But the nearest cooking fire is all the way upstairs!

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.