current meta, you either want some command spec cruiser or pilot spec escort.
Thanks for both your comments. Seems I’ll be deep into the wiki now
I'm on the main storyline- I'm almost done with the fifth series, and just made Captain yesterday.
Honestly, from everything I've played so far, I really liked the first three storylines- but then they hit me with New Romulus in series 4 and all its dungeoncrawling (Hey dog, I saw you just finished a run through that instance- do another one for this incredibly stupidly-placed flag system!) and now the Dyson Sphere (fuck you with a phaser bank, Tower Control mission- no matter what you call it, trying to force people into grouping can die in a fire). I'm hoping things get better, though- I liked the first three because the story was pretty good, and I'm admittedly a sucker for games with a decent story and/or solid roleplaying scenes, but New Romulus (Really, guys, what the fuck did you THINK was going to happen when you decided to mess around with the ancient Iconian device that nearly killed the planet 150,000 years ago? *sigh*) and the "Oh, look at these stupid minigames we're masking behind important quests!" bit of the Dyson Sphere... yeah, not exactly high points of the game.
High points? The fact that you can keep attempting missions even if you get downed and continue where you left off is amazing, and I don't mind rolling for everything I can because I can always spend energy credits at the exchange for the stuff I do need. The fact that we don't see much of, if any, RW-moneytraders (unlike other Cryptic properties).
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Nimbus and Kobali Prime are a lot better at it, since the zones were created with the intent of them being embedded in the campaign, where the other two were tacked on a few expansions back to help pin their events to a point in the story instead of lost in the sea of endgame. Kobali Prime is actually one of my favorite parts of the campaign - bit by bit you're fed conflicting information that, if you piece together, actually makes sense in a really bad way. By the time you get to the big plot twist, you'll probably see it coming, but there's two more coming shortly after that are both real punches in the dick.
Money traders are pretty much starved out of STO because there's a cheap in-game way to get EC for real money: Buy lockbox keys and sell them on the exchange. It's cheap enough to do that a farmer can never get enough EC to compete, and since any potential customer can do this themselves without your markup there's no profit margin in getting EC that way and then selling it for more dollars.
But that skip function is a godsend.
I can has cheezburger, yes?
Shameless plug for the 38th Fleet "Argo", of which I'm a member.
I can't group with the non-RP side because my build is godawful, being tailored around the story of my ship before gameplay considerations.
But then the RP side has rules against non-phaser weapons on a Starfleet ship and incorporation of alien technology (which my chief engineer is always bolting something somewhere). Damnit as long as I'm abusing my power as an admiral to monopolize my favorite ship and sideline my old first officer in her first command (hey also don't like this but it's not against the rules) I'm going to fuck with the power distribution nodes any way I want to.
I can has cheezburger, yes?