Star Trek Online - To Boldly Beta where No One Has Beta'd Before!

[lupi]

finally got on yesterday and logged a bit over 6 hours. a couple steps from getting a tier 2 ship and overall I'd say the game is in better shape than I was expecting. Space combat was pretty fun and the only real thing it feels like is missing at launch would be systems getting damaged. A 20 torpedo tube boat down to 5% health should be hard pressed to launch any more projectiles let alone a full spread.

About half of the glitches/bugs I've come across so far can probably be attributed to lag/server load.

While in much more need of refinement than space, the ground section was a fun diversion from just ship combat. Object collision was a nice thing to see after so many mmo's skip it for ease of code, but a bunch of melee types just charging up to a group of beamers and standing there swinging while getting nuked seems odd; partially due to the fact that it takes several phaser blast to down someone.

The beta's been good enough to push it into the probably buy slot. Since everything will be wiped I'll probably play again this weekend to see what the next level of ship is like.

Assuming they continue working on it, the theme should see enough opening income to keep it going come in and the base for a good game seems to be there.

 

[lupi]

Guess servers where closed for awhile last night and a new release/patch was put up.


One thing I forgot to mention of my current play experience is the auto grouping. While I haven't changed the option, unless the mission you are on is hardcoded as a group one, others that enter the sector at the same time you do can be slotted to join you as a single party. In general this is fine as its a multiplayer game still even though it's extremely solo friendly and I enjoy having other people join, let's you see other playstyles and equipment and such. Well the one problem here is that the planet "instances" spawn at various strengths based on the incoming group. So if you start spawning enemies for your 2 or 3 man party then someone(s) leaves, it's going to be extremely difficult to finish. I'm hoping there is some way to reset an instance like this, but when it occurred to me I couldn't find it. Ended up waiting till the next day to enter the system again and see what happened and it was reset then. A small note on how this works; just entering the system together and then dropping doesn't get you screwed (from my observation), only if someone comes within detection range of the enemy and then someone bails.


Also an interesting point in how they are handling server load. As far as I can tell everyone playing is playing for all practical purposes on one server (for those used to most traditional mmos that permanently split up the population). They are handling load in the same way guild wars runs their instances for those familiar with that system (I realized this by seeing a "server" listing come up when crossing boundaries although it doesn't seem anything was selectable as it appeared and disappeared rather rapidly. So while there may be 10000 people in the main starbase, there could be 1000 versions of that starbase currently up with only 100 people per version.

I also participated in a defense of starbase 24 mission (think they are referred to as fleet actions) and there were it seemed a good 100 ships per side if not more present. Ran pretty smoothly, although if still in a low level vessel you don't want to be on point as the opening salvo could be devastating.

 

[SunnyD]

Also an interesting point in how they are handling server load. As far as I can tell everyone playing is playing for all practical purposes on one server (for those used to most traditional mmos that permanently split up the population). They are handling load in the same way guild wars runs their instances for those familiar with that system (I realized this by seeing a "server" listing come up when crossing boundaries although it doesn't seem anything was selectable as it appeared and disappeared rather rapidly. So while there may be 10000 people in the main starbase, there could be 1000 versions of that starbase currently up with only 100 people per version.

Same way they do it with Champions Online.

The autogrouping is an annoyance imho. If I want to group up, I would find people I want to group with instead of being forced into a random team.

 

[bullbert]

The autogrouping is an annoyance imho. If I want to group up, I would find people I want to group with instead of being forced into a random team.

The autogrouping is an option. Default is on. Just turn it off if you do not like it.

 

[bullbert]

...snip...
Also an interesting point in how they are handling server load. As far as I can tell everyone playing is playing for all practical purposes on one server (for those used to most traditional mmos that permanently split up the population). They are handling load in the same way guild wars runs their instances for those familiar with that system (I realized this by seeing a "server" listing come up when crossing boundaries although it doesn't seem anything was selectable as it appeared and disappeared rather rapidly. So while there may be 10000 people in the main starbase, there could be 1000 versions of that starbase currently up with only 100 people per version.
...snip...

That was an instance list for that server, that flashed in front of you. There is an option to choose which instance you want. Default is off.

edit: There was an update yesterday and today. I only played for an hour after the update, trying out the Klingon side. The functions/options buttons around the mini-map have all moved, but I am not sure if that was a Klingon thing or update thing. I did not find that soft-switch, yet.

 

[lupi]

Only played a few minutes yesterday as they were down a good chunk of the night for patching. Seems some of the new UI stuff was added. Some seems nice while others are negligible but different so you need to find where they moved something.

On a good note, I know the guy I used for years to get my WoW UI package from was hired by cryptic a year or so ago (although I think at the time it was for another game but can always hope) and he did a pretty sweet job graphically molding a bunch of other peoples UI mods into one big group.

Did my first mission out of the start section, and found a planet that I needed to find a certain number of plants on. Luckily the land masses on these new planets seems rather negligible cause mindlessly walking around for a plant wasn't a great thrill.

 

[lupi]

Also on the good side, the spock voice files are now active in the game it seems.

 

[Daverino]

Only played a few minutes yesterday as they were down a good chunk of the night for patching. Seems some of the new UI stuff was added. Some seems nice while others are negligible but different so you need to find where they moved something.

On a good note, I know the guy I used for years to get my WoW UI package from was hired by cryptic a year or so ago (although I think at the time it was for another game but can always hope) and he did a pretty sweet job graphically molding a bunch of other peoples UI mods into one big group.

Did my first mission out of the start section, and found a planet that I needed to find a certain number of plants on. Luckily the land masses on these new planets seems rather negligible cause mindlessly walking around for a plant wasn't a great thrill.

The 'find the foo' missions are really boring and tedious. The good news - if you can call it that - is that now running a scan will point you towards the next foo. It makes clearing them out much faster.

 

[Raduque]

I'm lovin' this game. Just preordered.

Lupi, if you go the Galactic map while in an instance, and not in combat, you can change the instance. When you do, the list comes up and you can click "Always Let me Choose", which will cause the instance list to stay up till you choose a server. There may be a countdown too, I'm not sure.

 

[ayabe]

I'm still on the fence, it's been years away from MMO'ing for me. I have had fun playing but I'm not sure it's quite good enough to get me back into the whole deal again.

Should get my ship upgrade tonight if I can play, we'll see if I'm swayed after the weekend.

 

[SunnyD]

Well I'm still patching from yesterday. Patch was huge. If I'm still having issues with Starbase 24 crashing, I'm just going to give up period.

Anyhow, I will not be subscribing to this one. Cryptic is screwing their customers over with the pricing on it. With word that they're already working on a 3rd (4th? counting City of Heroes) MMO concurrently, given the state of the launch of Champions Online, the state of what's shaping up to be the launch of Star Trek Online, Cryptic's handling of CO post launch and their handling of STO pre-launch... odds are STO is going to launch, get a good long look and be broken repeatedly within the first month, then summarily ignored as everybody goes to work full time on the 3rd title.

I'm not supporting crap. They got my money for CO... unfortunately.

 

[lupi]

Patching for this game has been about the smoothest of any mmo, right up there with lotro for me. Also did 2 of the sb24's, never crashed. I've only had one crash the entire time while playing, have no idea of why it happened but was able to relog right back on.

I don't know if the pre-beta population is thinning out or the server adds are kicking in or if with a created char you get head of the line, but since finally getting in a couple days ago I've never not gotten in on the first attempt since.




Was thinking of buying the gamestop package as it doés provide a little stronger actual in game bonus and the rest are mainly cosmetic junk I don't care about (I guess the other hardon item is the borg crewmate; not sure if people plan on getting a bikini outfit for her or what but can't imagine it being that much different from any other crewman)

 

[SunnyD]

Was thinking of buying the gamestop package as it doés provide a little stronger actual in game bonus and the rest are mainly cosmetic junk I don't care about (I guess the other hardon item is the borg crewmate; not sure if people plan on getting a bikini outfit for her or what but can't imagine it being that much different from any other crewman)

The borg BO comes with specific bonuses that aren't attainable with regular BO's. The drawback is that the borg BO is completely NOT customizable.

 

[Arglebargle]

My beef with the STO set up so far comes down to poorly designed mission info. 'Hunting for contacts' is not my idea of a fun time waster. While they did just put space station contacts on the maps, it's still not enough, and sometimes still confusing.

I've come across a contact that shows up on the map, but is actually on a different level of the space station. And even not directly over the place where he shows up on the map below. There are unclear goals in missions. I've just gotten a fedex Memory Alpha mission (probably the start of mission thread) where the directions I have been given to sector and planet do not show up on the map list of places to go. Information on the actul usefulness of skills is lacking.

So far, pretty much every play episode ends for me with some unclear mission goal that exceeds my interest in pressing on. Lots of conceptual rough edges.

 

[lupi]

Just read through a thread about new officers being found in game. Seems that you can also get higher quality officers that let you train higher level skills to lower rank officers than they'd normally be able to have.

And some of those that preordered the borg thinking it would be the most "op" selection are already disappointed.


You're right about the map and such, but it still feels a lot like many other mmos Í've done including wow. What I really hated about the maps was that you couldn't tell what system was what until you clicked the system which would bring up the do you want to travel here window which you would then need to manually close and continue hunting. An oddity about this, sometimes if I was already under a travel to XXX system order and I opened up the map the system names would appear when I hovered the mouse point over it. With the latest patch the names now all just appear on the map.

 

[Throckmorton]

Love space combat, especially the big fleet actions

 

[Hey Zeus]

GAME is amazing and the patch was 800 megs.

 

[Karsten]

The patch helped A LOT but overall, some game choices still make me kinda down on the game. I really wanted to like it, but I am very skeptical right now. I talked about it in our last podcast:
http://www.pcpcgames.com/category/pod/

 

[aigomorla]

New patch is coming out and should be done by now.

What i dont understand is they make us buy the game and pay a monthly, vs WOW where the game is basically free and you just pay monthly.

Also what sucks is i heard my character will get wiped when open beta ends and retail starts. :\

EDIT: Gah 148MEG patch..

I have THE MOST halrious bug going on right now..

Im running 2 x HD4870X2 in Xfire.. means i have over 4gigs of RAM just on my gpu's.
And im running into out of memory on GPU errors.

ROFL..

 

[flashbacck]

I agree with comments on the missions... They're just not interesting AT ALL. Running around scanning crates for no reason just isn't fun for me.

The fact that everything is instanced to groups of 1-50 people makes me wonder where the first M in MMO is.

 

[SunnyD]

What i dont understand is they make us buy the game and pay a monthly, vs WOW where the game is basically free and you just pay monthly.

...

Im running 2 x HD4870X2 in Xfire.. means i have over 4gigs of RAM just on my gpu's.
And im running into out of memory on GPU errors.

ROFL..

Remember, when WoW was released they charged $49.99 for boxed product as well.

As far as your video card issues - Cryptic's graphics engine isn't very ATI friendly. Make sure if you haven't already, TURN OFF AA.

 

[Magusigne]

I think half of you guys downloaded and played a different Star Trek MMO than me.

It was terrible! I must be crazy;p

 

[Hey Zeus]

No issues whatsoever with my rig or the game. LOVE IT!!!!! I NEED to play as a Klingon and would love to play as a Borg

For those who haven't seen it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0QhD4rymPw

 

[manimal]

Ya last few patches really helped my stability on my MBP and the i7 now runs the game without a ctd. Ground combat is buggier than space. Earlier today I was wishing the ground combat was more fps than neutered bioware clickfest...

Cant wait for the next ship.

 

[Nik]

No issues whatsoever with my rig or the game. LOVE IT!!!!! I NEED to play as a Klingon and would love to play as a Borg

For those who haven't seen it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0QhD4rymPw

Klingon side is so half-assed at this point. There's still no drops outside of higher level nebula and pvp. It's like Klingon ships are basically skins for fed ships. I was really disappointed with KDF.