I know, I'm completely unimaginitive when it comes to blog post titles. Alright, so, let me just jump right into this, because I've been thinking about it all week, while reading various articles and blog posts talking about Star Trek Online, and I honestly don't understand why people are so negative about this game JUST because Cryptic's last game did not succeed. I am not seeing any of the things that caused me to quit Champions Online. Or, to be more accurate, the same problems technically still exist, but I don't think they apply because the game is so different.

1. Skill System and Respecs.

Let's start with the biggest one.

Now, obviously, Star Trek Online has no respecs yet, they will be implemented later. But this does not worry me in the slightest because of the way the base skill system is set up.

In Champions Online, the skill system was the basis for the entire reason I (and I'm not the only one by far) was so angry about them charging for respecs on the C-Store. And in the end, it is the single most important thing I blame for the game's failure. Your lack of end-game content doesn't matter when people are turned off of the game before they get there. As many people have said in the past, WoW didn't have a lot of end-game content when it was first released, and look at where it is now.

I'll boil it down to one thing: too many choices too early in the game. Yes, most other games lock you into a single class from the start. But classes have such set archetypes for a reason. People don't have to understand the game mechanics to understand that a priest is a support class, that a rogue's basic gameplay revolves around sneaking around and stabbing things for massive damage.

I believe that one of the reasons WoW pulls in new players so well is that it doesn't really offer any early-game choices that have lasting impact. All of your spells are determined solely by your class, every mage is going to learn the same ones. You're not forced to choose whether you'd rather learn Frostbolt or Arcane Missiles, you learn both of them and get to decide for yourself which one you'd rather use more. You can't even look at your talents until you're level 10, and by then you have a better idea of your preferences for certain spells, and the initial respec costs are trivial, only becoming really expensive if you continue to respec repeatedly.

Champions asks you to choose between something like 18 different powersets right off the bat, based on nothing more than cosmetic things like whether you'd rather be throwing fireballs or shadow bolts, with very little information on what the gameplay differences between them are (and there are definitely gameplay differences). And as you level up, you choose from a vast list of potential powers, including not only your own powerset, but any of the other ones as well. The number of potential combinations is staggering.

Having a customizable powerset is great, right? Unfortunately, it was easy to make your character either so overpowered that elite mobs were easily soloable, or so underpowered that you'd barely have a chance against normal mobs, completely by accident. The powers you've chosen are the bread and butter of how effective your character is. And you're basically, through the sheer cost of unlearning your powers, permanently locked in to these choices.

As a fresh character, you do not have enough money to change your decisions immediately after learning them, if you should decide that you've made a mistake and would rather have learned a different ability. As your character earns more money, and sneaks closer to being able to afford to unlearn a skill, they will probably level up, causing the the respec costs to increase, staying just out of your grasp. And the more choices you've made since the one you don't like, the more expensive it is to change them, because you can only unlearn the most recently learned skill, and then the one before that, and so on -- even if you're just going to relearn all the ones between when you're done anyway. They're in the way, and have to be removed individually before you can change the one in the middle.

It gets so insane for a new character to try out different things that it's usually more time-efficient to simply create a new character and relearn different skills the second time around. And I don't WANT to create a new character! Part of an MMO is becoming attached to your avatar, especially so with a game like Champions with such a vibrant character creation system. You spend literally HOURS poring over every tiny little detail of your character, you're so proud to send them out into the world, so proud to see them through the tutorial zone. And trust me, that tutorial zone becomes an order of magnitude less fun every time I played through it with a new character just because I wanted to change my skills around.

I think this would have been a much less serious problem if there had just been some kind of system in place to give you free respecs at certain level intervals, say every 10th level. If you decide that you aren't liking the direction your character's powers are going by the time you get to level 10, or you decide that you aren't using the power you learned at level 8 as much as you thought you would, you can change your build around at level 10. Or even the ability to unlearn one specific power without having to mess with the rest of them. I feel rather silly using a full respec just to change one power I learned at level 8 while keeping the rest of them the same.

For the first month, it was okay. The patches were rebalancing the classes so much that they gave us free respecs every week or two anyway. But then they stopped doing that, and as I mentioned, they cheated me out of my last remaining free patch respec during the free Halloween weekend. It is possible to get a full respec in-game, but the cost in in-game currency is prohibitively expensive, and the UI does not make it any easier -- there's no "select the point you'd like to go back to and pay the total sum," you're forced to select and unlearn each power individually.

Is there any wonder in this situation that people were angry about having to pay for respecs using microtransactions? The whole skill system seemed to be designed specifically to require many respecs until you figured out what you wanted your character to be, but the game deliberately prevents you from being able to do so.

Now Star Trek Online, from what little I've seen (to be fair, I still have not reached level 10) does not force these difficult decisions on you from the start. Though I think it would be interesting to have a mainstream MMO that would actually allow you to learn everything if you played long enough, I was not surprised whatsoever by the addition of the skill point cap and the future implementation of respecs. However, the respec system in STO does not worry me in the slightest. I actually expect them to offer respecs in the same way as Champions, through microtransactions, but I'm still not worried. Why is that?

I am earning skill points as I play, and I'm spending them on things. However, even though I cannot unlearn these points once I have put them in, I am not worried that the choices I am making will turn out to be mistakes. I am not learning abilities that may not be as useful as they sound or overlooking other abilities, because skill points are spent on passive benefits, like WoW talents but much more general in scope. All of my active abilities are tied directly to equipment or bridge officers, which are easily changed. If I want to use a medical tricorder to heal someone instead of destroying shields with a tachyon harmonic, all I have to do is equip the medical tricorder.

There are three "classes" (red shirts, yellow shirts and blue shirts) but in the space half of the game they are, as far as I can tell, completely irrelevant. Any character can pilot any ship, and the only differences you will have from the other classes will be the types of special abilities (via Kit equipment) you have access to when on ground missions. All skill points are spent in passive benefits that are incredibly nonspecific when you are below level 10 (such as a skill that slightly increases hull strength, speed and maneuverability for all ships) and then becoming more and more specific as you get to the higher level brackets (such as a skill that increases those stats further for Science-type ships, and later specifically Deep-Space Science vessels). All of the low-level skills are useful to all players, and until you're trying to min-max your spec at end-game, it doesn't matter which ones you learn.

So basically, in Star Trek Online, your character does not begin to specialize, and you are not required to make any permanent decisions that you might regret, until you have been playing the game for quite some time and have had a chance to understand more of the game mechanics. So unlike Champions, I do not find myself worried about my skills, or the impending respec system, because I don't see it affecting me until I'm at the level cap.

2. Items.

In Champions Online, I was quite uncertain as to what exactly the items were supposed to BE from a lore perspective. As an example, I'd equip a "Lightning Strike" (that had an icon that looks like a bare, muscular male chest) to my Primary Defense slot, and it would reduce the threat caused by my attacks by increasing my "Presence" stat. Yeah, it's confusing. I mean, it's a neat idea that superheroes get stronger based on things that happened to them, but how exactly do I equip and unequip the fact that I got struck by lightning? Or grew a third eye? Or received training by some super-secret organization? As equipment, it is a pure abstraction.

Star Trek has enough of a lore background to make all of the equipment understandable. Oh, this? It's a medical tricorder. You wave it over someone's head and they're healed. The concept is totally believable because it happened in the shows on a regular basis. This piece of ship equipment I just picked up is a more powerful impulse engine, which improves my speed and how well I can turn. My mind is able to latch on to these concepts. I defeat an enemy vessel, find an intact disruptor cannon in the remaining rubble, and beam it into my cargo hold to be installed onto my ship at a later time. Ships only drop ship loot, and ground missions only drop ground loot. Kill a Klingon, loot the bottle of Targ milk he was carrying in his pocket.

3. Inventory Management.

Star Trek Online obviously borrows heavily from Champions as far as interface goes, but one thing I am glad they have gotten rid of is the idiotic bag system that divided my inventory into separate panels that I could not have open at the same time, that I had to completely empty of all items in order to upgrade to a larger version.

No, in Star Trek Online, you have one bag panel (it seems to represent your ship's cargo hold, I think, though this is never officially explained as far as I've seen), it does not appear to be expandable, but I haven't had any issues with running out of room yet. You have a bank at Earth Starbase that has approximately the same amount of space as your bag.

You can equip four types of consumable items each to yourself and each of your crew members, and your officers will automatically use them when necessary to heal themselves or boost their own damage. Equipping these items removes them from your bag, so even if you're not planning to use any of those hyposprays or shield generators, you can stick them in your own personal item bar and they won't take up any space. Your ship can equip its own items too, so that you can have them ready on your action bar when you need a quick boost of emergency power to a specific system. And again, they won't take up space.

In Champions Online, you could get around the inventory limitation by simply mailing items to yourself. Mail never expired, and each piece of mail could hold something like five items. Anything that was not soulbound, you could simply mail to yourself and forget about it for a while. I haven't found the mail in Star Trek Online, but I hear that it does exist, so maybe this is still a problem -- but like I said, I haven't really been having any issues with that yet.

4. Auctions.

Now, to be fair, the auction UI in Star Trek Online suffers from many of the same issues as the one in Champions Online. You still cannot sort the results whatsoever, stacks of items do not display their price per item -- which is extremely important when the stack size and item cost are very small and on opposite sides of the panel, and combined with the previous inability to sort the list by stack size or price.

I am only calling them "auctions" out of a sense of MMO consistency, for the Cryptic-style AH has no bidding, simply a flat buyout price. Star Trek Online follows this pattern. Items do not have a duration or a cost to post them, meaning that you can post them and then leave them there indefinitely. I actually find this to be preferable to the WoW system where you have to put in a bid cost and a buyout cost, and constantly be taking items out of the mail and into your bags and onto the AH again -- it's time-consuming and annoying.

You may think "well then, with everybody in the entire game playing on the same server, the auction house is going to become hopelessly bloated over time as people just post everything they find for some extravagant price and leave it there, just to get it out of their bag, all the better if someone buys it eventually!" While this was certainly true of Champions, STO has implemented a fix to this problem that is elegant in its simplicity: you can only have 20 auctions up at the same time. You can take them down whenever you want for no cost, and replace them with other items or repost them at a different price if they aren't selling.

Where in WoW your incentive to post things fairly is partly the deposit money you would lose if they don't sell, and partly the annoyance of having to collect and repost the item later. In STO your incentive is that your auction slots are limited, which gives them value. You only want to post your better items, to maximize the amount of money you can get. This limits people putting useless junk on the AH -- though I haven't actually *found* any completely useless junk yet, in that way it's like Champions, no such thing as vendor trash. At least it minimizes people putting up individual items. And the other half of the incentive to price things fairly is that if they sell sooner, you can replace them with other items rather than having that valuable auction slot be occupied for a long time.

Of course, the economy is far from stable, I'm seeing items sold by a vendor in the next section of the station for 100 credits being sold for as much as 100,000 credits. Hopefully people will get over this silliness eventually.

Anyway, since there's no bidding or durations, the mail system is completely uninvolved here. You buy something from the AH, or cancel one of your own auctions, it goes directly into your bag. Auctions don't expire so they won't fill up your mailbox and force you to sit there collecting mail. As far as I can tell, the money from your successful auctions goes directly into your bag, though it'll still send you an automated message through the in-game mail so that you can keep track of the bookkeeping if you so desire.

Perhaps this was also implemented in Champions after I stopped playing. I would find this information optimistic but irrelevant, since it did not occur when it might have mattered.

The other reason the auction house in Champions was a failure was because there was actually no reason to buy things from other players. Every. Single. Quest. gave equipment as a reward, with a wide variety of attributes, and as a result I often had gear that perfectly matched my level and spec at all times, with gear slightly above my level waiting in my bank from higher-level quests that I would equip as soon as I leveled up. So I certainly didn't need to buy gear.

The quest rewards I didn't need were basically "disenchanted" into crafting materials -- since almost every quest gave rewards for all three "crafting" categories, giving me a steady stream of materials. This allowed me to have my crafting skill maxed out for whatever level range I was simply by using the by-products of my questing. Though it was ultimately pointless because I couldn't craft anything that actually had any useful stats. So I didn't need to buy crafting supplies either.

My character in Champions was so self-sufficient economically that I couldn't think of anything I might possibly want to buy on the auction house. Gear only increased my stats slightly, and since I was wtfpwning everything anyway, I didn't see the point of spending precious respec moneys on minor gear upgrades that might be one or two points more specialized in my spec than what I was wearing -- if I could even manage to figure out what items I was looking for, since as I mentioned, all of the items were extremely bizarre.

And when *I* can't think of anything I wanted to buy, why would other people have anything they want to buy? I did manage to sell a good amount of crafting mats, presumably to people who were powerleveling crafting on their alts in order to get the one piece of gear that was accidentally a secondary gear item with the stats of a primary gear item. But I'd imagine the situation most people have is that they post every item they have on the auction house while never actually buying anything. This isn't really a sustainable economic system.

In Star Trek Online, I've purchased a number of items. First of all, most quests are rewarding me with skill points and various credits, rather than items. So there are a number of holes in my equipment that are not upgraded to the highest level, and I'd like to repair these holes by buying things. Secondly, because your abilities are tied to your gear, I might want to purchase a particular type of weapon for my ship or a different type of kit for my main character. Thirdly, because the crafting in this game is nearly nonexistent (I'd consider it more of a badge-based upgrade/reputation system, personally, since it's all done by trading in items to NPCs) that particular aspect of the economy is a nonissue.

What number was I on? Oh right...

5. Character Customization.

This is a low blow, for a game like Champions that more or less depended on its powerful character creator. I can't tell you how many times I was browsing through the character creator and saw some really awesome costume piece, and was suddenly inspired to create a cool new character. I'd go playing around with different pieces, making first the head, then the chest, making them look just the way I wanted, then go to work on the legs, and realize that the leg piece to match the chest did not exist. I'd have to say that in the majority of cases where I wanted to make a character of a certain theme, using a set of matching pieces, not all of them actually existed.

Maybe this was less of a problem with male characters (I always get the feeling that the models for female characters are less polished just because fewer gamers are female and guys who play female characters don't care about these things as much?) but I really felt like rather than make a number of full costume sets that they separated into individual pieces, they took the male skins and checked to see which ones looked okay on the female models, and any of the ones that didn't they simply left out.

My character originally resorted to tiger stripes because the serpent stripe pattern that looked great on her head, chest and tail had no matching version for the legs for several months (and I think they only added it because I specifically complained about it so much) but even when they did add it, they only added it for normal-shaped legs, not the beast-style legs that I preferred to use. The awesome-looking two-tone serpent stripe pattern that existed for the tail and later the legs was not available for the chest or head, so I had to settle for the single version.

And why do I bring this up for Star Trek Online? Because in STO, everyone wears a uniform. Head pieces don't have to match each other. My only cares about my costume are its accuracy to the show.

Speaking of which, I learned of a snazzy costume option today, that you can unlock if you enter the code "JIH MUSHA SOH" at this site. It's the uniform from the Star Trek 2-6 movies. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with Bridge Officers (it's on the list, but it doesn't work when you try to select it) though I'm hoping they'll fix this soon.

It's too snazzy for me to not wear, though.

My bridge officers will stick to the TNG-movie uniforms they're currently wearing. I wish I could wear the uniforms from the actual TNG series, rather than choosing between the cloth movie ones and like 10 different versions of the ugly futuristic rubberized-looking uniforms. And while they're at it, make the black uniform colors more black. Everything feels like a shade of gray right now. I'm actually finding that the dark blues and brown-yellows are darker than the color that seems to be meant to be black. Maybe I should tweak my gamma settings. I have the Original Series uniforms from the preorder, but they don't work on bridge officers either, and the pants for that set make my character's calves look huge and bulky. Maybe I need to mess with some leg scaling options somewhere.

But as I was saying, Star Trek Online doesn't have to worry about very specialized costume pieces matching other very specialized costume pieces.

6. Group Content.

If I'm such a solo-oriented player, why was I so upset that Champions had no group content? Because it was the main feature I had been excited about before the game's release. Not for grouping with random strangers, but for grouping with the two people who matter most to me.

One of the main problems the three of us (Khoa, Best Friend and myself) have when playing MMOs together is how much each of us actually wants to play. I tend to play the most, though Khoa can level an alt to the level cap in an amazingly short time if he really gets inspired, and Best Friend tends to play the least. It is very difficult for us to play together when we do play the same MMO, because Khoa and I have a tendency to progress faster and the three of us are only ever in the same level range if we're deliberately limiting ourselves for that purpose. So you know, if we ARE playing together, it's usually two alts and one person's main.

One of the coolest things I heard about Champions before it came out was the Sidekick system, where you could scale your level up or down to someone in your group, so that your stats would act as if you were their level. You still wouldn't have the same number of skills, but you wouldn't be a completely useless follower just leeching loot (or the opposite, you wouldn't be a high-level player wtfpwning everything and making it no fun for the lowbie) and I thought, this is perfect! I could play as much as I wanted to, and level up as high as I want, and then when we want to play together, I could just sidekick myself down to their level and we could help each other out with group quests.

It was only made better by the other group-related news I heard, that instances would scale based on how many players you had, so that you could run them with three people, but if you went in with five, more adds would spawn and increase the difficulty. Perfect! Three-person instances! And we just happen to run as a three-person team, with Khoa preferring to be a tank and myself the healer.

Unfortunately, it turned out that pretty much everything in the game was soloable, and you didn't actually need to be in a group for anything. I'm pretty sure all of these 3-person instances they were talking about were at end-game, out of a fear that people would quit once they reached the level cap. However, none of us were patient enough to stick with the solo content long enough to get to anything that we might have needed to work together to take down.

Now, every single quest in Star Trek Online is instanced and scripted. Every system you explore will consist of "enter system, complete objectives, then leave" and when other players enter the instance to begin the quest at the same time, you are automatically grouped with them, and the number of enemies will scale with the number of players, resulting in epic space battles.

However, I turned off this auto-grouping, because the inevitable "gogogogo" nature of MMO strangers was interfering with my ability to enjoy the story behind the quests. The other players had already sprinted on ahead and repaired all of the geological survey equipment or whatever before I was even done reading the quest text. The auto-grouping is not very intelligent about what TYPE of quests it groups you for, and will occasionally stick you in a 5-person group for a mission that has absolutely no combat, leaving you to desperately follow along as the other players complete all of the objectives.

Star Trek Online doesn't need group content so much. Your character is quite self-sufficient in its abilities, and considering that the shows were pretty much built on the concept of one ship and its crew against crazy unknown situations, it's downright bizarre to be working together with other ships to solve them. "Solo MMO" seems like an oxymoron, but I rather like the idea. Having other people there opens up the possibility of multiplayer if I so desire in the future, but for the most part I'm exploring the galaxy by myself.

However, because every single mission scales based on the number of players, if Best Friend wanted to play with me we could do our quests together and still have the same level of difficulty, rather than things becoming trivially easy just because there are two of us.

In conclusion...

I do not believe that Star Trek Online suffers from the same problems that Champions did. I have a lot of hope for the game, and I think it has a lot of potential. Time will tell if it turns out to have different problems later on, or if the same problems crop up when I reach higher levels. I'll definitely be posting again, whether my opinion on the matter changes or not.

So I'm mentally writing this post about how I think people are unfairly allowing their experiences with Cryptic's last MMO to color their opinions about the current one, and how I don't think STO is suffering from any of the problems that made me give up on Champions, but I don't have time to actually write it at the moment. I'll distract you with some screenshots. I've been taking a lot of them, as I'm still in the phase of "oooh what's that? Ooh so pretty!" so I'm hitting that PrtSc button quite often, looking through the pics I took later on.

My ship on my first open beta character was named the Genesis, because a random ship-name generator came up with "The Genesis Spider" as its first option, and I thought it was awesome. My second Open Beta ship (when I made a new character, I still haven't made it to Lieutenant Commander) was named the Antares. I've always felt a connection to Antares because it was the name of my group at Space Camp when I was a kid (I named my draenei hunter's red wasp pet Antares, felt it was the most fitting pet name I've ever had and couldn't get myself to replace her pet after that). But my ship upon release is the U.S.S. Silverwing. Rather than naming my captain Kiryn Silverwing like I did in Beta, I took the more direct Re'Vek translation and named her Kiryn Ka'dae.

I still haven't gotten the hang of actually using the Expose/Exploit system as it's meant to be used, I'm sure. My special attack button starts flashing sometimes, and I haven't yet quite figured out why it does so, but I've figured out that when it does, and my sniper-shot special attack is not on cooldown, I can hit somebody for like 5 times as much damage as the shot would normally do and it makes them disintegrate instantly. Cool, huh? I spent some time trying to get a good shot of this, kinda like the ship-explosion shockwaves, which I now know are the warp core going critical.

I've been doing lots of things in-game. Like fighting things in space. It hasn't gotten old yet, and I keep getting new abilities and more awesome gear and that just makes it more interesting.

Like trying to scan for anomalies, and no matter what I climb on or what angle I approach it, I just have to accept that some of them are inside places I can't get into. =(

Speaking of bugs... I can apparently see inside of people's heads by positioning my camera just right. I have another that shows the inside of someone's teeth, but I don't think I'll creep you out twice in one post.

And I've been visiting all kinds of crazy planets with my crew. I scan things with my tricorder, my officers stand around looking threatening.

(You can tell which two are expendable red-shirts because their uniforms don't match) I won't lie, I took a lot of pictures of this place the first time I went in. All of the bright shiny objects, the mathematical formulas and star charts hovering holographically on every surface...

The hallways with ceilings made of stars... Then I explored some more systems and realized that pretty much every "laboratory" type place uses pretty much the same graphics.

But they're pretty graphics!

You don't know how much of an effect it has on me to open up the "Credits" section on a big-name game like that and see the names of people I used to work with at other companies. These aren't just names taking up space in a section they're legally required to include somewhere, these are *real people* who happen to be my friends. It is for them that I want this game to succeed. It is for them that I want the company to thrive. So if you're wondering why I'm rapidly turning into an STO fangirl, and refuse to believe that it's a genuinely good game, you can blame that for my reason.

I've been doing some research and discovered a bunch of things that aren't immediately obvious upon first starting the game.

1. How to turn on auto-fire.

I saw the auto-fire options in the options menu when I was originally poking around in there, but couldn't figure out why my weapons weren't auto-firing. Last night, I tried right-clicking on my ship's phasers, and breathed a sigh of relief. Before then, I'd been spamming Shift to fire both phasers whenever they were off cooldown, and my thumb was really starting to hurt.

2. How to turn off display of armor and kits.

I was really sad when I got my first body armor and saw that it replaced my uniform. I'd spent so long getting the colors on my uniform just right! I was starting to consider unequipping my armor whenever I was in starbase so that I could run around in a proper uniform, because I really HATE how the armor looks on my character. However, I just discovered that, like above, it is possible to right-click on your armor or kit to hide it so that you just display your uniform.

3. What the hell do these ship console stats do??

I kept getting these Science ship consoles that had weird stats like +7.5 Astrometrics or +12 Spatial Anomaly, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what they were for. Apparently, they add ranks to certain skills (i.e. talents) that in turn buff certain abilities. Unfortunately, it appears that the randomized drops are utterly useless most of the time, because my character only got to level 8 Lieutenant, and the only science consoles I found so far were buffing skills that I can't even learn until I'm an Admiral (level 40+).

Apparently you can see which skills affect your abilities by looking at their more in-depth information on the P screen.

4. This game has nothing to do with the new rebooted movie.

I was reading through the history over the weekend, and discovered that, despite my assumptions that it was tied to the new rebooted franchise, this game doesn't have anything to do with the alternate universe created when Spock went back in time in the new movie. It actually takes place in the original timeline, a decade or two after the future part of that movie exists. I.E. Spock is apparently dead, and the Romulan Empire collapsed after its home planet was destroyed -- they're in the process of rebuilding. The Klingons were at peace with the Federation at one point but when the Klingons attacked the Romulans in their moment of weakness and the Federation defended them, it all went downhill.

I also hear rumors about the Cardassians rebuilding their home planet after the Dominion War, and that they'll eventually be another playable faction. Considering I never watched DS9 or Voyager in-depth, I don't really know many of the details of what that means.

I read this article on Massively about chaotic starting areas (which linked to this blog post) and it really made me sit back and say "you know, you're right!" I don't really have much I can add to what he already said.

Something about the STO starting area really felt jarring, and I didn't realize what it was until now. Here I am, trying to read my skill tooltips and figure out what all of these buttons do, and there are red lights flashing and people commanding me to hurry to some other place so I can do something INCREDIBLY URGENT. The game is basically shouting "gogogogogo" at me, telling me to hurry up, shouting at me to GO FASTER DO IT NAO like some bad WoW pickup group.

And that's when the conscious part of my mind forcibly breaks the illusion, and reminds the rest of me that there isn't REALLY a time limit, there isn't REALLY any urgency, the enemies standing there will continue standing there making threatening gestures at me from a safe distance until I have taken the time to figure out what I'm doing. It destroys the whole point of plopping me in the middle of all that action in the first place. Consider immersion destroyed as I learn the controls at my own pace and sigh exasperatedly at the guy who tells me that I need to hurry.

When I had to return to my ship and they stood there and explained what the three bridge officer types did before they would let me beam back to my ship and save the day, I was confused. HURRY UP! FIGHT THESE BORG! Okay, now stop and click through these three sets of dialogue boxes where we tell you things you already know... (the bridge officer powers are quite intuitive since you just read the descriptions of the three classes when you made your own character five minutes ago) OKAY NOW FIGHT THESE SHIPS!!!

It's not just STO and Champions. I noticed the same thing in Allods. Here I am, trying to figure out what this spell does, trying to figure out how to use that wand I just got as a quest reward (I never did figure it out, I eventually just gave up), and they're like "WE'RE UNDER ATTACK! WE'VE GOTTA EVACUATE!!"

I miss the old days of the WoW starting area. I for one don't need to feel like I'm a hero when I'm level ONE. The whole concept is absurd. I'm level ONE. Level ONE people don't save the day. They beat up boars and hope to one day BECOME a legendary hero.

So yeah, those explosions... they kinda hurt.

I was in a mission with a bunch of people, and that meant there were a BUNCH of enemy ships, as difficulty seems to scale with the number of people present. I flew in first, and I was getting so hammered that my shields dropped just as we took down one of them -- it exploded and reduced my health to 5%. As I was flying away, I noticed that my ship was on fire.

Luckily, I took advantage of the powers of my brand new engineering officer to do some emergency repairs on the shield, and all was well again.

No, I haven't been playing since my last post, this is just another of the random screenshots that I had from last time, that I totally forgot about before.

Now, I'm going to be busy with non-gaming stuff for a while -- for my birthday, dad got me the DS9 model kit (with fiber optic lighting system!) that hasn't been in production for many years. I had the non-fiber-optic version of it when I was a kid, and though I never really watched DS9 much, the opening music never failed to bring a tear to my eye, and the beautiful design of the spacestation itself made that my favorite model. I don't know what happened to that one (it was lost years ago, my memory fails when trying to figure out when), but now I shall go enjoy some nostalgia by building a new one. I'm going to need some model glue and a soldering iron....

So I played a bit more tonight, and didn't have any further issues with crashing and whatnot, this time being very careful to shut down any other programs running in the background -- like I said, WoW handles me running firefox, mediamonkey and skype in the background at the same time and alt-tabbing between them at will, but STO is in open beta and is considerably more unstable. Which makes me a little sad. The music in this game tends to be rather ignorable, and I was having more fun playing my own MP3s in the background.

Anyway, I zipped around, completing that mission I had crashed out of twice before, and the one after it, and then going on to complete my patrol of various star systems nearby.

Here's a pic of the first mission's system:

On the left side, a ship that's being attacked by space pirates. On the right side, an anomaly that I can loot. Ooh, sparklies. Ship under attack can wait -- for science!! *charges towards the anomaly*

And of course, they did wait, and here's a pic of the space combat:

Blow up the ship and it makes a HUGE explosion, with shockwaves and everything:

Though that pic is technically from a later mission, it took me a while before I could get a good shot with the shockwave in it.

I found a tribble in the ship I beamed over to, and found a creepy bug when I tried to let my best buddy Zara the Tactical Ensign use it:

Then we finish the mission, warp back to Sector Space, which is basically a galaxy map that you can fly around in, with exaggerated models of the various systems. Each system is an instanced mission, and I found the instanced nature of a number of these to be rather annoying.

In one, I flew in, was auto-joined with a group of other players, started flying around and shooting the enemies, and then the leader of the team booted me for no reason... I had to leave and rejoin in order to finish my mission.

Another mission had me flying around destroying pirate spacedocks all by myself -- it was a little time-consuming to do without any other ships to help.

A third mission had me and three other people escorting a mining ship that got lost in an asteroid belt back to the mining outpost. I've really got no clue why this required four people, since the freighter would only follow one person, and no enemy ships attacked. It was pretty much a quest of "wait around as the guy the ship randomly chose figures out how to use his map and flies in the right direction."

A fourth mission, which I enjoyed quite a bit, had me running around talking to several different people, and then the game basically quizzed me on what they had said, in order to prove that the federation cares about the problems facing the people of this world. I'm hoping to see more of those non-combat missions here. Blowing up ships is fun and all, but when I remember Star Trek, I remember them trying to AVOID conflict as much as possible.

I find myself wishing that instead of being an MMO, this could be a single-player game that takes place in a time period where flying around, exploring the galaxy and making friends with new, unknown races could actually work. But for the meantime, I don't think I'll be playing much more of the Star Trek beta. There's a ton of things to explore here, and while I do love testing it and helping them make the game better, I'd rather save the rest of the exploration for later, so that I'm not burned out on it when the game actually releases.

I'll leave you with one other picture. I got a third crewmember (I let him be Science just to be well-rounded) and he turned out to be a Male Of Unknown Species named Zar. This will not do, I say. My Tactical officer is already named Zara, I need to rename this guy. I was flipping through the Random name generator, cringing at the completely unpronounceable names it was giving me, trying to figure out who programmed these things. I mean, I know that he's an unknown species, but does his name have to be completely incomprehensible? One of the few that I could actually pronounce:

That's right. Ensign Gayer Coed, the Science Officer.

I was trying to figure out how to take screenshots that included the UI. Again, another failing that STO shares with Champions -- Sometimes I WANT to take a screenshot with the UI visible, did you ever think of THAT, Cryptic?? Anyway, I was trying to figure out how to take a screenshot of this, and I didn't want to lose the name, so... apparently, you can only rename your Bridge Officers once? It wouldn't let me rename him again afterwards, and didn't really explain why. I mean, why even let me open up that window if everything's just going to be grayed out? Why not just gray out the "Rename" button entirely? So... my Science Officer in the Open Beta shall forever be named Gayercoed.

Just skimming through Blue posts, and Daelo cheered me up:

"The incorrectly flipped levels on the two colors of Maraudon will be addressed in a future patch. I also fixed the maggot generator in Orange. Thanks for the reports."

Good to see that he isn't ignoring annoying bugs just because they're for low-level content.

...But when I tried to log in (last night I had crashed in the middle of the first mission they sent me out of stardock, to rescue some ship) the whole game froze immediately, disconnected me soon after, and then I probably spent a good ten or fifteen minutes trying to get the program to shut down, while my music player kept playing the same 15-second piece of "Different People" by No Doubt over and over and OVER again. I'm rather surprised that it didn't blue-screen. It made the noise it sometimes makes when it's about to, but it managed to hold together. *pats computer lovingly*

So, let me talk about my thoughts through the tutorial parts.

Firstly, the game DOES NOT take place in the timeline of the recent reboot movie, as I had originally assumed. It does take place in that same alternate universe, but instead it occurs in the future, about 30 years after the last Next Generation movie, at some point in the 25th century. I only discovered this when I asked Commander Akira Sulu who the hell he was, and he told me that his great-grandfather served with Kirk on the Enterprise. And then some people on General Chat started discussing stuff they read from the forums about the timeline of this game.

So the ship combat, as everyone else is saying, is quite fun and extremely different from any other MMO I've played. You basically have four shield sections (forward, left, right, and back, ignoring the fact that this is three-dimensional combat and you should really have an upper and lower shield too) and your weapons align rather nicely with these zones. Photon torpedos can only be fired at targets in front of you. The front phasers can be fired at targets in the front and sides, and back phasers can be fired at targets in the back and sides -- allowing you to overlap your two phasers by putting your side to the enemy. However, phasers are more effective against shields, while photon torpedoes are more effective against the ship after the shields fall -- and it's not so easy to turn your ship towards the enemy in time to finish them off with photon torpedoes after you've weakened their shields.

I thought ship combat was rather slow at first, but that's before they told me about Full Impulse power that let me zip around at high speed out of combat by diverting more power to the engines.

Now ground combat, I can see why people are saying the animations aren't that great, but it does FEEL rather fitting. The mechanics reward you for ducking down behind cover, for rolling to the side (flashbacks of Galaxy Quest, the rolling helps) and the combat throws the idea of having a resource out the window. Your attacks are only limited by their cooldowns, not by any kind of mana or energy you have to manage in the meantime. You have a health bar and a forcefield bar that acts like a second health bar, and regenerates quickly when you hide behind cover.

You also have a whole party of NPCs following you around. In the tutorial I just had the one officer following me around, but once I got out and on to the next mission (where I froze soon after) I had that officer plus several people labeled only as "Security" who exist only to fill out the group. In any other games, these "Bridge Officers" would be considered Pets. You can buy and sell them on the auction house (there's something vaguely disturbing about buying and selling people, even if they are just virtual people) and give them promotions and level up their skills, rename them (they come with randomized names) and give them their own backstories if you so desire. I am my own 5-man party, with little pet controls to get them to assist me, and ways to command them to walk somewhere specific if I'd like to get flanking bonuses for shooting at an enemy from multiple directions at once. All of your pets have special attacks based on whether they are engineering, science or tactical, and different strengths and weaknesses based on what species they are and what gear they have equipped.

I found a couple of anomalies, and they're apparently nothing more than gathering nodes -- you see it flashing, go over to it and press F, and you loot it for an item that you take back to starbase to use in some kind of crafting system to improve your gear. But I haven't actually explored that part, because my game crashed =(

Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the game soon. I'm hoping my issues are just being caused by my attempts to burn DVDs in the background while I play. WoW wouldn't have a problem with that, but STO is still rather unstable.

I'll probably talk later about the ship/ground combat in STO, but I wanted to take a moment now to mention something I meant to include when I was talking about the character creator last night: it is ANNOYING AS HELL to try to change anything, because my character is turning her head back and forth every couple of seconds.

I'm trying to adjust something like the width of her head, so I want to look at her head from the front. But no, she's turning her head back and forth like there's something fascinating moving around off in the distance that she has to watch. Forcing me to CONSTANTLY turn the model around to keep her oriented properly. The reason for this is that the character creator uses the same idle animations. I went through all of them in the body editor (thankfully there were more poses to choose from than there were in Champions) but in every single one of them, the character was constantly scanning the horizon, and my ability to edit minute details on her head was suffering because of it.

They need to either tweak the idle animations for the character creator, or give me a little pause button somewhere. The character creator has a lot of options, yes, but it pisses me the hell off because of this stupid animation issue.

Okay, that's all. It's out of my system now.

Overall, I like the game. It MIGHT just be related to the fact that I've been spending the past couple of months watching old Star Trek episodes.

Firstly, the menus etc. are obviously just copied from Champions, I recognize many things including the sucky auction house and the keybindings dialogue. Which obviously means that it has many of the same issues right off the bat -- you can't save keybindings between one character and the next; playing at higher resolutions makes the UI painfully small, but increasing the UI scale breaks a number of parts of the interface (the buttons that control my away team didn't scale properly, and overlapped each other); the button to cancel your target is the same one that brings up the game menu (though to be fair, that's a failing that even WoW still has), and I still have not figured out if there even is a way to use emotes that doesn't involve navigating several menus (there's an emote menu that lets you choose from a list, but trying to type that emote in chat just resulted in an "unknown command" error).

I do like the character creator quite a bit, though after all the hype I've heard, there was not as much customization as I was expecting. Sure, there are several dozen different types of ears to choose from, but what does it matter when the vast majority of them are horrifically ugly? I smirked to myself about the ease at which you can create night elves in STO, since there are long, pointy ears as well as extra-long eyebrows and face tattoos.

I rather like the character I made. You see, when I was a child, I considered myself quite an artist, because I favored the romantic notions associated with such people. But I have since discovered that in truth, I am a scientist, discovered that I am not so much creative as precise. Even though my career is not traditionally science-based, being able to use the scientific method to narrow down my understanding of some elusive glitch fills me with great joy. Combine this with the fact that my most cherished times in WoW were playing as a healer, and I feel a certain amount of serendipity that the Science Officer class in Star Trek Online is the healing class. I mean, it makes sense, because they're the doctors as well, but the way this concept meshes with game mechanics feels very harmonious. The fact that I identify this strongly with the class probably means I'm never even going to THINK about creating one of the others, despite my strong altoholic tendencies.

Meet Lieutenant Kiryn Silverwing, though technically when I took this picture she was still only an Ensign a few minutes in to the tutorial.

I'll finish this tomorrow. I'm tired and I wanna go to sleep =P