Star Trek Online

I played it last year around this time and it was a blast, so much more fun than before. But the more I kept playing it, the more I wished it was Eve Online and then just went back to Eve. So, STO is fun if you don't want any more out of the game. No idea what's changed recently though

ya know its not that bad. I think the ground missions are stupid. If you want to get your fix of Star Trek spaceships shooting each other or charge the borg a few times its worth the install. I played it maybe a year or two ago?

I was playing this a month or two ago for a few weeks. Still pretty much the same as release, except there are faction grinds for gear now and a few new areas. The ground combat is still kind of sketchy but better than it was. As you would probably expect, all of the best ships are gotten by either to buying them with real cash, or being in a guild with a tricked-out starbase that can build them (though there was a very nice one available over Christmas). The episodes are kind of fun to play through in a Star Trek kind of way.

If you love Star Trek, its a fun game for a few weeks, until you realize there is no endgame worth mentioning to hold you at max level once you have ground out all of your faction gear (which will take a little while mainly because it is tied to daily resource-type gathering turn-ins). If you don't, well, it still might be fun for a few weeks to blast shit with phasers in a badass starship, but there are better vehicles to scratch that itch.

It's a little like EQ2 in that it's had so much stuff added to it and so many improvements after a poor launch. If you like MMOs and like Star Trek, youneedto play STO through to the end of the first (Klingon) campaign at the very least

A few hints:
You'll get a free ship every ten levels, so don't worry about buying one with CrypticBux.
There are alotof different things to do but again don't worry that much about sitting down and grinding your way through all of them. Pick what looks interesting.
The Duty Officer system, when you reach the right level for it, are free money & xp. Bridge officers/Boffs are your traditional party members similar to EQ mercs. Duty officers/Doffs are offscreen and are essentially "Mission shows up, you assign what you hope are relevant redshirts, and the game goes away and comes back X minutes/hours/days later with either a reward or mission failed notice".
Unless you need an itemright now, sell it.
Klingon (+Gorn/Nausicaan/Orion) characters are unlocked once you reach a certain level Fed-side.
STO unfucks both the Borg and Species 8472 after Voyager ruined them.
Playable Romulans may (or may not) be coming soon.

I play it off and on. They released an update to the game a little while ago that changed how you do the upper tier missions (borg) that was highly thought to be awful. Time will tell though.

The game at it's upper tiers is:

1) Rep farm
2) Fleet base construction (guild house) that unlocks tiers of loot for your fleet members (ground + ships) <--- Major sink and also the best loot in the game
3) Dilithium farm (game currency that transfers to zen $ for store purchases)
4) Running the same missions over and over

Overall I enjoy it casually now. It's the only game I still login to do a few things and it gives me a chance to geek out on star trek stuff.

I'm[email protected]/* <![CDATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling{p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail'{for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16.slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e,c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */if you ever see me in-game or want to drop a message. I'm not on often during the semester.

Tips/Tricks:

There are private channels for elite-stf (dungones) pick up groups. These groups generally have a 100% completion rate because they are people who know what they're doing and have been doing them some time. It's invite only and they moderate the bad people out pretty actively so you generally always have a good group. And its very active. Also private channels for serious auctioners and sellers and others that I havent gotten into. Get into a large / small fleet depending on your preference. But know that smaller fleets will take a LONG time [year(s)?] to finish their upper tier fleet construction if not many people are active.

To see the end game fleet construction stuff, join a big fleet and be active. My small fleet I joined last year, while I had a great time with those guys, are still only on early tier 4.

The last time I fired this up a few months ago, the grind for Dilithium to afford ships was absolutely insane. You're pretty much capped at a certain amount each day that you can "refine" into a currency that can be spent. You can circumvent this by choosing to use Cryptic/Zen Coins or whatever they're called now.

I might be mistaken but I do believe that the best possible ships are still only purchasable in the in-game Zen Store. Getting your fleet base's construction high enough only gives you the "right to equip" said ships and they still require Zen to purchase them. You can convert Dilithium to Zen but this is unrealistically ridiculous due to Dilithium to Zen conversion. It's something that would easily take months to do even if you were playing hardcore on a daily basis. Cryptic charges $25 bucks a ship in the Zen store and up to $50 for a pack of ships for your faction. None of this carries over to the Klingon Faction if you purchase ships/character unlocks/races for the Federation and vice versa.

I feel bad for the "lifetime subscribers" because they only get about 500 Zen a month which is about $5 and all of their lifetime benefits are all purchasable now in the Z Store.

Itzena_sl said:

The Duty Officer system, when you reach the right level for it, are free money & xp. Bridge officers/Boffs are your traditional party members similar to EQ mercs. Duty officers/Doffs are offscreen and are essentially "Mission shows up, you assign what you hope are relevant redshirts, and the game goes away and comes back X minutes/hours/days later with either a reward or mission failed notice".

Click to expand...

Does this this replace ground missions?

No, it's in addition to. Ground missions are still you + NPC bridge officers.

...oh yeah, that reminds me. If you played STO back in the day, the ground mission enemy NPCs had their health either halved or quartered around the same time the game went F2P so combat went from slow grind to (relatively) fast-paced. Also there's an alternate FPS-mode as well.

There's multiple ways to get Dilithium in the game though, the refinement cap is 8k per day per character, which translates to about 87 zen at the going rate of 91 dil/zen, or use it for base upgrades or equipment. Most of the best ships are the refits/fleet that cost around 2-2.5k zen unless you buy the pack for 5k, something to work for, but it's not like the other admiral ships are so bad you're screwed when you get to the end.

The lock boxes they have offer special ships as well(some of which can buy on the exchange), I have opened about half a dozen or so far in the last month, and the one good thing for me about sto boxes compared to gw2, it doesn't piss me off and I don't feel like I wasted a ton of gold every time I open one, because it feels so much easier to farm Dilithium than gold and you don't get crappy potions like gw2 boxes. They also have special events that offer other free ships every once in a while.

I'm enjoying the game since coming back for the third time and playing it casually and mostly blowing shit up with space combat, don't like ground stuff much. The game can get a little deeper if you want to tinker more with efficient play with ship types and ship equipment(weapons and consoles) with rep or fleet stores, bridge officer quality and skill sets, duty officer quality and skills, your main skill set(talents). Like every other game find an active fleet and and it gets more interesting.

Probably not something that will keep you playing 8 hrs a day like wow, but pretty decent for a free game.

Havent played in a long time now but did manage to EVE it with a Klingon. Meaning I logged in, set Duty Officer thing and logged out to grind out. Dont really remember how log it took to hit lvl 50. Want to say 2 weeks and paired with the daily home planet quest/quiz thing. You know, the quiz about history/Lore in the game, got addicted to trying to collect all the Books.

STO has really turned around since Cryptic was bought out by Perfect World. This time last year the game had just gone free to play and while there were a ton of new players, they just didn't have the end-game fleshed out well enough to keep all those new players. You had Borg STFs, which had recently been revamped into 20 minute 5-man content, and that was about it. There was the older content, like fleet actions, but nobody was running those except for accolades and trophies since the rewards sucked.

Season 6 added STO's fleet advancement system, which is really nothing more than a huge money pit. Season 6 also added a handful of space and ground "events" that you can queue up from anywhere in the game and play through. It's 5-man content, with a couple 20-man events. Completing these events gets you "fleet marks", which you then donate along with dilthium, commodities, duty officers and more in order to build your fleet base. Donating resources to build the base rewards you with "fleet credits", which you can then use to buy items and ships from your fleet starbase, though in addition almost everything also costs dilithium. The only saving grace is that the items and ships really are the best in the game.

Season 7 added the reputation system, which is nothing more than a personalized version of the fleet advancement system. It even has the same UI. In order to increase your reputation with one of the factions, you have to donate "marks", items and skill points. Donating said resources increases your reputation. Each reputation is split into 5 tiers, with reputation rewards getting better the higher tier you're in. These rewards are all themed around specific species, so Romulan reputation will net you all sorts of Romulan-themed items, and duty and bridge officers, where Omega Force reputation will get you the Borg items and whatnot. There are currently only two reputations, but the devs have said that they plan on adding new reputations often. Considering it took me about a month to get a rep to T5, they're going to have to add a new reputation faction every 3-6 months if they're going to keep that system interesting.

Season 8, or rather, "The big update that seriously isn't a season". The devs have been tight-lipped regarding this update coming in May. They released a teaser image of a Romulan eagle and the words "March beneath the raptor's wings", with the release date. A lot of people are speculating that this will be the release of the playable Romulan faction, but to be honest I think it's way too soon for that. Season 7 added an entire new sector block, but for all intents and purposes it was empty. It had a bunch of systems that had daily missions, but no story content at all. You had New Romulus, a bunch of daily missions and a single event. For a sector block, that's practically no content at all.

Personally I think the big May update is the second half of season 7 content that couldn't be added in time. Story missions were noticeably absent from season 6 and 7, so they have to be adding some good story content in order to appease that group of players. They haven't added a new social world in a year, so I'm thinking Nimbus III (from Star Trek V) will end up that. They haven't explained why the Klingons would be willing to help this Romulan off-shoot faction on New Romulus either, and since Khitomer is right there it would be the perfect place to deal with that. Basically season 7 added a huge zone with almost no content. The big May update is the rest of that content in order to fill in the new zone.


As for the game, it's fairly solid. Ground combat is still not as fun as space combat, but when you consider that only about 25% of combat takes place on the ground it's not that bad. It can be fun in a good group. In a bad group it'll make you not want to play ground missions though.
The F2P system is actually pretty flexible. You can play and earn dilithium, which you can then refine (8k daily cap) and use to buy items, ships, or exchange it for Zen, which is the currency to buy stuff in the C-store. Making 8k a day isn't difficult. Right now Zen is trading for about 90 refined dilithium, so you could get a 2500 zen C-store ship in less than a month without paying a dime if you want. Or, if you don't want to grind it out you can always buy Zen and get stuff that way.

Look at it this way: If STO had had the normal amount of development time, it'd have been released about now. It's a full game now. It still has some quirks left over from it's early days, but everything I've seen since then and read about that's coming in future updates actually has me excited about playing.

Playable romulan race

Players have been asking for it forever

What , a Romulan invasion?

Friday_sl said:

Playable romulan race

Players have been asking for it forever

Click to expand...

Yeah, it looks that way. A fleetmate of mine found some new artwork in the game files that seems to indicate a Romulan faction being a choice at character creation, as well as graphics for the three classes (Engineering, Science & Tactical). Devs have mentioned that character creation/UI was getting a make-over and when pressed said they couldn't talk about it.

So yeah. Playable Romulan faction in May, but that may not be all.

Cryptic devs have been saying for years that the Klingon faction would be a full faction (story mission content for levels 1-50) before the Romulan faction would be added. In order to make the KDF have a level 1-50 leveling experience Cryptic would have to add about 20 missions. As it turns out, in order to add a Romulan faction they'd only need to add about 30 missions, and only the first 10 Romulan missions would have to be exclusive to the new Romulan faction, the rest could be open to any faction.
The KDF already has their level 1-10 content in the game, it's just being used at level 20 instead of level 1. Also, Cryptic has had a KDF tutorial collecting dust for over a year. Once they decided to have Fed players unlock KDF characters at level 25, there was no reason to have a KDF tutorial in the game.


So, looks like May will bring a new Romulan faction as well as finish off the KDF faction for a full level 1-50 progression, along with several new missions for all factions. Might be a good time to check out STO if you haven't already.

I'm betting instead it will just be a 'Recovered Romulan Warbird' special edition flyable ship for federation players only that costs $30.

But it may include a hat for TF2.

I will login, create Rom toon, set duty officers and log out. Rinse and repeat daily till lvl 50. I might play a little bit depending on time or interest. Still erked about the key thing and boxes. Havent checked but still assume you HAVE to purchase keys in their cash shop still?

You can buy them from other players on the exchange, too.

Here we go again!

Anyone playing that wants to get a guild going, let me know. I am[email protected]/* <![CDATA[ */!function(t,e,r,n,c,a,p){try{t=document.currentScript||function(){for(t=document.getElementsByTagName('script'),e=t.length;e--if(t[e].getAttribute('data-cfhash'))return t[e]}();if(t&&(c=t.previousSibling{p=t.parentNode;if(a=c.getAttribute('data-cfemail'{for(e='',r='0x'+a.substr(0,2)|0,n=2;a.length-n;n+=2)e+='%'+('0'+('0x'+a.substr(n,2)^r).toString(16.slice(-2);p.replaceChild(document.createTextNode(decodeURIComponent(e,c)}p.removeChild(t)}}catch(u){}}()/* ]]> */in STO or message me here.

I am a huge ST nerd and since this is F2P I figured I would fart around.

Inc Mistwalker jokes!