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.