1. Don’t go out of your way to scan for crafting materials.

This really sucks, because I LIKE being all sciency, an the minigame is kinda fun I guess. The problem is that there are so many different kinds of crafting materials, and you only get one or two of them for completing the minigame. I need like… SIXTY of a certain type of material to craft a single item!

Crafting materials are nearly worthless to sell on auction, they will eat your bank space if you try to collect enough of them to make anything, and they will magically fill up your bag space if you try to pick them up while questing.

I only even get crafting mats any more from scanning things with my Duty Officer missions (as a side product when I’m just trying to get science/exploration EXP) and I just toss them in the fleet bank.

You’ll say, “but I need crafting materials to CRAFT things!”

2. Don’t bother crafting anything, ever.

Every item I have ever searched for on the exchange that is craftable is selling for less than the materials would cost if you sold them instead.

In order to even MAKE these items, you will need to spend a ton of items to level yourself up to that point. There are no Bound crafted items that I’ve ever seen, so everything you could craft, you can instead purchase from other players who have crafted it.

Here’s an example for you. Rick and I hit 50 last night, and I started looking at what gear I should get now that I’m technically at end-game. Starting epics are the Aegis 3-piece set.

Each of these gear pieces are selling on the Exchange for about 1.3 million energy credits. Wow, that sounds like a lot of money! Okay, let’s do some math. I am able to craft these items for various materials plus 18 Uncommon Unreplicatable Materials.

How do you get Uncommon Unreplicatable Materials? I mentioned this in my last post, but they cost 1,000 Dilithium from a vendor in Memory Alpha, and are worth about 90,000 Energy Credits if you sell them on the exchange instead of crafting things with them.

So even BEFORE you factor in all of the materials you need that are not Uncommon Unreplicatable Materials, you are looking at about 1.62 million Energy Credits. Even if you craft them during the crafting event that reduces Unreplicatable Materials cost by 20%, you STILL wouldn’t get below 1.3 million. And that’s the lower end of the Uncommon mats value — I’ve seen them selling for over 100,000 each at times.

After going through all of that, I wish I had just ignored the crafting system altogether. I don’t know why other people are crafting these items for a loss, but I have to assume it’s because they don’t understand the basics of opportunity cost — they gathered these crafting mats “for free” and are using them to craft things. I am thankful for this, because it allows me to obtain crafted items for very affordable prices.

3. Kerrat System warzone quest is repeatable and EASY.

At a certain level, I’m not sure what, you can get a tutorial quest by talking to someone in Starbase K-7. (I get a transwarp teleport to there, now that I’m rank 2 in Diplomacy — it’s so nice being able to pop back and forth between “Daily Quest Sector” and “Home Base” like that.)

This quest allows you to enter a War Zone at the Kerrat System. This is meant to be a battleground, but there are hardly ever any Klingons inside.

The quest requires you to fly to the various points and scan them, then destroy four “repair hulks”, which don’t survive more than a few hits. The borg cubes and spheres in the area will generally not attack you at all unless you attack them first. All in all, the quest takes a couple of minutes to finish, even if you’re doing it by yourself.

Once you finish the quest, hail Starfleet to turn it in, and pick up the same quest again. After you finish the tutorial, you need to complete the warzone three times for each quest completion, but it rewards a ton of skillpoints and Dilithium, and can be repeated as many times as you have the patience for.

Each time you finish the zone objectives, it will take a few minutes to start again, but you can just switch to a new instance using the minimap button and find one that’s up. We’re easily able to reach our daily dilithium refine cap by doing this. We used to travel all over to finish our various dailies, but since we discovered we can just repeat this one indefinitely, we have no reason to do anything else.

This will level you up super fast. I didn’t turn in my promotion quest for level 45 until I hit 49, because I was leveling up so fast and simply didn’t go back to Earth during that timeframe.

4. Your Defense level is partially determined by how fast you are moving.

Not just your Defense stat. Not just your Engine power. But how high up the throttle is. So for example, if you put all of your big guns on the front, then fly within range, point yourself towards the enemy and slow down to minimum so you don’t fly past them and you still have some maneuverability, it turns out that this drastically increases the amount of damage you take.

Makes sense, because “Defense” and “Evasion” in this game are largely two words for the same thing. Hard to evade attacks when you’re moving really slowly.

5. Shorter-duration duty officer assignments usually have better rewards.

Assignments that take many hours often have just barely higher rewards than assignments that take 30 minutes to an hour. The idea here is that the game is rewarding you for staying logged in enough that you can send your people on many 1-hour missions back to back, rather than one longer mission.

For maximum commendation XP gain, don’t just take whatever missions you see. Pay attention to how long you plan to keep playing. If you’re going to play for several more hours, fly around and only accept missions that take an hour or less to finish. If you know you’ll need to log off for a couple of hours, take missions that require a couple of hours to finish, so they’ll be done when you get back. If it’s getting late, and you’ll be logging off for the night soon and know you on’t be back until tomorrow evening, take the longer missions that require 6, 8, or even 20 hours.

For the most part, don’t bother picking up any quests that take 20 hours or more, unless you will: (a) definitely not be logging on for at least 20 hours, or (b) they give special rewards that you can’t get through shorter-duration quests (such as the duty officer recruitment missions or the special colonization missions in the star clusters).

6. Save the colonists, prisoners, and contraband you get from duty officer assignments.

You can get colonists from assignments in any federation-owned sector, and it always seems like there are more missions available to get RID of colonists than there are to GET them. But don’t just toss them back out to the Resettle Colonists missions, because you’ll NEED those colonists for the special star cluster assignments.

You can get prisoners only through critical success on “Uncover Information Leak” or something like that. You CAN hand them over to Starfleet, but if you take them to an enemy-owned sector instead, you can do a Prisoner Exchange for a special duty officer instead.

You can get Contraband easily, usually from Inspect Ship for Contraband missions. You CAN trade these in three at a time for Dilithium, which is pretty nice, but make sure you hold on to a few of them for the rare assignments that allow you to craft things from prototype plans.

There are refugees too, but I haven’t figured out how to get those yet.

Okay, okay, I know my last post was full of complaints. Here’s the flipside of that.

Let me paint a picture of a general complaint I have about WoW.

Let’s assume that the general difficulty of a WoW dungeon is approximately the same if you’re a level 15 or level 50, if you’re both fighting against level appropriate content. Now, the level 50 character could come and run their level 15 friend through their dungeon, killing everything easily while the level 15 trails behind picking up loot, but that’s not fun, that’s a chore.

The entire game starts to revolve around what level you are. Grouping with anyone who’s more than two or three levels away from you is pointless. Considering how fast you level up, the chances of actually encountering anyone who’s within your level range is low, and the early game is all about soloing. Level as fast as you can so that you can play with your friend.

They won’t come help you, because it won’t be fun for either of you to have a max-level person (or even a considerably higher-level person, if they’re not maxed) one-shotting all of your quest mobs for you. They can’t queue for dungeons with you, because they’re outside of the correct level range. In order for both of you to have fun, they need to leave you alone.

Or, on the other hand, they can roll a new character specifically to play with you. What if you want to play when they’re not around? What if they decide they like that character a lot, and are itching to play it, but they can’t without you?

If one of the pair does any quests at all, they’ll be out of sync with the other person, and will have to wait for them to catch up. If they do something other than quests, like go to battlegrounds or random dungeons, they’ll get XP and be too high level to be anything other than a babysitter for the lower level character.

Now let me compare that to STO.

My character was in her 20s by the time Rick started his character. He did some quests on his own, and a few times, I jumped in to play with him, because missions are repeatable. I can scale down to his level, and we can turn the difficulty up to medium (also increasing the rewards) to compensate for the fact that we’ve got teamwork on our side.

Most importantly, the REWARDS for the story missions also scale to your level. If I go off and do something else, and level up twice as much, and then we go complete the same story mission together (with me scaling down to his level) then I get a higher-level reward that’s a pretty nice upgrade for me. I can do these story missions at whatever level I want to, and the rewards I get will be appropriate to whatever level I am when I finish them.

We decided that we would save the story episode missions to play with each other. That’s perfectly fine in this game, because if one of us is higher level, it doesn’t matter. If one of us wants to play more, they’ve got a TON of things to do:

1. Completely randomized quests in the various star clusters, ranging from delivering supplies to needy colonies, scanning for crafting materials, shooting randomly-generated-alien-du-jour in space or on the ground, or scanning non-crafting materials on the ground. There’s a daily to do three of these pretty much anywhere, and because there’s a huge pool of random quests, it’s a daily that doesn’t get too repetitive.

2. Other dailies: I only know of a handful now, but there’s a big list on the wiki. You can go to the academy and answer a lore question about the Star Trek universe, you can go to other systems and repair communication satellites or something. Get lots of dilithium.

3. Repeatable public quests with random groups. If you do lots of damage, get first place and win a purple item! Then sell it on the Exchange for mad cash.

4. Duty Officer system! I swear I spend more time poking at my duty officers than anything else. I’m still finding new things to do with my Duty Officers. (More on that later.)

5. Queue for PvP. Always Klingons to fight! Haven’t tried it myself, though.

6. Fly through the sectors, looking for borg. They pop up at random, but I’m not sure whether it’s worth it. Other people don’t cooperate enough, so it fails a lot.

7. Patrol missions for the various systems throughout the sectors. Each one has its own little mission, and you get pretty good XP for completing them. I just wish there were some way to keep track of which ones you’ve finished. Achievements or something.

8. I’ve seen lots of other things in various places, like random Klingon attacks in sector space.

9. If you get bored with those, you can check out the community-authored missions! Yes, you can make your own quests that other people can play and rate. I heard some people talking on Zone chat the other day about how they were making Star Wars-themed missions. That’s just wrong. However, there is a daily quest to complete three community-authored missions, so you can get more stuff by doing them, and these have the potential to be much more interesting than the randomly-generated ones in the star clusters.

I can see the two of us playing this game as our main MMO for a long, long time.

Here’s a few bonus tips for you that we recently discovered:

1. Don’t bother spending Dilithium on gear upgrades while leveling. Not because you want to save it for max level as all of the players on Zone chat will tell you. (Though that might not be a bad idea — you don’t get a free ship when you hit level 50 like you do at all of the other 10th-level milestones.) A better reason is that it’s not efficient. If you really want to spend your Dilithium on gear upgrades, it’s far more cost-effective to convert it to Energy Credits first. Every thousand refined dilithium can be used to purchase one “Uncommon Unreplicatable Materials” from an NPC on Memory Alpha, each of which sell for at least 90,000 Energy Credits on the Exchange. Once you’ve made your money that way, just buy whatever gear upgrades you need from the Exchange. A single piece of gear at the higher levels can start to cost you several thousand dilithium, and it’s quite easy to buy it more cheaply from other players.

2. You know what you CAN spend Dilithium on (other than earning mad cash)? Bind-on-Pickup Duty Officers. Nobody told me this until a few days ago, but once you have reached a rank through some kind of duty officer XP and purchased an officer using the token, you will be able to purchase any of the Duty Officers of that rank using Dilithium. Well, except for Diplomacy Duty Officers. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re KDF people, or because it’s possible (but slow) to get Diplomacy ranks without doing any Duty Officer stuff.

3. Speaking of Duty Officers, there is a hidden questchain (assignment-chain, I guess) for each star cluster. You basically perform a variety of tasks to build a new colony in that area. Each one will have text in its description stating something like “Completing this assignment opens up other assignments in this cluster.” Once you’ve completed all of them for a particular cluster, you get a special duty officer!

4. There’s also a super-rare El-Aurian bartender Duty Officer (basically Guinan from Next Generation, with a different name) that you can apparently get from a super-rare temporal anomaly assignment in one of the sectors. I’m not sure how I found her, because the reward listings for assignments are often not very accurate. I was just looking over my Duty Officer roster one day, and there she was! Purple-quality telepathic bartender.

STO has gone free to play, and you may remember my last post on the subject nearby two years ago when the game first released. I’ve gotten a few people into it now that there isn’t a monthly subscription fee, and overall, I feel the game has improved a great deal. Some little annoyances with the UI have been fixed, and a lot of new content has been added. My favorite are the Duty Officers, because they give me a menu to poke at when I can only log in for 15 minutes on one of my breaks at work.

However, I feel like there are a lot of things about this game that are unfriendly to new players. Both major and minor issues that I am putting up with because I love Star Trek and it’s free, but I’m sure a lot of people are being driven away by these things.

1. The game feels like it is intentionally confusing.

There is a lot of information that I feel like I should have known several levels ago that I am just stumbling onto (I don’t think I realized I was given Evasive Maneuvers at level 2 until around level 8, for example), or simple questions I have where the answer is hidden deep down a submenu rather than being explained. What is your Auxiliary power level for? The other three power levels are self-explanatory, but I had to dig through the Library Computer specifically looking for this information, finally finding it in an advanced space tactics page.

The game often feels like it is hiding information from me. It almost feels like this is intentional, following the old Everquest mentality that if you make the game hostile, the players will need to band together to defeat it — if you make the game confusing, players will need to talk to each other to figure it out.

This is a problem from the moment you first create your character. Even the “simple” explanations of the traits you need to pick don’t make any sense, because you don’t know what any of it means yet. Improves the power transfer rate of my ship? Is that useful? Increases Warp Core Efficiency? I feel like I need to play this game with a browser window open to the wiki to look things up at the same time. (Not that the wiki is good at answering most of the questions I have…) I feel like picking Traits should be something I do later, maybe around level 10, once I’ve had a chance to play the game a bit and have a better idea of what these things are for.

I will have conversations with other people who just started, and point out a few things to them that took me a long time to figure out:

• Right-click your space weapons and they’ll auto-fire. Makes combat infinitely easier when you don’t have to constantly spam the space bar to fire your phasers, but I stumbled onto it by accident.
• Right-click your armor/kit to turn of visuals so that you can actually see the uniform you just spent 20 minutes perfecting. (I’ve spoken with several new people who ranted at me about how stupid it was that their armor covered up their uniform, and they were extremely appreciative of this hidden function.)
• Check your power window, your quest log, and your accolades window every time you level up, because you probably got some kind of reward and you need to dig for it.
• Yes, Sulu IS in the Admiral’s Office, that thing you think is a window behind the Admiral’s desk is actually a viewscreen and there are stairs down to a lower area behind it. Not that it matters, because the patrol missions he used to have were removed from the game and there doesn’t seem to be much of a point to talking to him any more.

In a lot of other situations, new people ask me questions and I have to honestly say “I have no idea” and move on. What do the numbers on your skills MEAN? It’s increasing something by 10, 10 what? 10 percent? 10 points? Where can I see all of these stats? Most of the things affected by my skills don’t appear anywhere in my stats panel. Unless there’s some hidden extra “advanced details” panel I have to open by right-clicking on something unintuitive that I haven’t chanced to right-click on yet.

I find it especially annoying how often I’m faced with complicated ship parts that say they give +10 in Shield Emitters or EPS Conduits or whatever, and I have to go dig through my skills menu to find out what that item actually does. I wouldn’t mind the tooltip being a bit bigger if it would just have a little sentence saying that it increases power drain or shield healing or something, just like the bridge officer tooltips tell you what their traits and skills do.

2. It’s hard to keep track of what all of my powers do from their icons.

They are all the same color, and the icons on them are very abstract, with little or no connection to what the powers are used for. I have a very color-oriented brain, and having a dozen buttons on my hotbar that are all exactly the same color scheme makes it very difficult for me to remember which icons do which things. I’ll probably learn them eventually through pure repetition, but when I’m constantly switching out my bridge officer skills to try out different things in order to figure out which combination is best, it’s going to take a while.

This digestive system icon is the Evasive Maneuvers skill. What? It’s a silhouette of a person, showing a line going down their throat, into their stomach, then to the side into their intestines. Tell me you don’t see a simplified diagram of the digestive system there. I know that it’s SUPPOSED to be a curving line to represent the fact that it helps you move around, with the person outline to represent… I’m not sure. That you’re using it on yourself? But I can’t look at it and see anything other than digestion.

I wish I could at least have little customizable color sliders to make all of my damage abilities red, all of my shield-healing abilities yellow, all of my hull/health healing abilities blue, all of my buff abilities green, all of my debuff abilities purple… I’m used to playing games that have abilities in a wide range of colors! Or even better, give me a macro system and let me use custom icons for said macros. I’ll be happy to design some myself that actually help me remember what they do.

Right now, when I’m running low on health or shields in a panic, I’m just hitting all of the buttons I have that are off cooldown in hopes of hitting the one that will help in this situation, because by the time I mouse over all of them to read their names/descriptions and remember what they do, I’ll probably be dead.

Also, it’s incredibly irritating when my bars rearrange themselves without telling me. Maybe I’ll temporarily be on a different ship for a quest. Maybe I’ll just load into a different sector. Suddenly half of my abilities are gone and the rest are on the wrong buttons, but I don’t notice this until I’ve loaded into a space combat mission and am trying to figure out where my Beam Target Shields button went. I KNOW that I just arranged those buttons yesterday….

3. I continue to have constant rubberbanding issues.

The game constantly slams my characters into walls when I’m just trying to walk in a straight line down a hallway that I recently turned onto, or pulls my ship backwards when I’m moving in a straight line through sector space. One time, I was standing in a doorway for several seconds, shooting at someone, before the rubberbanding pulled me safely back into a hallway. I failed the “slingshot around a star” quest the first time because my ship got yanked to the left just as I was about to fly through one of the rings.

I use a wireless router at home, but it should not be necessary for me to snake an ethernet cable through my house to my computer in order to play this game. I have been playing online games for many years and none of the other games I have ever played have had this problem. I might be unable to loot something or my attacks might stop dealing damage for a moment as the server catches up, but I have NEVER been slammed into walls due to lag except when playing Cryptic games.

This is the sole reason I stopped my subscription to Champions Online the month after it was initially released, and also the reason why I have never returned to that game for more than about 30 minutes at a time. I keep checking back on a regular basis, and every time I’m surprised that nothing has been done to fix this yet.

4. I don’t like how many of the passive traits are species-specific.

I like one trait from this species, but I don’t like their other required trait, or I want to make a character with a certain look. Why are so many of the good traits locked away in specific species? Can Betazoids really be the ONLY empathic race in the galaxy? Is it impossible for another species out there to have a symbiont similar to the Trill? It seems pretty silly that you can’t use a lot of these traits on Alien characters. If it’s for balance reasons, then why are some races given multiple good traits while others are given multiple bad ones? For example, is there a legitimate reason to ever play a Pakled character?

Just saying that if you put certain trait unlocks on the C-Store, along with an item that lets you reset your traits, I would definitely buy it. I’m rather surprised there isn’t already a race/trait reset item, since you tend to make this decision before you know how it will affect you, and are forced to remake your character from scratch once you have learned.

Good to see this game accurately portrays the racist mentality of the show. You know, the “oh, maybe this cardassian ISN’T sneaky and unscrupulous… oh wait, yes he is” that constantly pops up in the episodes. We don’t care what color your skin is, but “I’m sorry, Surisa, but you’re a saurian, and this betazoid obviously makes a better science officer because of her racial traits. You’ve been a loyal officer since I was level 5, and I haven’t even met her yet, but the choice is obvious.”

5. The Reply to Tell feature makes me very nervous.

A friend of mine sent me a tell, and it’s very hard to figure out how you’re supposed to have a conversation this way, other than by typing /tell and their handle, or by right-clicking on their name in chat, every single time. I was later clued in to the fact that there was a keybinding for that, but the fact that you have to take focus OFF of the chat menu in order for that keybinding to work makes it rather annoying to attempt to have a conversation via tell.

You can’t enter a separate channel for tells on the dropdown, and you can’t see if the front of your message contains the /tell tag after you’ve typed enough for it to scroll to the side, so I’m constantly second-guessing myself and deleting my message to make sure it started with /tell. I get very nervous that I’m going to mistell something embarrassing to Zone chat (my friend actually did this within a few minutes of starting our conversation), and have ended up making custom channels for any conversations more than a couple of messages long.

Also, one time someone PMed me at DS9 to tell me that I was still displaying the Lieutenant title even though I’m a captain, and when I tried to respond to thank them for the heads-up, it told me that “new accounts cannot send tells to non-friends.” Excuse me? I created my account over two YEARS ago. I don’t think I qualify as “new” any more.

You know what would be really neat? If you could open a chat window that’s like a subspace communication, like the windows you use to talk with NPCs — it could have a picture of the other person’s character, like I’m having a video chat with them like people do in the show. I could minimize it while I’m in combat, make it flash when there are new messages. Maybe I could have buttons to make my character do little animations on screen when I want to smile or something.

6. Minimap zoom amount is very inconsistent.

I often find myself on ground missions where my minimap only displays a bunch of blurry pixels and is completely useless to get my bearings. I try to zoom out, but I can’t zoom out at all, I can only zoom in to what is even more blurry and useless. It would be nice if I wanted to know exactly how all of the enemies within 5 feet of me are arranged without actually looking at them, but is completely useless to find out where I’m supposed to be going from this room without opening up the zone map.

7. Quests are often extremely unclear about where I’m supposed to go.

One of three situations will happen. Either I’m supposed to inspect several objects, and the highlighted zone on the map is the ENTIRE map, which is not helpful at all. Or the thing I’m supposed to inspect is so tiny that the scaled-down edges of the selected area are nearly invisible on the zone map. Or there is no highlighted area on the map at all.

Oftentimes, the quest gives me little information other than “use the computer” or “scan the rocks” or “administer the antidote.” Who am I administering the antidote to, and where are they? Where are the things I need to scan?

I try to look in my quest log, and it only shows the description for the overall quest, no help for the specific subquest that I’m currently working on. I look through the log at the things my bridge officers told me, and they’re not much help. They might tell me who to administer the antidote to, but I still have no idea where this person is. They tell me that I need to scan the thingamabobs, but they don’t even give me a general direction.

It’s nice that I can use my V-key scanner to look for interactable things, but it doesn’t help at all in some situations. Scanning finds both quest items and anomalies. Several times, the anomalies are underground or inside a building and I can’t get them to go away, but the scan keeps pointing towards it. I just have to run around the giant circled quest area in hopes that I’ll stumble onto one of the things I need to find, because my scanner has been neutralized completely.

8. Bridge officer recommendations for duty officer assignments are often not the best choices.

I keep trying the bridge officer recommendations, but I am constantly finding that there are other people in my roster who are not being recommended and are better for the task.

This isn’t just a case of the recommendation choosing a green-quality person with no matching traits when there are white-quality people with several matching traits. I’m talking about my bridge officers recommending white-quality people with NO matching traits, when there are several white-quality people who DO have matching traits as well as green-quality people with no matching traits.

Here’s an example. One time, the three that were recommended to me were all white-quality officers without a single matching trait between them. Out of curiosity, I clicked to see the full list, and there was a fourth person — a green-quality officer with TWO matching traits. Selecting one of the non-matching officers left me with 8% critical and 92% success, but selecting the matching person DOUBLED my critical success! Isn’t a higher chance of critical success better?

What kind of criteria is it using? Is there some reason other than RP for slotting certain bridge officers as the leaders of certain departments? Are some bridge officers better at making recommendations than others? Or is there some reason I would WANT to use someone with no matching traits over someone with several? This goes against how the duty officer system was explained to me, and also what the percentages are when I compare these officers.

Edit: Ooh, I’ve got screenshots!

Take a look at my recommendations for this assignment. Nothing matches!

Let’s look at the full list, shall we?

I’ve got 10 officers in my total list who match at least one trait, two of them matching two traits. I’ve got ten officers who are green-quality, some of them matching traits. And there, in the middle of the list, is Nemekra, who not only matches two traits, but is green quality! Why is she not being recommended to me? Why are NONE of these people being recommended to me??

9. It is very time-consuming to travel to other places to complete quests.

I log in, and find myself sitting at Earth Spacedock, where I often log out for the night. I poke at my Duty Officers to get them all set up, I toss a few items on the exchange, and then I look at my quest log. I think to myself “hmm, I think I’d like to get a few quests done.” I ask the diplomacy guy where I’m going today, and he tells me “the opposite side of the quadrant!” Ugh. I don’t want to fly all the way over there… I think I’ll just log off and watch an old episode of Voyager.

It’s great that the main story missions give an easy way to teleport directly to them, but why isn’t there an easy way to travel to the other zones quickly? Most other MMOs give easy ways to travel long distances. I feel like flight paths have been abolished and I’m being asked to run on foot all the way from Stormwind to Blasted Lands every night. At least in WoW, I could hop on a gryphon and fly all the way across the continent while I go do something else, but in STO, I need to actually be paying attention while I travel in order to say “Yes, I do want to warp to the next sector” and then wait through a loading screen, aim my ship in the proper direction, then wait for the next sector-change popup. It’s nice that I can auto-route to systems within a sector, but that doesn’t help me when my destination is three sectors away.

More wormholes/transwarp locations, please? I love that I have one for Earth so that I can jump home when I’m done with whatever I was doing in the far corners of the galaxy, but the trip over there in the first place takes way too long.

In a similar vein, loading screens take WAY too long. It can take me five minutes to get into Earth Spacedock or DS9. Occasionally, it would get up to 94 or so and then just hang there. After a few minutes, I’ll give up and restart the game, and it loads me in just fine. But more often than not, I’ll start flying in a straight line through sector space or encounter a loading screen and alt-tab out to read some blogs. A half hour later, I’ll remember that I was playing STO and alt-tab back to the game to find that I’ve been logged out due to being idle. I wouldn’t do that so much if travel wasn’t so time-consuming.

10. Where are the Borg missions, and how are they triggered?

I seem to run into these at random when traveling. I want my friend to come help me so we’ll be more likely to succeed, and it takes five minutes for him to travel to my location. It seems specific to not only my sector, but also the instance of that sector. I need my friend to be exactly where I am in order to come help, and the quest is mostly over by the time he gets there. I really wish there were an easier way for party members to join in on these, especially since they’re timed.

I could understand if it were an hourly event, say every hour on the hour, there is a borg attack. But for there to be a borg attack at THIS time, in THIS instance of THIS sector, and nowhere else, is just weird. There doesn’t seem to be any pattern to it, so that if I want to fight some borg, I can never find them anywhere, but they’re always popping up when I’m on my way to do something else.

11. The economy is totally screwed up.

Not that I’m complaining, but why the HELL are people willing to pay 8,000 Energy Credits on an item they can buy from their own ship’s replicator at any time for 10% of that, or from cargo ships in sector space for even less? Is it because people are idiots, or aren’t paying attention? Is it because the game does a really bad job of teaching players where they can buy commodities, so that when they encounter a quest requiring these items, they think they HAVE to buy them at that price in order to complete it? Is it a side effect of having a 40-item limit for the Exchange, meaning there is not enough supply to meet the demand?

I’m not sure where people are getting all of these Energy Credits, but I think there’s something horribly wrong when I can earn huge amounts of money by buying common items from NPCs for pennies and relisting them. In our WoW terms, this is like those people who sell individual glasses of milk on the auction house during the holidays because there are people too stupid to know they can buy it from the innkeeper 20 feet away. You scoff because you don’t think anyone will actually buy them and those people are wasting their time, but you know deep-down that whoever’s listing them wouldn’t do it in the first place if they weren’t actually selling any at that price.

As you can see from my Raptr widget on the sidebar, I have barely touched Star Trek Online this month (I think my tracker shorted out on the 8th, I swear I’ve played more recently than the 28th of last month). It makes me feel bad, but I have made the decision to cancel my subscription. I have come to the conclusion that it is mainly because of a lack of a variety of options.

Like I mentioned in my previous post on the subject, there seems to be little to do in STO that doesn’t involve shooting Klingons. The game is beautiful, but from a long-term perspective, everything looks the same.

If my current mission is a space battle, well, sometimes there will be a planet there, sometimes there won’t. Sometimes there will be an asteroid belt, sometimes there won’t. Sometimes the nebula surrounding the place will be green, sometimes it will be purple. But for the most part, the scenery doesn’t change that much. It’s SPACE. It’s pretty space, and it’s often different colored space, but there’s only so long you can look at stars without it all starting to blend together as the same exact setting.

The ships I’m fighting are different from each other, but I fight each one in pretty much the same way. It’s a white circle with orange or green lines coming out from it (and occasionally orange blips) and I’m also a white circle with orange AND green lines (and occasionally orange blips) and my job is to fly straight at the enemy circle and fire some orange blips at it, and then circle it and shoot my two colors of lines at it, and occasionally dip my orientation to shoot more blips. Occasionally I’ll fire off a blue line or a Really Awesome Vortex, or I’ll pop a cooldown that makes parts of my ship glow orange for a few seconds. But for the most part, I face every battle in exactly the same way. They might be Klingons, they might be Gorn, they might be something else, but there isn’t really much difference other than the names and models of the enemy ships.

If my current mission is a ground mission, it consists of either “hey, there are some things here you need to scan with your tricorder, but there are groups of Klingons in the way, so shoot them,” or “hey, there are groups of Klingons here, they look suspicious, so shoot them.” And every time, I deal with it the same way (since even when there aren’t story objects to scan with my tricorder, there are always anomalies). Send out away team to surround the enemy group. There are usually two or three dudes in each group who have shields, so I take them down first. Tell group to focus on that guy in the back who’s summoning those annoying targs/saurian gorn things. (Were they so uncreative that they made the same exact enemy type for the Klingons and the Gorn and just reskinned the pigs as lizards? Because they act exactly the same.)

Very VERY rarely there is a mission that consists of “hey, there are some things here you need to scan with your tricorder (but you’re perfectly safe since there aren’t any Klingons here that you need to shoot)” but I think one of the main issues here is that if I don’t FEEL like doing combat missions, I can’t even choose to do the non-combat ones instead. All of them are random. I don’t know what kind of mission I’m going to be asked to do until I’ve started it. I might zone into the next randomized mission in the star cluster, it says “Klingon patrols defeated 0/4″ and I groan to myself and think “aw man, not again!”

Over the years, I gradually come to understand further reasons why I like WoW so much. This is a good example. Constant change of scenery. If I get bored with the swampy Wetlands, I can go do quests in the rocky Redridge Mountains. A wide variety of different graphics. Each enemy I fight has different animations, different sound effects. Some are casters that I can interrupt. Some are ranged mobs that I can’t easily pull as a group. Some of them tend to travel in packs, but run away when they get low on health, so I have to slow them down before they can pull more.

Even within the same zone, there’s a wide variety of settings. Take Redridge for example, since I was finishing up old quests there last night. There are quests that send me off to the south to fight gnolls and dragon whelps, in a pretty heavily forested area. There are quests that send me off to the north, to fight orcs near the steep rocky cliffs, and there are even quests that send me into caves, and to old abandoned castles. There are quests to send me to the bottom of the lake, fighting murlocs who run away from me faster than I can swim while also trying to navigate slowly in three dimensions without drowning. And this is all in a single zone, within a few levels of each other.

The quests are specifically designed to bring me to a certain area and then take me away from it again just before I get bored of it, giving me a constant change of scenery. And most importantly (I think) is that I can choose which of these places I want to go to. If I don’t feel like swimming, I can look at my quest log and think “no, I don’t really feel like swimming, I think I’d rather go to a cave right now” and go there. I don’t hit a button that says “I want to do a quest” and it says “okay, swimming time!” and I go “aw man, not again!” Even with the random dungeon finder, I have a pretty good idea of what dungeons it’ll send me to, and if it’s been sending me to the same one a lot lately, I can just check that one off of the list and it’ll send me somewhere else.

And in addition to this, there are plenty of activities in WoW that don’t involve killing things.

Did I mention the fishing? I think I did, last time.

I can browse the auction house and try to find some good deals, maybe make some money with my tradeskills. Oh well, I can’t do that in STO, because there isn’t any crafting (and what excuse for crafting there is requires me to travel to the far side of a zone I’m still not actually high enough level to quest in yet). The auction house is limited to 20 items, and because everyone who plays is on the same server, supply of every item is up so high that prices are driven so low that I won’t earn enough above vendor cost to be worth the price. The auction interface really isn’t helping here — attempting to undercut the other people doesn’t work when the ones who are looking to buy things at the cheapest rate can’t even find which listings are cheaper.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that having all of the players on the same server is GREAT for playing with your friends, but TERRIBLE for the in-game economy. Maybe someday, someone will find an answer to this problem.

We watched an episode of Next Generation tonight, and in part of it, Riker was trapped in an underground Romulan base, trying to escape, but it turns out the whole thing was an incredibly realistic hologram and there were never any Romulans there at all, the kid controlling the holographic projector was just lonely and wanted to create a convincing reality so that Riker wouldn’t leave. Why can’t we have twists like that in STO? Why must every mission be “we’re at war with the Klingons, and hey, there are Klingons here, so shoot them”?

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.