Upcoming review of Star Trek Online's Benthan Assault Cruiser

The Benthan Assault Cruiser is a new lock box ship that bears witness. It's a strong cruiser, with a staggering amount of firepower, and I enjoyed my career with the ship. She may become my liberated borg's new vessel for a while.

Opening Star Trek Online lockboxes for fun and profit

Looks like I’ve become the proud owner of a Xindi-Aquatic Narcine Dreadnought Carrier.

Whenever a new lockbox drops in Star Trek Online, I often use my lifetime stipend to buy 10 or 20 keys. This time, opening the new Xindi lockboxes, the ship dropped from the second box I opened.

I will be flying it for a while to get a review written for this starship and try to get that up on GameOgre and Vox Ex Machina. Recently, I’ve written one review for the T’varo Light Warbirrd Retrofit and the Undine Nicor Bio-Warship (the second one is still pending publication.)

I particularly enjoy flying carriers in STO and I have a Catian Atrox Carrier as well as a Tholian Recluse Carrier on different characters. So we’ll see where the Narcine stacks up—from the look of it, with a heavy Tactical loadout, it’s a battleship designed for front line fire-support. This is especially accentuated by the fact that it comes with two hangars of frigate pets.

The frigates are also minelayers, which is an unexpected pet capability.

Just an FYI, “narcine” is the scientific name of a family of electric rays, which the Narcine Dreadnought looks a little bit like from a dorsal profile. I named mine “Sepiida” which is the order that cuttlefish belong to (a mollusk closely related to squid, octopus, and nautulus.)

Interview: On Being a Captain in Star Trek Online

The folks over at MMO Anthropology had a chance to talk to a mutual friend of ours from Star Trek Online about what it’s like to be a captain in the game. Then I took a chance to write up an article about the interview over at SiliconANGLE. Be sure to watch the video and read the article to get a glimpse of some of what happens in STO and how it affects personal experience and expression In virtual worlds.

Star Trek Online: Solanae Dyson Science Destroyers

I noticed that a lot of people have been very interested in this new virtual items from Star Trek Online. These ships are a reward from participating in the 4th Anniversary Event in STO and bring a few new interesting mechanics into the game. As a result, the folks over at Vox Ex Machina sat down with a few players and looked at their Dyson science destroyers and wrote up a review.

Star Trek Online: Dyson Science Destroyer Review

Head over there and let them know what you think. There are two screenshots right now (from the Aves-class Romulan variant) but more screenshots are expected today.

I personally have an Aves-class and I’ve been slowing grinding up the Dyson reputation so that I can grab the Experimental Proton Weapon for its front arc. I know that there’s a dearth of consoles that buff proton damage, but I’m intrigued by a weapon that can act as both a cannon and a beam.

I’m not a very good Romulan player at this point--I’ve noticed I’m a cruiser captain who doesn’t deal well with warbirds—but the hit-and-run tactics needed by a battle-cloaking science vessel with some escort-upbringing do make for exciting space battles.

Star Trek Online: Hirogen Hunter Heavy Escort?

With Star Trek Online providing a surprising venue to talk about the nature of virtual items—and the fact that I have a job that lets me report on the goings-on in free-to-play MMO games—I decided to try an experiment by having a player in STO who flies one of these ships give me notes to review it by.

The result, this badass virtual item spotlight on GameOgre about the Hirogen Hunter Heavy Escort lockbox ship.

The game mechanics have generated a layered culture of thought about equipment, strategy, and button-press abilities. This means that reviews of these virtual items (the starships) includes a lot of jargon that to an outsider sounds and looks a lot like gibberish—but with a little bit of context quickly makes a lot of sense.

I am especially intrigued by the proliferation of the understanding of the Aux2Bat (referring to an ability called “Auxiliary to Battery”) starship build. A methodology that takes advantage of synergies between STO game mechanics that allow a single ship-equippable ability (on a bridge officer) to significantly lower skill cooldowns. Since the concept of A2B is so popular in starship building it was important not to leave it out of the review of the Hirogen Hunter.

Keeping in mind how STO players relate to ships, builds, and other players when referring to game mechanics will make for better, in-depth, audience-centric reviews. In the past I’ve covered the Catian Atrox Carrier, the Tholian Recluse Carrier, and the Romulan Dreadnought Warbird.

Star Trek Online: The Art of the Build

I know that the analysis from the Star Trek Online Winter Event survey is not done yet (and this might take a while) so this is a poor time to develop a new project, but I have a great idea for an essay and video series: STO: The Art of the Build.

I came up with this shortly after talking about the Dyson Solanae Hybrid-Technology Romulan science-destroyer warbird being released in STO Season 8.5. It comes with a set of consoles, weapons, and even different ship-costume effects that have sparked a lot of discussion on how to “build” it and its variants.

The premise is, that similar to many RPGs, STO has paper-dolls for players’ equipment--but players can also captain starships. A starship isn’t just another piece of equipment, it’s almost another character/class all on its own and players must spend time thinking of how to build them.

Not only does this come down to a choice in ship—based on specs, opportunity, and play-style—but there’s also a great deal of thought that goes into building up bridge officers, training them, equipment for the ship—from weapon layout to console choice to support weapons and abilities.

All of this collapses together alongside a large number of ships available to every faction, a huge amount of choice also exists in aesthetic effect as well as game mechanics.

To this end, the playerbase continually digests and spins out configurations, resources, and communicates on how to approach particular goals in game for PvE, PvP, and ship costuming.

Star Trek Online: Dyson Solanae hybrid-technology science destroyer

I think that I just found the ship for my Romulan Star Trek Online character: the Dyson science destroyer.

STO must be beside-themselves in producing new content, including bringing back Tim Russ to reprise his role as Tuvok from Star Trek: Voyager to become Admiral Tuvok. It’s fun to hear his voice chastising the enemy as I blast them out of space.

Of course, my romulan character—one Simpronia—will be flying the Romulan warbird variant of the Dyson science destroyer. The lower shield capacity coupled with the battle-cloak makes this ship unstoppable and it will nicely synergize with her science career path.

The path to getting Sim a proper ship to fly has been a long and hard one. As romulan, she has a huge decision matrix to pick between Romulan faction ships and Federation faction ships—the Fed ship is tempting, but it has no cloak and ambushes with this ship seem exactly what I’d like to do.

Since this is a science-based destroyer I can still act as a second-line support in the beginning of battles by using debuffs and sensor confusion; but upon closing range, I can switch into tactical-mode, cloak, and then ambush craft trying to pick on my teammates in PvE.

While there’s a full-on Dyson set to be had, I am still considering going primarily with polaron-based weaponry and the Jem’Hadar set (or components thereof.) I might hybridize between damage capability and science-tanking but we’ll see.

I just love those purple beams and bolts.

Interview with William McCormick from Star Trek Online

Star Trek Online has come a long way from when it became free-to-play all the way to Season 6. There have been people with the game since it came into being as a pay-to-play game.

Here, MMO Anthropology interviews William McCormick who is with a reasonably sized fleet in the game who has been doing a video series about fleets and the new content. Fleets are the essential part of Star Trek Online social structure, they are essentially guilds, and recently STO added “fleet starbases” which act as a sort of player housing applied to the in game guilds.

Link, via YouTube and MMO Anthropology.

Star Trek Online Developers Gozer and Heretic Signal Resignation

Star Trek Online has seen two developers mark their calendars with a figure resignation, both Geoff "Heretic" Tuffli and Dan "Gozer" Griffis have signaled their departure from Cryptic Studio's MMORPG game with future resignations and left behind their notes on the forums.

http://www.vg247.com/2012/06/26/star-trek-online-content-designer-dan-griffis-to-depart-cryptic-in-a-few-weeks/

"Star Trek Online content designer Dan Griffis to depart Cryptic in 'a few weeks'"

Looks like Gozer is departing and above is the link to the .VG247 on the subject.

http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=278521

Also, "jumping ship," is Geoff "Heretic" Tuffli who left his mark on the STO Perfect World forums with an apology and a sad farewell to the players.

Developers have a lot of social context and currency with the virtual worlds that they develop for. They're, in a way, the architects of the aesthetic and the code that governs how the community interacts with that virtuosity and within themselves; as a result, they're often the target of adulation and scorn in turn depending on the cycle of development. Not often do they work directly with the community--but sometimes they do become part of the very worlds that they develop and design.

As a result, the departure of developers from an MMO game brings with it a different and distinct sensation than the sense of developers who worked on a static, published single box game. Certainly now we're seeing more episodic content; but MMO developers personally affect and cast great shadows over the online communities that their games support.

So when they leave, it's a bit of a big deal.

Link, via MMO Anthropology.

Star Trek Online Lock Boxes and Lobi Crystals

Cryptic Studios and Perfect World Entertainment just cannot help themselves when it comes to the grab-bag items called “lock boxes.” The Ferengi lock boxes, distant cousins of the Cardassian lock boxes, have been around the servers for more than a month now, dispensing randomly starships and terrible loot for microtransaction currency bought master keys.

How have these affected the in-game economy?

Link, via MMO Anthropology.

Star Trek Online and the Social Implications of Becoming Free-to-Play

It’s time for a new MMO Anthropology about Star Trek Online, developed by Cryptic Studios and now published by Perfect World Entertainment—it is a game in transition from pay-to-play to free-to-play.

As an originally pay-to-play MMO, Star Trek Online contains a great deal of content and an amazing eye to detail. Although, it is still buggy as all hell and sometimes those bugs really interfere with gameplay.

In this article, a discussion is brought forward about how going free-to-play will effect change to the communities present especially as players who used to pay a subscription find themselves amid players who do not. With pay-to-play communities there is a sense of risk and sunk cost to playing whereas with free-to-play it’s all about who buys what.

Star Trek Online is trying to alleviate this by making it about level-of-service as well as having cash-only ships (although they can also be had by free-to-play players by using an exchange system that allows trading reward-currency for pay-currency.)

Just see the essay for more, or watch the video for the summary.

Link, via MMO Anthropology and YouTube.

Around the Alpha Quadrant: Attaining Captain

So I’m guilty. Star Trek Online just went free to play January 17th and I’ve been flying around the quadrant with friends picking up ships, blowing Klingons out airlocks, and forcing Romulans to such down warp plasma—by way of quantum torpedoes.

Things have been pretty good for the galaxy under my kind leadership.

I’d like to introduce everyone to my crew:

Captain Cassandra--and look, there’s Hadaly!

This shot was taken not very far away from some very unhappy gorn and klingons who really wanted to my rampage through their secret base looking for augment technology.

Either that or they just didn’t like the weather on their terrible, lonely, cold planet.

I’ve been enjoying this game thoroughly and I have even brought several friends in. Also, because I’m affiliated, I should point out that MMO Anthropology has published an essay on what going free-to-play does to a community and what this means for the MMO ecology.

Pretty much, I haven’t spent any money; but I can see why people might want to. Perfect World Entertainment have taken Cryptic Studios’s work and bring it into the free-to-play space extremely well.

Although, of course, that means that the starships that I think look the best are also the ones that cost the most! Or cost at all…

I see what you did there, PWE.

I will leave you with beautiful pictures of my ship the Cassiopeia II and an exploding Borg cube.