Star Trek Online preorder TRIBBLE!

[White Haven]

It helps everyone who isn't an engineering captain, because the engineer goes in first, soaks the alpha and breaks range, and by that point the rest of the team is inside the enemy fleet, the range between different enemies and friendlies is jumbled, and the enemy fleet disperses its fire among multiple ships.

Alternately, send a science ship in close and punch Scramble Sensors on a ship in the middle of the hostile spawn. Not only are they now not focusing fire, they're shooting the shit out of each other for a while.

[charlemagne]

The Tier 2 skills generally stack with later ones. In fact, Cruiser Captain explicitly states that it applies to all cruisers. T3 and up is when you start needing to specialize, and that's when the poor tree design becomes really apparent especially with the ship captain skills.

You're right, somehow the "any type of" did escape me until now.

[Vanas]

In the moments before they're messing up the server, a celebration.

Finally!


I'm a scientist in a Cruiser, mostly because I can. Now to play around with it, if/when the server comes back.

[SylasGaunt]

It helps everyone who isn't an engineering captain, because the engineer goes in first, soaks the alpha and breaks range, and by that point the rest of the team is inside the enemy fleet, the range between different enemies and friendlies is jumbled, and the enemy fleet disperses its fire among multiple ships.

And good luck convincing the engineer to manuever in and get shot at. The situation at the time was ridiculous when you'd see an entire group of feddie ships hovering just outside engagement range waiting for someone to go in first and get wasted.

Alternately, send a science ship in close and punch Scramble Sensors on a ship in the middle of the hostile spawn. Not only are they now not focusing fire, they're shooting the shit out of each other for a while.

I've tried that. The problem is that it takes time for the scrambler probe to get in there which is long enough for a torpedo volley to go out.

[White Haven]

Yes, that's why you use it in conjunction with an engineer to eat the alpha, or a sacrificial lamb if you don't have one. Shocker, I know, you couldn't just charge a group of warships as a random chaotic mob and expect to come out without casualties.

And frankly engineers who are too timid to do what they do best should just go back to flying Mirandas in the Sirius block.

[GuppyShark]

Yes, that's why you use it in conjunction with an engineer to eat the alpha, or a sacrificial lamb if you don't have one. Shocker, I know, you couldn't just charge a group of warships as a random chaotic mob and expect to come out without casualties.

And yet that seems to be what people want. Enemies that focus fire and frontload their damage so they might actually kill something? Sounds good to me, it's better than "hold A and press space = win".

[Oskuro]

Challenging enemies with sound tactics are good for people used to that style of gameplay, but let's face it, STO will have a large volume of players not only inexperienced in tactical war games, but even in MMOs or, dare I say, games in general. It isn't surprising that things get nerfed a bit to appease them, specially during beta (since, you know, they haven't bought the game yet).

Hopefully, as people become more adept at space combat, the challenge level of the encounters will be upped again or something.

[SylasGaunt]

Well the shields have been toned down (especially for Science vessels who got an additional 10% hull/shield nerf on top of what everyone else got)

[charlemagne]

Yeah, and enemy damage was bumped up a notch. Which is good, because now enemies are actually somewhat challenging again.

But the hilarity in the zone channels... I know, they're full of retarded mouthbreathers in every MMO, but some of the crap that's said there is priceless. Like "wtf still no joystick support" - yeah wtf indeed, this isn't Tie Fighter moron. Or "it was awesomely balanced yesterday and now it's like hard WoW encounters everyhwere" - my god, yesterday you blew Romulans out of the sky with only autofire while afk, and that was supposed to be balanced?

In other news, I love the "Ramming Speed" space skill It's awesome to klick it and blow BoPs up by just going through them

[Oskuro]

Speaking of game chat, my friend tells me that he can actually read in-game chat from Champions Online while playing the beta. I'm guessing that's because he's using the same Cryptic account for both and it kind of migles.

Anyone noticed that?

[charlemagne]

Yeah, both games are running the same chat server/service. You can access user-made channels from both STO and CO in both STO and CO.

[Oskuro]

And Angry Joe seems to agree with Spoony: Link

Some funny screenshots he got (Click to enlarge embiggen!):


Hanging out on the Beach....With my STARSHIP! LOL! Now THATS Shore Leave.


Angry Joe is so powerful he traverses the galaxy on his Flying Cloud Destroying WORLDS! FEAR MEEE!

[charlemagne]

That spawn bug is just related to the serious lag the pretty tiny beta server produced during peak hours. It goes away once you switch instances or wait for a few seconds. It's only really bothersome if you fall in space and take enough fall damage to die, but that's not really relevant either because there's no death penalty yet in beta

[Mr Bean]

OK yesterday I decided I won't buy this game. Thank you open Beta.
Why you might ask?

Because of the ground combat, which I've gone from merely been underwhelming to full on hating. I like to even love the space battles. Love the atmosphere, love the tactics, the special ability the 3d nature of combat. The wonderful star system the have us fly through even if the scale is fucked up to all hell.

But the ground combat? I now loath every time I'm forced out of my ship to get on the ground with my away team. It's simply.... horrible, the enemies take forever to kill. Their are shit-tons of them and I've started avoiding story content because I know I'll have to go down and start shooting up 148 klingon's. I mean seriously each ground section once I hit Lt Commander takes an average of thirty minutes to clear because their are 20-50 enemy groups between you and your target. Sometimes you have a nice trick or two like forcing a Frengi bar tender to tell you information by walking around conducting a Federation safety inspection on his bar except it takes to long (Their are about twenty scan able objects and you need to find six major faults) and yet AGAIN you get into another fight when the bar patrons decided to attack my phaser cannon wielding away team for no godamn reason except they don't like starfleet. Except I've got an armed cruiser over their head. It makes no damn sense. Why can't I call for fire. Why does every away mission have to be wading through an entire platoon of mooks. Worse are the pet mooks like the Targ handlers who will forced you to kill 2-10 tags before you kill him. Because he can yank them directly our of his arse where he keeps an infinite number of them.

I hate, I hate, I HATE the ground combat. Maybe I'll give this game a look in a year after the've had time to fix all these issue. But in the mean time the ground combat is to much of a deal breaker for me.

[SylasGaunt]

I found the ground combat started going much faster for me once I started abusing the expose/exploit weapon mechanics.

[White Haven]

If only exposes weren't entirely proc-based...

On another note: Captain, bitches. Captain.

[charlemagne]

I just cancelled my preorder. The thing is, there are things to like about this game, but overall, after the novelty of pew-pewing stuff in a cruiser wears of, there's not that much left. There's some really great missions that are fun to do, but as Bean mentioned, ground combat is awful and getting more tedious with every mission.

But what I miss the most is "more Trek". It's hard describe what I mean by that, but right now I feel that while Cryptic has some nice ideas here and there, the overall atmosphere and feel are just lacking.

I'll keep the game on my radar and maybe try it again once there's a trial and they had some more time to add content and do new stuff. Maybe we even will be able to navigate sector space from the bridge? That's one of the things I really don't get - every ST series is about dicking around on the bridge/command center, and all we get to do there is - nothing.

[wautd]

OK yesterday I decided I won't buy this game. Thank you open Beta.
Why you might ask?

Because of the ground combat, which I've gone from merely been underwhelming to full on hating. I like to even love the space battles. Love the atmosphere, love the tactics, the special ability the 3d nature of combat. The wonderful star system the have us fly through even if the scale is fucked up to all hell.

I hate, I hate, I HATE the ground combat.

Reminds me of Star Wars: Empire at War. It could have been worth a buy if only ground combat was removed.

Same thing with this game really. Flying ST in a MMORPG looks fun and tempting but the stuff on the ground? Yuk.

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I find the ground combat pretty fun. It just needs to be quicker (less tedious phaser spamming to kill one klingon), which is an easy adjustment I'm sure will be made before long.

[Gramzamber]

To each their own I suppose. I don't see anything particularily wrong with the ground combat other than the balance is off and enemies have too much health resulting in boring phaser-fests.
However those issues are entirely fixable especially if we yell at Cryptic for it. They've been quite good at making changes players have asked for so far.

[Oskuro]

Just came back from a local retailer that offers pre-orders. Apparently I can get the pre-order benefits even if I buy the game after release, since they will be getting pre-order codes but have not received actual pre-orders and will have spares. It's very possible that the guy who told me this really isn't informed on how it'll be handled, but it would be funny to buy after release and still get the bonus (red-matter capacitor in this case).

[Brother-Captain Gaius]

I did that with PotBS. Got the game two months after launch and a local GameStop had extra pre-orders another month after that. I got one, added the code, and voila - pre-order junk.

[Kamakazie Sith]

Looks like the develops setup a impromptu mass event. At first Klingon players were allowed to invade UFP sectors and planets, including the Sol system. That was pretty lackluster since they announced the event and a shit load of UFP players were waiting for them all the major sectors and subsequently raped them without lube. It was brutal.

The develops upon seeing this great slaughter decided to up the anty and the borg invaded. In sector space if they caught up to you then you were immediately pulled into deep space combat without any choice. There you encountered +20, +30, and I think even +40 Borg probes and spheres which easily cut through Tier 1, 2, and even 3 ships. I didn't see a Tier 4 ship engaged in any of those battles.

I was playing during the Klingon invasion which was pretty boring since the Klingons never really had a chance. The borg on the other hand were dangerous but even they were being overwhelmed in space. I learned that the borg had boarded the Sol system starbase. I went there and helped out. Initially, things were under control. We even had Klingons board the station to "help", but they were cut down quickly. Then the borg started a massive push. When I left, because I got bored, there were almost as many borg on that station, if not more, as players. One cool thing I saw was the NPC characters were fighting against the borg.

Not too bad for a spur of the moment event.

[Gramzamber]

I got bored of the mass Borg invasion and partied on Risa with a bunch of people till beta was shut down, was more fun really.

[PREDATOR490]

The event was poorly planned and executed but it proved to at least somewhat entertaining. Hopefully Cryptic will learn from their mistake here for future events.

As it is, I managed to reach my goal of getting into the Defiant and with the arrival of the Borg it got a full workout. The Borg didnt really hit me too hard and they were only +8 to me so evidently I was closer to their match than the majority of people getting hammered at +20s. I kept getting locked and targeted though because of me doing the most damage to the Borg but with the amount of firepower usually being brought to bear, the Borg ships often got killed.

The Starbase situation was entirely different. I went down and it was utter chaos, long load times and raging firefights in every instance to the point it was difficult to know what was going on. I eventually found my way into Sulu's office where it was free of Borg. The respawn times were rather stupid for the Borg and the inability to actually KILL them..
They had these node things that in theory were meant to disable them but destroying them was nigh impossible and I'm not sure it even worked. That said, near the end of the event the instance I was on had managed to organise and begin fully sweeping the Borg to the point they were being cleared. They were still respawning but with a dozen players all mixing and matching grenades, exposes and exploit weapons the Borg fell pretty quickly.

On the upside, these Borg drones were much better than the ones I have seen so far. It gives me hope that when Borg space opens up they might be something of an actual challenge. The worst thing about the Borg was that insane ability to inject you with nanoprobes or something. It gradually reduces your heath for a LONG time and it has a 'paralyse' effect making you unable to heal or move.

As for the Klingon aspect, Cryptic messed up but the Klingons didnt help their situation either. Its a simple fact that the auto-target feature means that if you trigger weapons then its going to start shooting the hostile in your sights. If thats a Klingon, they are automatically flagged as hostile so naturally weapons lock on and fire.
It works the other way around, I saw more than a few Klingons firing on Federation people as soon as they entered and while some might be accidents others were deliberatly trying to fight.
Naturally, not a good idea when your surrounded by Federation ships but my Defiant was almost completely ignored by all Klingons. The ones that actually did notice me, only did so when they realise that small ship in their rear is hitting them with MKVIII high yield 3 torpedoes. Birds of Prey just melt under that kind of attack so its already too late for them to attack. The only thing that seemed to last long against me shooting was a Vorcha, the guy tried to hold me in a tractor beam but when I'm on his rear the last thing you want to do is tractor me so that I can do anything but continue to fire forward into his rear shields.

I got a lifetime subscription, with this event I suppose I can justify using my 'Liberated Borg' character. Its a shame that it means I lose my Joined Trill bonus, it would have been nice if they combined the two bonuses for those that had them. Some say its 'overpowered' but looking the proposed features of these bonuses, they dont seem that much better than anything else.