Star Trek Online : A New and Unbroken Thread!

[Sir T]

You do get more marks for doing the Omega Ground missions however. You really need a group that knows what they are doing however.

[Surlyboi]

Yes. And the problem is most people in ground missions to this day still don't have their shit together.

[Rishathra]

If what Surlyboi suggested seems like too much, just running ISE once a day will take you ten minutes on average.  It's very pug friendly.  If all of your teammates are pants-on-head, it might take fifteen minutes instead.  You get a nice little bump of marks and dilithium, even a decent bit of loot occasionally.  Even failing the optional objective, you get more marks than you would need to slot both daily xp projects.

[Tyrnan]

I think I might have actually run that one on normal way back, the walkthrough certainly sounded familiar.  I might give it another go at some stage once I have my setup finalised.  Do people still run the normal version?  I'd rather get any fuck-ups out of my system in that before trying elite.  And I'm guessing stuff like FAW and Torp Spread wouldn't be the best abilities to bring for the generator part? 

[Rishathra]

Oh no, FAW is still good stuff, just wait to use it until all the generators are ready to pop.  Same with torp spread.  Be careful when and where you use it.  In fact, a common strategy is to Gravity Well the blob of spheres that spawn after the generators are blown.  FAW and torp spread abilities are terrific at this point.

Something to keep in mind when bringing the generators down:  The common wisdom is to knock each one down to 10% and then destroy them all at once.  This does not take into account the possibility that you have teammates who are unaware of this tactic.  So what I do is knock each down to just 50% on my first lap and THEN go around a second time to get them to 10%.  This gives the team a cushion so if someone does pop a generator early, it is still possible to bring the rest down in a timely fashion before the nanite spheres arrive.

[Sir T]

I'd give advice, but I'd simply direct you to the tutorial on ISE that I did a while back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZMqh2UBOIU

This is my Cure space one. Its not as good but it will show you whats involved if you want to give it a try. I meant to do one for the third one but I never got around to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JWNaMLfuHw

DOnt bother with normal for anything other then practice. The amount of marks and dil you get is miniscule and not worth your time.

[Tyrnan]

I'd give advice, but I'd simply direct you to the tutorial on ISE that I did a while back

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZMqh2UBOIU

This is my Cure space one. Its not as good but it will show you whats involved if you want to give it a try. I meant to do one for the third one but I never got around to it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JWNaMLfuHw

DOnt bother with normal for anything other then practice. The amount of marks and dil you get is miniscule and not worth your time.

Thanks for the links.  I think I'll avoid Cure for the time being as it looks a lot more fuck-upable than Infected.  And yeah, the normal mode runs would be purely for practice to get a feel for it before trying it for real.

[Morat20]

I hear season nine dropped. Any info? I can't seem to get the site to load.

[Merusk]

Undine are everywhere, Reputations have been completely rekajiggered (no more Dyson tokens for ez repping, but also no more store unlocks for old reps)  New Earth Spacedock, totally new kit system for those who actually bother with ground combat,  Oh.. traits have been completely revamped, too. Just got in and got notice about that.

ed:  So the new trait and skill system sucks.  You no longer get ALL the rep bonuses you've ground out. You can only select 4 active space and ground traits from all the ones you've unlocked.  

Though the daily grind no longer takes consumables, so that's a plus.  Just marks, 2k expertise and 15k credits for each 2k rep project.

[Rishathra]

The good news:  I figured I would try to make a little ec by stockpiling some keys for a month or two, and take advantage of the inflated "omg new things" pricing and throw it all on the exchange.  I opened two boxes and got a Nicor Cruiser.

The bad news:  If the game doesn't crash the moment I log in, it crashes after five minutes, and then instantly on that character afterwards.

[Surlyboi]

It's been doing that to me on the OS X client for weeks.

[Merusk]

Tried a fresh install? Any time that happens to me in other MMOs it's a cache problem.  I'm too lazy to hunt for caches so I uninstall then reinstall.

[Special J]

There was patch that hopefully resolved your issue:

http://community.arcgames.com/en/news/star-trek-online/detail/3043353-release-notes_-april-24_-2014

Resolved an issue which was causing a graphic related crash when attempting to log in at the loading screen.

[Surlyboi]

Tried a fresh install? Any time that happens to me in other MMOs it's a cache problem.  I'm too lazy to hunt for caches so I uninstall then reinstall.

It's not actually STO, it's Wine. I need to dig into that and debug it. I'll do that next week when the wife's out of town.

[Rishathra]

The patch didn't help, so I said fuck it and reinstalled.  It seems to have fixed the problem, thankfully, and I got those Khan outfits as a bonus.  It appeared I was overdue for a reinstall anyways.  The old client is the same one I've been running since beta, and the folder was about 25 gigs.  After the reinstall, 8 gigs.  So yeah, there was probably a small bit of bloat and redundant code in there.

[Stormwaltz]

For anyone interested, there was a patch today that tossed out the crappy old crafting system and replaced it with something new that runs through the Duty Officer system.

I haven't been able to explore it properly yet because they did such a staggering job of shitting up the DOff UI. Less information, harder to focus on critical information, and as frosting on the shit-cake, the game's frequently sub-optimum officer choices are now "helpfully" inserted for you by default. You have to manually replace each and every officer using the same shitty "column of icons" UI that no one likes to use for replacing items on the character sheet.

Oh, and did you like being able to search by officer role, rarity, or including/excluding certain attributes? Too bad - you can't do any of those anymore. You just get a big scrolling stack of headshots for every single officer you have that might be able to fill the role. And remember, some roles can be filled by any officer. So if, like me, you have around 400, you won't be able to find the one you want unless you spend five minutes scrolling through hundreds of NPC portraits sorted in largely random order.

I can't believe this made it through testing.

EDIT:

Holy fucking shit. So everyone has thousands upon thousands of now-obsolete crafting materials sitting in their banks. They're gone, useless, totally obsolete. I myself have 43 stacks of various objects, ranging in size from 60-250.

You have to convert them all to the new system. Manually. By purchasing new items in 1-100 unit increments.

They could have just run a script on the server to convert all everything... but they didn't.

Jesus Christ. It's like they went out of their way to implement everything in the worst and least-convenient way possible.

EDIT 2:

More icing on the shit cake, there's a new sub-inventory page exclusively for crafting materials. Except, they implemented it so items in that sub-inventory sort to the top when you're trying to sell loot at a vendor. So you have to scroll way the fuck down to find the things you actually want to sell after doing missions or raids or whatever.

What is this I don't even

EDIT 3:

You can no longer see how many (total) of a needed resource you have in the assignment tab, only if you have enough for an assignment or not. This is important to me because if I only have three Shapeshifting Lockets left, I don't want to expend them on "Develop Entertainment Applications" until I have more. Now I have to go to a bank and check to see how many of resource X I have left... or cart it around in my inventory.

EDIT 4:

After grappling with it for a couple of days, I've concluded the new "bar graph" approach to showing outcome probabilities is less instantly parse-able and intuitive to me than the old pie chart was. Before it was, okay, blue + green are larger than yellow + red, and red is just a silver, so... go! Now it's all comparing bar lengths and trying to estimate how much it all adds up to.

It also seems to take up more UI real estate.

[Tannhauser]

This all sounds highly illogical.  

Going to go check it out later.

Edit: Yeah, they fucked doffs up.  The crafting is interesting, but I hate the new doff interface.  I'm gobsmacked that they went backwards on this patch.  Glad I didn't get rid of all my old crafting components, I have a bank pack full of them.

Not sure I'll log back in for a while though.  This new patch is highly disappointing.

[Morat20]

Will return to check it out in two weeks when they patch out the stupid.

Also, they redid Earthdock and I can't find shit.

[Surlyboi]

Like the new ESD, everything's a lot closer together and once you run around it a couple of times, it makes sense.

That said, I'll agree with everyone that the DOFF interface is beyond fucked right now. I'm also glad I never got into crafting and I will continue to pretend that part of the game doesn't exist.

I'll sort all that shit out when the Destiny beta is over.

[Sir T]

I was my guilds unoffical crafter of the Aegis set for a while, and thats only because I had one char that leveled up crafting before the shitty Dilithium for crafting came in.

This new system sounds like a Bruce Lee punch in the Balls. I must check it out tomorrow to soak in the rage!

[Surlyboi]

Coming in October, Delta Rising. Adventures in the Delta quadrant. Talaxians and Ocampa and Kazons, oh my!

Apparently, there will be new ships, species, etc... They've hinted at a marginally touched on race's homeworld. I'm hoping it's the Krenim.

[Stormwaltz]

They announced the details of Tier 6 ships, which have a number of features that add up to "lol @ players who bought ships."

But wait! They assure you, "Players have been invested in this tier of ships for 4 years and we wanted to avoid devaluing the time and money spent in obtaining them."

So you can upgrade your Tier 5 ships to an inferior version of of a Tier 6

Oh, and it will only cost you "somewhere between $5 and $10."

Per ship.

 

[Merusk]

A New currency or the RMT currency they've always used? If the latter then NBD. Everyone should have invested in the $200 lifer package by now. Free $5 of creds each month.

[Surlyboi]

It's weird. Some of the ships bought in the CStore will be free upgrades, some won't. Not really a lot of rhyme or reason around it either.

[Senses]

I'm inbetween games right now and decided to check this out.  I'd say my first few hours exploring as Federation were awful because frankly, its a lot different than most MMOs, from UI, to travel and hotkey setup..but, Once I learned a bit, then restarted as Romulan, I'm really enjoying myself.  I don't think any of the other space genre games capture the flow from space combat to ground combat better.  The missions truly have an episodic feel to them which has been a refreshing change from diku. Travel is still super confusing though, and don't even get me started on crafting, but I thought I'd mention it here for the other MMO Nomads that creep around.  Should be good for 3 weeks of free entertainment.

[Merusk]

Romulan game experience is WAY better than Fed. It took me 2 years to get my first fed up to level because those first few levels sucked so bad and there was nothing to keep me moving forward other than "oooh, Star Trek."  Romulan experience had a great over-arching storyline you were invested in and did the proper "this is what you do, this is how you do it" tutorials at the right spots.  It's very evident which experience was done after lessons were learned.

I agree 100% on the travel. I didn't figure out how the hell the map worked until much, much later.

[Senses]

Romulan game experience is WAY better than Fed. It took me 2 years to get my first fed up to level because those first few levels sucked so bad and there was nothing to keep me moving forward other than "oooh, Star Trek."  Romulan experience had a great over-arching storyline you were invested in and did the proper "this is what you do, this is how you do it" tutorials at the right spots.  It's very evident which experience was done after lessons were learned.

I agree 100% on the travel. I didn't figure out how the hell the map worked until much, much later.

Well I scratched the experience with the Federation up to simply not being comfortable with game functions, but, it really did seem like the Romulan story, rewards, and general feel were so much more comfortable.  I just finished this Episode where we stumbled upon a Derelict cube where the middle of it had been hollowed out and I almost felt like I was back watching the series and waiting to find out how it happened lol.  Really bringing out the long lost trekkie nerd in me.

[Surlyboi]

Delta Rising went live yesterday with a few facelifts to some of the visuals and the requisite bugs and crashes to desktop that come with that.

By the time I logged in at about 9PM last night, there were already level 60 Fleet Admirals tooling around.

Catasses gonna catass, I guess.

[Rishathra]

Eh, leveling in STO has always been trivial.  I have two mules that I got to 50 in two months just doing the SFA trivia dailies.

[Riggswolfe]

Delta Rising went live yesterday with a few facelifts to some of the visuals and the requisite bugs and crashes to desktop that come with that.

By the time I logged in at about 9PM last night, there were already level 60 Fleet Admirals tooling around.

Catasses gonna catass, I guess.

From what I hear the people that have hit 60 did it by grinding pve queues and such.

[Furiously]

The amount of exp questing gives after 50 is pathetic.

[Surlyboi]

Meh. I got a level every mission and a half. Can't complain.

[5150]

Q's wonder land is live and this years it's a Breen carrier.

The best news (IMO) is that it's now way less grindy for alts

[Scold]

If I just want to play this solo for the storylines, SWTOR style, how viable is that?

[5150]

If I just want to play this solo for the storylines, SWTOR style, how viable is that?

Very, the Romulan story is generally regarded as the best, historically Klingons was worst although I believe they've done some work in that dept. (can't personally say as it's been years since I've levelled a Klingon). Romulans are force to pick a side (Fed or Klingon) at level 10 which opens up that factions missions as well.

The story arcs are well paced IMO but you'll finish the Romulan specific stuff and hit the all faction content probably around level 30 (depending on how hard you do duty officicer missions once you unlock them)