Star Trek Online Discussion Thread (now free to play!)

[Hartzilla2007]

So with the increase in skill points from free to play going live and the Q double rewards boost I got my new alt. Kenny to Lt. CRMD just doing one story mission, one exploration tour, and most of the Sirius patrols.

If this keeps up Kenny will be STF ready by the end of the weekend.

 

[SilentP]

Hey, which one of you guys goes by the name of Taylor on ST:O? Think I was fighting alongside you for a couple of PvP games last night (the TrekBBS Armada fleet identifier gave it away).

In the ground game I was Malcolm Rudderidge and in space, captaining the Excelsior class U.S.S Exemplar.

 

[Eckauskas]

Well, thanks to Q, I went from a Lt 4th class to Cmndr 2nd class in just under 3 hours.

Decent.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Well I started this weekend by making a new alt named Taylor starting out at ensign and now I'm proud to say I just hit VA with him. Finally I have two VA characters.

And the best part since the Q weekend let me do it with only finishing all the story and patrol missions in sirius and regulus I now get to do the rest of the game without having to trade in my ship or equipment.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Well I started this weekend by making a new alt named Taylor starting out at ensign and now I'm proud to say I just hit VA with him. Finally I have two VA characters.

And the best part since the Q weekend let me do it with only finishing all the story and patrol missions in sirius and regulus I now get to do the rest of the game without having to trade in my ship or equipment.

Gratz on VA.
It's funny and sad at the same time.
The result of this fast leveling pace I experienced first hand.
Got randomly challenged by what I can only imagine to bel a noob VA.
Probably just been promoted, got his new ship and felt incredibly powerful.
He was flying a Prometheus Class and should have shredded me, cause escorts are so powerful with the new skill system.
I outdamaged him 3:1 in my Souvereign and beat him by:
-letting myself damage so much I could summon fleet support and watch
-using no abilities at all, just basic phasers and shield distribution
-parking my ship above the spacestation in "solar wind" and let autofire do the job...

The fast leveling pace produces low quality players who have no idea what they are doing.

Kudos: he kept coming at me and finished the match.

 

[DarkHorizon]

Well I started this weekend by making a new alt named Taylor starting out at ensign and now I'm proud to say I just hit VA with him. Finally I have two VA characters.

And the best part since the Q weekend let me do it with only finishing all the story and patrol missions in sirius and regulus I now get to do the rest of the game without having to trade in my ship or equipment.

I managed the same (recreating my Tribble toon on Holodeck to be my new primary, since I got a good handle on the play style with her), and reached VA right at the end of my session yesterday. I wanted to get to VA before the Doomsday mission (so I wouldn't have to redo it straight after for Hargh'peng mk XI), and managed to run a few Cardassian patrols for 1000 XP per to cross the line. Now I can run STFs and Dilithium missions to get the equipment I had on Tribble, and use the scaling rewards where needed.

I think my /played time at level up was about 20 hours (and one of those was spent doing the SFA event!). A bit mad, it is.

 

[LeadHead]

I wish I hadn't been so busy this weekend! I could've gotten so much more accomplished. Oh well.

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

I wish I hadn't been so busy this weekend! I could've gotten so much more accomplished. Oh well.

I really think you there is reason to complain that leveling is too slow atm, Q or no Q.
I thought it was too fast to begin with, as I actually enjoy mid level content and PVP.

 

[Scout101]

It's a tough spot for them. They have to make you level fast because there isn't enough content to DO at the lower levels, but then again, once you get to the end, not much there either, so what was the rush?

they really needed to think it out a lot better to start with, and have the leveling go a lot slower, but it would have meant they needed more missions/events, which they are just starting to think about 2 years after the fact...

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Personally I find the first rank should take 1-2 days. Then slow it down with each rank.
Commander should already take a few weeks so the Captain milestone feels significant. Besides Commander levels are way cool. Those are the most fun PVP wise.

 

[syberghost]

I think Lieutenant to LtC should take maybe five hours, acting as an extended tutorial. Then LtC to Commander should take 20 hours, Commander to Captain 40, Captain to Rear Admiral LH 80, and all the rest after that remain 80.

This is based on the industry statistics that indicate the average $15/month subscriber plays 20-21 hours a week. It would give them the ability to keep ahead of the content curve for the AVERAGE player in the future (assuming the dev team really does get the promised expansion after the F2P conversion is complete), and allow continual work to be done in the mid levels where it can attract new players, instead of 100% of it having to happen on the high end.

The poopsockers would still get there in a week, which would keep them happy.

 

[Scout101]

That would be good, if they slowed it down to that level (by giving lower ranks things to actually DO to soak up that time, instead of just grinding exploration missions while you get enough XP).

By your scale, that's 225 hours of gameplay. More than enough to keep anyone out of trouble, even keep grinders busy a little while, and it would ensure a nice spread rank structure.

With Q weekends, XP boosts, and not nearly that much content, though, even the developers admit you can hit endgame in a weekend of stready play, if you really go at it. Believe the quote involved a weekend and a case of redbull? Heck, on this page alone, we've got Hartzilla admitting he took a new toon all the way to VA this weekend, so clearly they didn't hit the 225 hour goal there.

Would have been nice if they had gone slower from the beginning, (you're only an ensign for like 5 minutes, and out of Lt before you're out of sight of Sol), but they started with what they had, so there's a ton of people at endgame, without that being all that well thought out. haven't replayed the STFs yet, but not a huge fan of the massively grindy new format, where it could take hundreds of runs to get a set of gear. Problem is that they DIDN'T slow the game down originally, so now they have to spend a lot of time (or should, anyway) focusing on endgame, because so many subscribers have a toon at that level, and want something to DO with that toon.

Would be good if the next big "season" push involved adding a ton more early/mid-level content, and slowing WAY down on the XP awarded (or increasing the requirements per rank, either way). Make it take a while to earn a rank, get a new ship, etc, rather than going through a couple per session...

Curious to see an estimate of "Actual" hours it takes to go from new character to endgame as currently set up. If industry statistics indicate that the average subscriber (or free player, now) will play 20 hours a week or so, I'd be willing to bet that if they maintained those rates of play (they seem skewed towards the heavy gamer, rather than the casual player), they'd have beaten the entire game at least once before they had to pay for a 2nd month of subscription. No way there's more than 80 hours of game play before you reach endgame. Probably not even after you've run all the old STFs a couple times, unless you got a bugged version and had to keep starting over. The game's then forced to rely on endgame content and PvP, which aren't STO's strong suits. Not a real good business plan.

 

[syberghost]

I agree; and now they're going to have a new giant rush of players in just over a month, and if they can't give them middle-tier content to slow them down, it won't gain them anything. They'll get a big influx of capital to make a lot of content, but how will they get a third wave to go through it?

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Well now that my new main alt is leved to the top I can start saving up ECs to get some extras being sold on the exchange as well as using my dilithium for high end gear plus I don't have to trade my soverign in for a new ship unless I see one I really want, and seeing as I managed to get most of the VA ships on the C-store it won't cost dilithium to change and the new skill system makes changing ships easier.

Now I only have one major issue to decide on.

Should I just ignore the text in the boxs and stay captain, or go Admiral?

 

[Timelord79 (he/him)]

Well now that my new main alt is leved to the top I can start saving up ECs to get some extras being sold on the exchange as well as using my dilithium for high end gear plus I don't have to trade my soverign in for a new ship unless I see one I really want, and seeing as I managed to get most of the VA ships on the C-store it won't cost dilithium to change and the new skill system makes changing ships easier.

Now I only have one major issue to decide on.

Should I just ignore the text in the boxs and stay captain, or go Admiral?

Captain all the way! XD

 

[Hartzilla2007]

Well now that my new main alt is leved to the top I can start saving up ECs to get some extras being sold on the exchange as well as using my dilithium for high end gear plus I don't have to trade my soverign in for a new ship unless I see one I really want, and seeing as I managed to get most of the VA ships on the C-store it won't cost dilithium to change and the new skill system makes changing ships easier.

Now I only have one major issue to decide on.

Should I just ignore the text in the boxs and stay captain, or go Admiral?

Captain all the way! XD

Well I have been leaning towards captain, otherwise I'm and Admiral getting ordered around by Captain Sulu (still have patroles on the Klingon front), and the Captain running DS9 which is kind of wierd.

 

[Scout101]

I agree; and now they're going to have a new giant rush of players in just over a month, and if they can't give them middle-tier content to slow them down, it won't gain them anything. They'll get a big influx of capital to make a lot of content, but how will they get a third wave to go through it?

Good question. Probably the sort of thing they should have been thinking about when they spent the past 9 months or so not releasing new content. Seems like on the forums when people complain about the C-Store, it's been made clear that there are different groups/skillsets that make C-Store items, episodes, underlying coding structure, etc. So what have the episode-creation type-people been up to for the past year? Believe they list writers and whatnot on the staff, what have they been up to?

Obviously before F2P goes live would have been the time to try and fix this. Once that group goes through it (and spends that money), doesn't seem like there's much of a plan to get people to start over on the 3rd wave, like you said. If they were going to fix the underlying structure, now would have been the time...

 

[Scout101]

With the way the Duty Officer system awards XP like crazy, don't even have to do the missions to shoot up in rank. Can sit in the bar and let the DOFF system rank you up. I've gained almost 2 levels since Monday morning without playing a mission, just checking in and assigning a full slate of DOFF missions every morning...

 

[Blamo]

The result of this fast leveling pace I experienced first hand.
Got randomly challenged by what I can only imagine to bel a noob VA.
Probably just been promoted, got his new ship and felt incredibly powerful.
He was flying a Prometheus Class and should have shredded me, cause escorts are so powerful with the new skill system.
I outdamaged him 3:1 in my Souvereign and beat him by:
-letting myself damage so much I could summon fleet support and watch
-using no abilities at all, just basic phasers and shield distribution
-parking my ship above the spacestation in "solar wind" and let autofire do the job...

The fast leveling pace produces low quality players who have no idea what they are doing.

Kudos: he kept coming at me and finished the match.

Sadly he could just as easily have been a VA for a year. Due to fighting mostly just NPCs, some players never really learn how to best use their skills or experiment with their builds. At VA levels, if you don't have any prior experience in PvP (or great space combat experience) you'll likely find yourself being casually blown up. For some the learning curve is far too steep and just never bother with PvP again.

 

[Rocketeer]

My KDF char made Major General 5 in 1 day, 5 hours on TTS. No missions, just xp from the DOFF system.