I had a mission that I’m pretty sure was a story mission. It told me to fly somewhere that, surprisingly, was in the same sector as Earth Starbase, so I didn’t have to spend fifteen minutes flying to the other end of the galaxy to do my next quest. Honestly, where are the quest hubs in this game? It’s great that I can talk to most of my quest givers from anywhere, but that doesn’t help me when I’ve only discovered three places I can access the auction house, and none of them are anywhere near where I’m questing. I can “hearth” back to Earth Starbase once per hour, but getting back out to where I was questing can be a pain.

So I flew to the other end of the sector to do my quest, logged into the map, and hey look, “Go destroy 4 Klingon squadrons hiding in this asteroid belt.” Progress: Klingon Squadrons defeated: 0/4.

*sigh* okay. Fine. As fun as the ship combat is in this game, it’s getting really repetitive. Fly in, hit spacebar to turn on auto-fire, shoot a volley of photon torpedoes, emergency power to weapons, Tyken’s Rift or a Tachyon Beam. Fly around in circles alternating torpedoes and dual phaser beams until it ’splodes.

So I fly in to the nearest group of enemies, hey look, they’re disruptor turrets set up on the asteroids. Despite their lack of shields, they take about as long to take down each as a ship. But guess what? They don’t count for my quest, since they’re not ships. After taking down two groups of these things without finding a single ship, I zoom out on the edge of the belt and fly around looking for an actual SHIP. I fly in and kill it, but the two groups of turrets surrounding this one ship come close to tearing my ship apart like tissue paper.

I limp away from the battle and head towards the next one. Again, a ship surrounded by two groups of turrets. Except that this time it’s a warship. And one of my shields is down before I’m even within range to shoot at the thing. I’m really not in the mood to go pick off the turrets one at a time so that I can get at the ships inside. I logged off mid-combat and decided to take a break from the game until it feels fun again.

I’m really not in the mood for ship combat, but there isn’t anything else to do in that game! It’s not like I can go fly off to some ocean world and enjoy some fishing-related shore leave. I can’t saunter onto the holodeck and explore a sherlock holmes-style murder mystery. I can’t spend an evening leveling up my crafting, because there really isn’t any. I can’t even roll an alt to explore a different form of gameplay, because there are only three classes and they don’t really make a sizeable difference in how the game is played.

I can shoot Klingons in space; I can shoot Klingons on the ground. I can shoot Klingons who are NPCs; I can shoot Klingons who are other players. If you want to shoot Klingons, you’ve come to the right place.

However, if you remember Star Trek for all of its “encountering new life forms and new civilizations” bit, well, there’s not a lot of that to be found around here. Even the star cluster repeatable randomized missions aren’t unknown, despite the quest that leads me to them saying something about exploring the unknown, because I swear half of them have me saving some random colonists from hey guess what? Klingons. Or one of their affiliate races at random. Or some other race I’ve never heard of, but “sir, we can’t let them get their hands on this technology because they’re (Race X)!” as if I know what that means.

In WoW, I can check my auctions. Level my professions. Maybe I’ll learn how to cook! Or go fishing in Ironforge, in search of the rare and elusive Old Ironjaw. Or maybe I’ll go fight some ice trolls and get to level ten. Or maybe I’ll decide I’m tired of snow, and go do some quests in a forested night elf area instead. So many options!

But for now, I’m going to head off to the doctor. Stupid doctor canceled my appointment tomorrow and I can’t get another until Thursday. Maybe if I march over there and tell them that I probably have strep throat and they need to give me antibiotics so I can stop infecting people and go back to work, they’ll get me an appointment. Bah. Stupid doctors.

This afternoon, after much thought, I decided that $15 isn’t really all THAT much money anyway, and re-opened my WoW account. Amazing how a month away from a game can make you see every little thing from a new light.

I immediately hopped over to Argent Dawn to make a character in the US chapter of Tamarind’s new blog community guild, Single Abstract Noun. Spent a bit of time ditzing around on a draenei hunter, but decided that I’d played too many draenei, and too many hunters, and that maybe this might be a good chance for me to finally get a gnome above level 15 (and the thought of riding another elephant was making me sick — I’ve never had a mechanostrider before!). And what’s more adorable than a little gnome warrior tanking big giant scary monsters?

So I spent the better part of the afternoon trying to come up with a name for my little gnomeling. The bad part is, this server’s been around since 2004, and anything resembling a good name was taken a long time ago. I was sorting through plant/spice-related names because things like Hazel and Cinnamon sounded good, and I thought maybe Paprika sounded like a good name for a red-haired gnome girl — but then I remembered Tam’s story about his troll named Kumquat, and decided against it. (Though honestly, given it’s a real word, it was probably taken years ago, I didn’t even check.)

So I changed a letter so that it would nickname into something more palatable, and my new gnome warrior Kaprika was born. Though with that letter change, now her name looks like I was going for an alternate spelling of Caprica. Dammit, why does this keep happening to me? First my dwarf rogue, now my gnome warrior. I never even watched that show! It just happens to make a really good character name!

Anyway….

They weren’t kidding about the the neutral mobs changing in the starting areas — I could just run right through those frost trolls, up to their leader, kill him for the loot I needed, then run back out of the cave without any of the trolls bothering me. Not like before, where I had to clear the place until I got to him. And it’s the weirdest thing, I picked up the quest to bring the scalding mornbrew back to the town “before it got cold,” but it doesn’t have a timer on it any more! I could carry that thing in my bags for however long I damn well please! They didn’t even bother to change the quest description so that it’s not telling you to hurry any more!

But overall, I’m really enjoying myself. This is probably just about the best guild I could hope for. Everybody’s off doing their own thing, laughing and chatting and not caring how fast everyone else is progressing, and it feels like you know everybody. What’s more, everyone loves to write and read blogs about the game, so the literacy count is amazingly high. I really hope this guild survives so that years down the road, I can say I was there from the start.

I’ve been putting a lot of thought into this lately. I can theoretically see a future in which I am subscribed to two MMOs at the same time. I like STO enough to want to keep it around and support it, yet WoW is constantly pulling me back — both in changed game mechanics that make me really want to go run battlegrounds with my level 40-something dwarf female subtlety rogue, and on the social side that I’d love to be able to join the US chapter of Tamarind’s blogger guild.

But realistically, I barely play a few hours of any particular game per week these days. I’m not sure that amount of playtime is worth $15 a month, and I feel increasingly guilty that I’m barely level 15 in STO after playing for over a month. I barely play at all these days. I’ve been trying to get through Warcraft 3 (for the third or fourth time, I really suck at RTS games — I’ll get to Frozen Throne someday) and maybe eventually beat Torchlight (I do not understand all of these people complaining that the story mode was “too short”) and I’ve got a list of other games I’d like to play too. It’s too much. Especially when I spend the majority of my free time sitting around sighing to myself about how bored I am, and don’t really want to play anything I’ve got sitting on my computer, and end up spending my weekend watching random TV episodes on Hulu.

I know in my heart that I will eventually return to WoW. It is familiar, my friends play it, I can talk to them about playing it. I can read blogs about playing it. I know the game inside and out to the point where I *understand* what people are saying when they’re talking/blogging about it, even when I’m not quite familiar with their class.

For now, I can hold off with WoW, knowing that there’s nothing new since the last time I played. But I know that when Cataclysm is released, I will no longer be able to resist. Will I have enough time to play STO for enough hours that I don’t feel guilty about spending my money? Or will I make some kind of justification like “well, even if I only play a handful of hours a month, it’s still cheaper than seeing a new movie at the theater” and keep subscribing anyway?

STO is a good game, it’s a beautiful game, it’s a fun game, but I think I’m a bit burned out on hobbies in general. I just can’t get excited about much of anything these days.

So there was this survey, asking all kinds of questions about what we liked about the game, etc. I realize that I really REALLY like this game, and I’d like it to continue to be fun. People complain about a lack of content, but I’m not even level 14 yet, and I’m leveling slowly, because I’m playing casually, maybe an hour or two every other night. I’d like to go into more detail about what I’d like to see in this game in the future.

1. Missions that take place on your own ship.

I know they’re working hard at adding in the rest of the ship, but I will be sorely disappointed if it turns out there is nothing to do there but walk around and check out ten-forward and see what engineering looks like. Like the bridge, especially when the bridge doesn’t really look much like a bridge. Things are far too big and spread out, I’m used to bridges that are smaller and more personal.

Why would I want to hang out there when there’s nothing to do and my chair-sitting emotes are REALLY difficult to position properly, and completely impossible to perform naturally? I mean honestly, who sprints up to a chair, stands on top of it, then carefully turns around and… jumps and rolls to the side (because the person controlling them accidentally double-tapped a movement key when trying to minutely adjust their position) then sprints back up to the chair, jumps on top of it again, carefully turns around again, sits down with their legs clipping into the chair, leaning on one arm looking thoughtful despite the fact that the elbow holding up that arm is resting about three inches to the left of the armrest? Who then says “screw it” and ends up accidentally rotating around so that their legs are going through the back of the chair, because the person controlling them has recently been playing a different game where right-click-drag moves the camera.

Sitting in a chair should not be this difficult. Especially when sitting in the captain’s chair is such a core part of Star Trek.

Anyway. I seem to have gone off on a tangent there.

It seems to me, while watching old episodes of Star Trek (into season 3 of Next Generation now, seeing a lot of very classic episodes I remember from when I was little) that the interesting things take place in three places. Right now, only two of those are being used. Either they encounter enemy ships, they beam down to a planet/spacestation where something weird is going on, or something invades their ship and they have to fight back.

I want to see missions where we arrive at some planet, and rather than the mission being about the planet or the stuff orbiting it, have some previously unknown lifeform infiltrate my engineering deck and make me run down there with my senior officers and solve the problem.

2. Auction House.

This is going to remain on my list until I see some improvement. I really like the system as it is now (it’s MUCH better than in Champions, despite being an identical interface — I blame the item names), but it’s STILL nearly impossible to search for things effectively.

My first suggestion is to give more options to narrow down item results, when there can be endless pages of the EXACT SAME item.

There remains no sorting mechanism of any kind, so you end up having to browse the pages until you find an item at the right price. You wish to purchase a Mk IV Photon Torpedo launcher? Well great, there’s like 50 pages of them, and the lowest priced one is located on page 12. Have fun!

Allow us to filter results by price, so that we can at least remove all of the options that are above what we are willing to pay.

And while you’re at it, let us sort the results by price too!

The price-per-item isn’t really an issue with this game, since the vast majority of items I’m interested in buying do not stack. I don’t really care for the “crafting” system in this game (which is another issue entirely) and I find far more consumables as drops than I ever have reason to use, so I have no need to purchase things that do stack. But if you do improve on the crafting system, giving us a separate column for price per item and letting us sort by that too.

Now this is a pie-in-the-sky idea that I’ve had for MMOs for a while now. If you’re going to take away the bid price, why do we even have to buy the whole stack? Why can’t I just put up a full stack of something, and then if someone only needs one, they only buy one, and leave the other four up there for other people to buy? Then you don’t even need to show the total stack price at all, just have the price ALWAYS be price per item.

Now, my other idea is in regards to making it easier to find different items if you don’t know what they’re called. This is based on a WoW auction mod I once used, where if you searched for the word “Glyph” then it would first give you a list of which items are on the auction house that contain that word, then you could click on one to see the results for that item. It actually made it a lot easier to find items whose names were partial names of other items, like if you wanted to buy Runecloth without also seeing every single Runecloth Bag and Runecloth Headband out there.

This kind of idea would be great for STO as well, where I could search for “torpedo” and it would show me photon torpedoes and quantum torpedoes and whatever else kind of torpedoes out there — and then I could choose a rank of the item type I want and it would only show me THAT rank, instead of currently when I try to search for Mk II weapons and it has Mk III weapons thrown in there too, because “Mk III” CONTAINS the text “Mk II”!

It would also reduce the problem I’ve been having where every single item has a really long name, and you simply have to type out the entire thing in order to find the item you’re looking for, because otherwise you get 15 million unsorted results of 20 different types of items. The current categories are lacking (“ship weapons” doesn’t narrow things down very much), though I’m finding the sorting by “level” to be useful in fixing the Mk II issue above, and the quality filter has helped me quite a bit in situations where white items and green items share the same name (which happens a lot with crafted items — you have to actually look at the item tooltips to figure out which item is which).

I think I’m done ranting about this — for now.

3. Fix the Enemy Signal Contacts in Sector Space.

I quite often find myself in Sector Space, having just completed a mission, feeling like I want to take a short break, maybe head downstairs to the kitchen to grab myself a drink.

Why is the game punishing me for taking a break at a time when it would be natural to want to take a break?

Because if I were to go AFK in Sector Space, an NPC Enemy Contact would invariably wander too close to me within 30 seconds and I’d automatically load into a hostile map with Klingons shooting at me. And I’d probably be destroyed rather quickly if I were not present to respond.

Now mind, there’s no actual penalty for death in this game (yet!) so it wouldn’t be much of an inconvenience, it’s just ANNOYING.

Why do I feel that it’s safer to go refill my beverage when I’m in the middle of a ground-mission spacestation that’s about to explode, because no matter how urgent they make these missions sound, none of them have time limits and as long as you’re out of patrol range of the enemy mobs, you’re in no danger whatsoever? Whereas after I finish a mission, when I’m not really in the middle of something at all, I can’t go off for 30 seconds without a stupid enemy contact loading right on top of me?

Seriously, there have been bugs I have been unable to submit because I got loaded into an Enemy Contact right in the middle of writing them, which closed the window and removed everything I wrote.

I’m sorry, it’s just RIDICULOUS. I don’t know what reason there could possibly be for pulling me out of sector space and tossing me into combat without my consent. Is it trying to convince me to log out when I’m not physically at my computer, in order to reduce server load? Because it’s definitely doing that. It’s my understanding that anything that encourages players to LEAVE the game is bad game design, but what do I know?

I’m just going to have to get into the habit of staying in the mission instance I was just in until I want to go to my next one, to avoid this issue until they do something about it.

And some more minor things that bug me:

4. Why are my weapons drawn when I beam in to a starbase?

Honestly, this is a minor thing, but it annoys me nonetheless. I beam on to Earth Starbase brandishing my Phaser Sniper Rifle Mk II as if the place was in the middle of being taken over by Klingons. You’d think the game would have some way of knowing if a ground situation is combat-based or not.

5. What?? My hearthstone doesn’t cool down when I’m offline?

Last time I played, I used my Transwarp to return to Earth Starbase, so that the next time I logged in, it would be off cooldown so that I could use it when I was done playing next time.

Tonight, I finished my mission, and it started to get late, so I flipped to my second action tray and… wait, why does it still have 8 minutes left on its timer? Guess I’ll go write a blog post while I wait — OH WAIT. ENEMY SIGNAL CONTACTS. I can’t be logged in, I can’t be logged out, make up your mind!

6. Away Team really should be in some kind of consistent order.

I was playing around with being support-based tonight, equipping a kit that gave me two abilities. One to increase resistance to physical damage while increasing your own physical damage, and the other to increase resistance to energy damage. I placed my officers so they were surrounding the enemies, then basically ran around tossing buffs on my bridge officers, commanding them to focus fire on certain targets, sniping anything that happened to get Exposed but otherwise not worrying about shooting things myself.

I realized that my bridge officers are almost never in the same order in the interface. Sometimes my engineering officer is first. Sometimes my tactical officer is first. This is making it really hard to quickly target and buff people using the interface. I tried using the “target teammate” keybinds (I stopped using them for that in WoW, I usually use them for extra abilities, but I haven’t had enough abilities to need the F keys in STO yet) and those keybinds don’t seem to work at all. Maybe they only target players and not NPC bridge officers? Seems a little odd. Not that this would help me a LOT, because I’d still have to re-learn what order they’re in with each mission (one time they even rearranged themselves during a single mission, when I loaded from one map into a different one), it would just help me not have to click on them every time.

So I have decided, now that my ship can carry enough officers that some of them can specialize in certain roles (Lieutenant Commanders can have six bridge officers!), that my Klingon science officer shall remain on my ship, and I shall get a different science officer (who is able to carry a tribble) with me on my away team missions. I don’t really need TWO ground-based science officers who can heal anyway.

I find myself strangely attached to my bridge officers. Not just because I’ve spent points in them (because, honestly, that’s not going to matter at end-game, there’s a skill point cap for your own character but there isn’t one for bridge officers) but because I designed them, I named them, they have personality! My Klingon officer K’Rina is the one I chose to promote to Lieutenant, because my new ship has ONE Lieutenant science station, and this spatial anomaly ability she had called Tyken’s Rift sounded fascinating.

And it is so, so awesome.

The screenshot doesn’t do it justice.

I can use this thing every minute and a half, and it lasts for 8 seconds, dealing damage and draining energy from all nearby ships. And it looks AWESOME.

I find myself using it every time it’s off cooldown. Not because it’s an overpowered weapon, I can’t even tell if it’s making a difference in combat at all. I use it simply because I think it looks awesome, and I love to see a giant rift in space open up in the middle of my enemies.

And isn’t that how a game should be? As long as I’m able to fight the mobs I run into without dying, I don’t see any need to care about how much damage I’m doing or how effective I am in combat. I’m just flying around, having fun and shooting things. I went into a fleet mission (which is basically a Public Quest, I have some concept of what those are despite their absence in WoW) last night, and flew around shooting at Gorn ships with 3-4 other people. I didn’t even group with them, or talk with them at all. We just flew around and blew things up. It was great.

And this morning, when I was researching what category of in-game ship the Defiant was (turns out it’s a Captain-level Tactical ship) I stumbled upon the thing that will keep me playing this game for a long, long time. It almost feels as if this was specifically designed for me.

See, if there’s one thing I love doing, it’s gathering data and organizing it into an easy-to-read spreadsheet. I’m being completely honest, it’s a real weakness of mine. It’s why I like making video game guides, because there is often a great deal of information that can be easily gathered just by reading tooltips or speaking to NPCs.

Things like randomness annoy me, more complicated relationships between things confound me, immense amounts of information such as what is found in an MMO frustrates me.

But this, this is just perfect.

Tribble breeding.

It is simple, TribbleA + Food = TribbleB. With 25 different types of tribbles, and 76 different types of food (at least listed on that page), this will turn out to be quite a large spreadsheet, but not impossible. And I can work on it while I’m playing — “oh look, I found a new type of food, time to try it out!”

This game has found the perfect way to hold my attention for quite a long time. Expect a Tribble breeding guide from me at some point in the future.