STO questions

[Lord Revan]

I've been watching some vids of Star Trek Online on Youtube and it looks nice, so I wanted to ask what are the requirements for running it, is there enough players on it and just how "free to play" it truly is?

[Ahriman238]

Free to play, but there's a level cap and a lot of content (like the contents of the boxes) that you need to pay for. So essentially the same as Runescape.

[Lord Revan]

Free to play, but there's a level cap and a lot of content (like the contents of the boxes) that you need to pay for. So essentially the same as Runescape.

what you mean by a level cap, you mean you can't reach max character level without paying and if so is it one time or sub?

granted that's pointless if my PC can't run it well enough.

[Ahriman238]

I don't remember the requirements that well, but they should be on the website. I hit level 40 and could go no further (though I did get a sweet Galaxy-class) before being sent to the Bajor Sector, and from there it didn't take long to get bored with the game. I don't know if buying one of the packages would have let me continue to level. Ground missions/combat were also disappointing.

[General Zod]

Free to play, but there's a level cap and a lot of content (like the contents of the boxes) that you need to pay for. So essentially the same as Runescape.

what you mean by a level cap, you mean you can't reach max character level without paying and if so is it one time or sub?

granted that's pointless if my PC can't run it well enough.

If you can run World of Warcraft you can probably run STO. It's not very resource intensive.

[Elheru Aran]

You can actually go up to level 50. I don't know when you stopped but 50 is the current max. After that point the idea is to get engaged in endgame content like joining a fleet and undertaking PvP and PvE encounters. You can also add to your ships and pick up some juicy stuff as well as completing various stuff like hitting the Tholian Encounter, daily Borg Fleet encounters, stuff like that.

Honestly, I've only been playing for about a month and already one of my characters is at level 50 (Romulan Vice-Admiral). I'm at Bajor as well. There's been a lot of story content added since Bajor/Cardassian/Dominion, though; there's Borg, Breen, Undine (Species 8472), and Dyson Sphere plots now. The Dyson Sphere stuff includes Voth. So you get to fight frickin' tyrannosauruses with frickin' laser beams on their heads. Seriously.

I would say STO has some very excellent F2P content. You can get almost all the decent bonuses and power-ups you could want from loot drops and such. There is really no need to pay for stuff unless you want a really nice ship or some fancy gear or whatever.

You don't even need to grind all that much as the "Duty Officer" system helps you out on that front. You can get up to something like 100 Duty Officers. Assigning them missions in the various sectors you pass through, if you pick the right missions and the Doffs succeed, can net you plenty of Dilithium currency without too much trouble. You can then put this Dilithium up on the exchange to trade for "Zen", which you can also use to buy stuff. It's all a pretty sweet deal if you're willing to put a little bit of work in.

Oh, and the biggest issue computer-wise with STO is that there's a fairly large download to install the game, then they do live patching during the load screens. Other than that it's not too resource-intensive. It's pretty easy to alt-tab back and forth between it and your desktop.

[Simon_Jester]

Honestly, I've only been playing for about a month and already one of my characters is at level 50 (Romulan Vice-Admiral). I'm at Bajor as well. There's been a lot of story content added since Bajor/Cardassian/Dominion, though; there's Borg, Breen, Undine (Species 8472),

The Borg/Breen/Undine plots felt kind of lame and inferior-expansion-packy to me, compared to the fairly solid and dramatic arc in the Bajor sector, or to the extended, diverse sorts of conflict you get into in the Klingon War arc or in the Romulan sector (I have not played a Romulan and only got a little way into my Klingon playthrough).

All three of those later 'seasons' taken together have about as much content as one of the earlier ones.

I can't speak for the Dyson Sphere campaign, which came out after I stopped playing around the end of last summer.

I would say STO has some very excellent F2P content. You can get almost all the decent bonuses and power-ups you could want from loot drops and such. There is really no need to pay for stuff unless you want a really nice ship or some fancy gear or whatever.

Agreed. You can have a pretty good time for free, although you won't necessarily be competitive in PvP or anything.

You don't even need to grind all that much as the "Duty Officer" system helps you out on that front. You can get up to something like 100 Duty Officers. Assigning them missions in the various sectors you pass through, if you pick the right missions and the Doffs succeed, can net you plenty of Dilithium currency without too much trouble. You can then put this Dilithium up on the exchange to trade for "Zen", which you can also use to buy stuff. It's all a pretty sweet deal if you're willing to put a little bit of work in.

I did that once for something. It's arguably a comically inefficient way to do thing (since you need roughly 10000 Dilithium to get 100 Zen which is worth roughly 1 dollar of real currency, and it takes a LOT more than one dollar worth of my time to get 10000 Dilithium, even with duty officers). But it does allow you to stay free on principles.

Oh, and the biggest issue computer-wise with STO is that there's a fairly large download to install the game, then they do live patching during the load screens. Other than that it's not too resource-intensive. It's pretty easy to alt-tab back and forth between it and your desktop.

Oh yeah. The load screens are a bear, but the game runs on my crappy laptop, so it'll probably work for you.

[Lord Revan]

Well PvP and I aren't really in speaking terms so that won't be an issue.

wasn't there so kind of special account you needed so I hope that's not a (major) security risk for my PC.

as for paying it's less about principle and more about availability of money.

[Elheru Aran]

Honestly, I've only been playing for about a month and already one of my characters is at level 50 (Romulan Vice-Admiral). I'm at Bajor as well. There's been a lot of story content added since Bajor/Cardassian/Dominion, though; there's Borg, Breen, Undine (Species 8472),

The Borg/Breen/Undine plots felt kind of lame and inferior-expansion-packy to me, compared to the fairly solid and dramatic arc in the Bajor sector, or to the extended, diverse sorts of conflict you get into in the Klingon War arc or in the Romulan sector (I have not played a Romulan and only got a little way into my Klingon playthrough).

All three of those later 'seasons' taken together have about as much content as one of the earlier ones.

I can't speak for the Dyson Sphere campaign, which came out after I stopped playing around the end of last summer.

Romulan is a pretty decent storyline, but ultimately it's a bit of a letdown in the long run as well. It suffers from having to share some stories with the other species (Nimbus being the most egregiously annoying example). I'm still in the Dominion storyline, but we'll see how it goes. I did get pretty tired of running around Bajor, though...

I did that once for something. It's arguably a comically inefficient way to do thing (since you need roughly 10000 Dilithium to get 100 Zen which is worth roughly 1 dollar of real currency, and it takes a LOT more than one dollar worth of my time to get 10000 Dilithium, even with duty officers). But it does allow you to stay free on principles.

Or if, like me, you don't have that much money to play with anyway I plan to try and see if I can make it through the game with what I have now rather than upgrading by purchasing ships with dilithium or fleet marks.

The main reason to do this though is so you can use your bridge officer abilities to the fullest. I must admit I would really love to have a Romulan ship where I can finally use my engineer's warp-plasma attack again...

The only account I can think of is that you have to pick up Arc, which is the main... host? for STO. It's free.

[TheFeniX]

Cryptic merged the accounts into the Perfect World system. There's not much of a security risk there. Just use a blow-off e-mail account.

The game can get laggy during large engagements, but the requirements were easily met back when it was released 4 years ago. It does seem to like a beefier video card, but I ran it 60FPS max everything with a GTX260, so anything near current video card-wise should get it done. The game is 4 years old now, so any graphical improvements (if any) are likely way below par for current gen hardware and it was pretty well optimized shortly after release (unlike SWTOR).

You should have seen me try to run it at release on a single-core Athlon 3000+ with a GeForce 6800 Ultra. Ah man, that shit was like a light-show. I don't think a single piece of hardware I had met specs. It's a sad day when an MMO forces a hardware upgrade.

[Lord Revan]

Just few more questions, first is a "blow-off" E-mail truly needed or can I use the same E-mail I use for WoW or GW2, second what faction you'd think would be best to start with?

[Elheru Aran]

You can just create a burner Gmail account if you really want to, but your game email should be fine if it's not your 'home' or 'real' email.

All the factions have their strengths. Federation is good overall, Klingon has a slight edge in offense, Romulans have a battle cloak and singularity powers that are very useful.

I will note that the Federation has the widest range of ships available as free upgrades as you level up. Granted, each category of ship will be the same at each level no matter what skin you put on it, but you can customize to a pretty good degree.

For example, you get to pick between a general-purpose ship, an attack-oriented ship and a science-focus ship. The loadout will be the same in each ship class, the only thing that really changes is the appearance you pick for the class you go with. It is highly customizable, though-- I was able to refine the look of my Galaxy quite a bit. You can get different nacelles, neck, body, saucer, what have you. Some custom options you have to pay for, though, but there's still a lot of freebies.

Romulans and Klingons, on the other hand, have much less customizing available to their ships, because they don't have nearly as many ships to pick from. Many of the Klink ships are some variation of Bird of Prey. With the Romulans, they have like 5 different ship colour schemes-- but you can only actually use 3, 2 are Reman-faction specific and you can't use them unless you pay for them or purchase the Reman faction pack.

One thing that did annoy me considerably with the Romulans was that around approximately... level 30? 25? you have to select which faction you will 'ally' with, the Federation or Klinks. This is because basically the game runs out of Romulan story after a while (roughly level 40ish for me) and you get stuck playing the same storylines that the Fed and Klinks have.

If you play a lot of random encounters, like the daily Borg stuff, and take a bunch of optional side missions, you can level up fast though. Some people have gotten up to full 50 less than halfway through the game. This can have perks in that you get cool stuff to play with, like more powerful guns and such, but on the other hand... you're at max level, you can only progress horizontally. This works for some people. I don't think it'll work for me.

[Lord Revan]

I guess I can use a Gmail account tied to my Google account (was my Youtube account before those got merged) assuming I can set the name as something else then my Full name.

[StarSword]

STO is not resource-intensive at all. I've had it running decently well using just the Intel HD 4000 graphics, not even my Nvidia card. (This was after GeForce Experience managed to uninstall the old driver and then somehow forgot to put the new one in. Last time I ever used that particular feature...)

As far as being F2P, you've basically got three grades of account. "Silver" is the basic F2P account where you pay no subscription fee. "Gold" is a monthly subscription where you get various perks based on how long you've subscribed, and lifetime subscriptions get all the perks at once for a one-time fee. It's possible to play the game entirely free and still get the good stuff by grinding dilithium and exchanging it for zen (microtransaction currency), but it's more grinding than I personally have the patience for.

Also, from previous threads I'm fairly sure you already have Steam, so I strongly advise playing through Steam rather than adding PWE's Arc client.

As for changing the name on your Google+ account so you don't have to use your real name:

[Agent Sorchus]

The only account I can think of is that you have to pick up Arc, which is the main... host? for STO. It's free.

You actually don't need the Arc launcher (which is a resource hogging PoS.) If you go to STO's forums users there know how to get you the old STO updater. Also you can use steam to download and never have to touch Arc.

As for a few things...

Romulans have to choose a faction to join around lvl10, though they continue to have unique missions till about 23, with just a few more till 30ish. There are very little choice in vessels if you play romulan, and most of them are very tactical ships. Only at the end game do romulan players get a sciency vessel.

The klingons have 3 ship classes with an odd ball or two. Battlecruisers are amongst the best ships in the game, massively tanky with good movement and firepower. Birds of prey are the squishiest and you have to play with them until level 20, but they are very flexible and have the second best stealth in the game (All romulan ships are better). And then there are raptors that are meant to play something like crippled federation escorts. Don't play Raptors kids. And the klingons have the only free carrier in the game that is rewarding in its own way.

If you feel the lack of ships there are many events where faction universal ships are given away for some grinding time and there are some nice Mirror universe designs that make up for a lot of the weakness in their original design.

AND THE NUMBER ONE THING TO GET FROM THE CASH SHOP is the extension on amount of currency you can carry. The limit on an exclusively free account is simply to low for most of the nice things that might end up on the exchange. And again you don't have to pay to get this, just play and trade for the money currency.

Look me up in game @Sorchus on the weekends and I can hook you up with gear and other goodies.

[Lord Revan]

if I play thru steam does it use my Steam account name as my user name then?

[Agent Sorchus]

I do not know, I do know you can use the steam wallet through STO so I think it is likely.

[StarSword]

if I play thru steam does it use my Steam account name as my user name then?

No, you still have to make an account on Perfect World's website. But it'll let you buy zen with your Steam wallet instead of having to wrestle with Paypal.

[Lord Revan]

goddamn this patch is taking long but then it's not the largest patch I've ever had with MMOs as I think I've had patches that were more then 1GB with WoW and this is "only" 8000 MB

[Darth Nostril]

I think you mean 800 Mb because 8000 is 7.8 Gb.

[Lord Revan]

I think you mean 800 Mb because 8000 is 7.8 Gb.

it says 8435 MB on the launcher but being several gigs would explain why it's taking so long.

[Sharp-kun]

STO will run on most things as people have said.

My main issue with the game is that there's not a particularly good end game (though its fun if you want to have a pimped out ship and crew), and a lot of iconic ships (like the Galaxy) are showing their age in terms of game balance - they can't come close to a lot of the newer cooler stuff.

[Lord Revan]

Look me up in game @Sorchus on the weekends and I can hook you up with gear and other goodies.

sure I don't mind the help if you're willing to give it, though if you could give a time range (preferably in GMT) of when you're generally online it would make looking you up easier, I'm @spiritborn (don't laugh it was only of my common names that the server would accept) so you can try looking me up as well.

[TheFeniX]

My main issue with the game is that there's not a particularly good end game (though its fun if you want to have a pimped out ship and crew), and a lot of iconic ships (like the Galaxy) are showing their age in terms of game balance - they can't come close to a lot of the newer cooler stuff.

What's the end-game like now? We were there for the original "raids" (READ: 5 pugs usually consisting of 4 DPS Tac and 1 Sci Healer) and they were brutally hard, but not in a good way. They required heavy levels of precision in a game that, up until that point, could be summarized by the old Leeroy Jenkins video: run in, blast shit, and hope everything else dies before you do.

[Elheru Aran]

They actually just a week or two rebooted the Galaxy. It's gotten better, from what I hear. I wouldn't know because if you already own a Galaxy it doesn't benefit