Incline Official codex Star Trek Online topic :salute:

[Norfleet]

There's a bunch of PvE shit constantly going on as well, but no one cares about any of that except when looking for easy targets.

Well, this game lacks any particularly meaningful PvP scene, so pretty much all of that is excluded. Yeah, empty space is only interesting if you're trying to murder people in it. While I certainly can appreciate the concept of Eve, I don't really see any reason for me, personally, to participate at this point, given that it A: Costs real money, and I have strict rule of not spending money on anything that doesn't offer some kind of return on investment, and B: Is now too far gone for me to bother showing up, as showing up that late to the party has gone passed "fashionably late" and well into the realm of "everyone is so far ahead of you that you may as well not even bother", and C: Yes, I've heard you CAN in theory play it for free, but I don't do the Crippleware model of F2P.

Every (MMO) player is just in it for the pigeon shit. Jump through hoops, get shinies. Just a matter how obvious the game does it. I am just a filthy casual part time pigeon tho.

This is funny, because in-game, for totally unrelated reasons, I'm known as "Emergency Pigeon Hologram". And people sometimes wonder why you'd need an emergency pigeon.

 

[Blaine]

There's a bunch of PvE shit constantly going on as well, but no one cares about any of that except when looking for easy targets.

Well, this game lacks any particularly meaningful PvP scene, so pretty much all of that is excluded. Yeah, empty space is only interesting if you're trying to murder people in it. While I certainly can appreciate the concept of Eve, I don't really see any reason for me, personally, to participate at this point, given that it A: Costs real money, and I have strict rule of not spending money on anything that doesn't offer some kind of return on investment, and B: Is now too far gone for me to bother showing up, as showing up that late to the party has gone passed "fashionably late" and well into the realm of "everyone is so far ahead of you that you may as well not even bother", and C: Yes, I've heard you CAN in theory play it for free, but I don't do the Crippleware model of F2P.

I just mentioned EVE as a basis for comparison, not trying to "sell" it. Unlike many EVE veterans, who generally pretend you can never be too late to the party, I tend to agree and think EVE is pretty damned top-heavy and stagnated now. They're just deluded. There's other stuff to do in EVE's sandbox relative to the vast space available, though, such as build mining and industry structures, run missions, and scan down research PoIs. Everything is persistent and non-instanced, all tens of thousands of players in the same universe.

EVE-O really isn't a F2P game, by either design or retrofit; it is and always has been a fairly standard subscription model game that simply allows players to trade account time and characters with each other via official channels, and has done for ages. CCP tried to introduce microtransactions years back, but were blown the fuck out by player backlash and dropped it. The "F2P" portion is essentially a free trial/demo that they began offering late in the game's lifetime, and not a "you get the entire game but have to grind a lot more than whales" type of thing. Although many might disagree, you don't actually have to grind in EVE, not if you're playing it correctly. I never did, and I amassed a vast fortune. However, you must PvP/learn to live and play in PvP-filled space in order to not grind.

Bit odd that you mention crippleware, though, since STO also has some pretty extreme account restrictions unless you either pay to add slots and so on, or else (I presume) grind and buy them from a player RMT market where whales put up real-money stuff for F2P players to buy. For the record, you can use EVE ISK in the same way to trade with other players for subscription time... but that's very difficult for PvE players. You have to git gud at PvP/living and playing in PvP areas to really get ahead.

 

[Jarpie]

Oh yeah, the map feels huge when you travel at warp 7 or so, I think the problem is that there's nothing to it. Would be nice if there'd be some kind of exploration angle to it, but hard to figure how to do that.

 

[Blaine]

Oh yeah, the map feels huge when you travel at warp 7 or so, I think the problem is that there's nothing to it. Would be nice if there'd be some kind of exploration angle to it, but hard to figure how to do that.

If only we had some sort of reference material wherein starships explore deep space from which to draw inspiration... hmmm....

 

[Norfleet]

Bit odd that you mention crippleware, though, since STO also has some pretty extreme account restrictions unless you either pay to add slots and so on, or else (I presume) grind and buy them from a player RMT market where whales put up real-money stuff for F2P players to buy.

Yeah, you don't see me recommending this game to people. You will note my advice is "Stay the Fuck Away". After all, I'm wielding said entrenched advantages, and I know exactly what those things are worth and why you don't want to come anywhere near this dumpster fire. It is, however, not nearly as bad as Eve because you don't require any kind of infrastructure or personal ability to succeed. In Eve, if you're not good out of the box, you're just wasting your time. In STO, being bad isn't a real obstacle to initial advancement. In fact, being bad is economically efficient.

But...if I haven't managed to convince you to run the fuck away, well, you do get an advantage others don't have: Higher-level access to me. I don't give my best info to just ANY random mutant, after all. Loose lips sink ships!

 

[Blaine]

I'm going to tool around in the game to least have a tour of it, and most likely only that—I've been running multiplayer board games in Tabletop Simulator for 5+ hours a day for the past week, and not likely to stop anytime soon, so not a lot of time for computery games at the moment.

However, I've received my first dose of true MMORPG nostalgia already, because the servers were down for maintenance when I tried to log in for the first time a little while ago.

 

[Norfleet]

Yeah, if you want me to give you the quick map of landmines, I can tell you which landmines not to step on. It's relatively easy to inflict serious damage to yourself, but also quite easy to avoid those. There are a lot of landmines which are basically just aimed at getting new players to rapidly piss away their resources for no return, procedures which have to be done correctly, etc. All in all, success in the game is fairly counterintuitive, which is why so few people achieve it.

 

[Blaine]

Sure, why not? I decided to roll a Jewish character to start off with, by the way.

 

[eklektyk]

small hint: thats not a spacejew .....

 

[Stokowski]

 

[Blaine]

small hint: thats not a spacejew .....

That's just what they want you to think.

...Are you calling the Ferengi Jewish? That's racist!

 

[Norfleet]

...Are you calling the Ferengi Jewish? That's racist!

There's also that amusing minor fact that they actually all ARE.

 

[Blaine]

Norfleet Well, where's my landmine map? I've been tootling around in STO for an hour or so per day for the past couple of days. I'm actually more impressed than I thought I'd be with the presentation and feel of the game (aside from captains hovering their hands in midair during comm dialogues and other weirdness), although it's important to bear in mind that that was a pretty low bar.

 

[Norfleet]

Well, for starters, when you get a new ship, ALWAYS CHOOSE THE SCIENCE SHIP. Where are you currently at? Are you even on the channel? What's your name?

 

[Blaine]

Well, for starters, when you get a new ship, ALWAYS CHOOSE THE SCIENCE SHIP. Where are you currently at? Are you even on the channel? What's your name?

I assume you're referring to an in-game Codexian chat channel, but it's not mentioned in the OP, nor on the first page, nor in the past four pages, nor in your signature, nor in the thread title or description; even a thread search for "channel" only prompts a laborious search through posts discussing the channel indirectly.

In other words, no, I'm not in the channel. Furthermore, this game utilizes a somewhat bizarre system of full character name/display character name/account user name and seems to display character first nameaccount user name in the chat. I assume you want the actual unique user name? It's blaine#7048.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

The full character name thing is really just a biography page detail (the easiest way to tell is that they don't bill you for changing it), generally one works with character@user or just @user. Anyway, sent a friend inv and hopefully a chat channel inv.

The chat channel works between factions and in fact between all three of Cryptic's games. So there is a chance of maybe once a year seeing me log in to play with dolls in Champions.

 

[Blaine]

Cool, thanks. I will say that despite there being nickel-and-dime shit and Temptations™ everywhere the eye can see, at least the basic limitations (inventory size, bank size, character slots, etc.) aren't too bad, and it seems the entire game is open to F2P players.

Bugs and technical issues I've run into so far:

• Welcome Back! window reappears at every single zone transition
• sprint stops working for no reason, restarting will fix it or it might come back on its own
• sometimes autopilot through sector space doesn't work, have to do it manually
• ship captains sometimes stand with their hands suspended in "riding a surfboard" pose: http://puu.sh/ADaXt/29133297ad.png
• "slightly" sloppy environmental design: http://puu.sh/ADb0a/88afdb1ad3.png
• frame drops to 60 FPS (from 144 FPS) in a few places, like damaged Fed ships with a lot of smoke and space views out the windows, which for a game this dated on my rig is absurd
• NPCs in cities (First City on Qo'noS, at any rate) pause for a moment every few seconds as they walk around

Vaarna_Aarne friend invite received and accepted, didn't see a channel invite in either the Social or Mail menus though.

Slightly miffed at the moment, since I accepted a quest reward that included a boff, and presumably the boff vanished into the ether since my slots were full, with the quest turn-in irretrievably completed. Lesson learned: Don't turn in quests offering boffs unless you clear a slot first.

 

[Norfleet]

Slightly miffed at the moment, since I accepted a quest reward that included a boff, and presumably the boff vanished into the ether since my slots were full, with the quest turn-in irretrievably completed. Lesson learned: Don't turn in quests offering boffs unless you clear a slot first.

It didn't vanish, it went into your Candidate roster under Stations. You don't want those boffs, though. They are utterly garbage.

 

[Blaine]

Well, garbage is better than nothing for the extended tutorial.

Will I ever get an invite to the chat channel? Who can say? The full character name should be krakrok@blaine#7048, if that's needed. Tomorrow, I'll be playing with a friend.

 

[Vaarna_Aarne]

Chat's userlist says you're invited now.

 

[Jarpie]

Blaine, the invite shows up in the channel list, click right window on chat-window tabs -> channels tab -> you should see the channel as invited.

 

[Bliblablubb]

You don't want those boffs, though. They are utterly garbage.

He is a piss poor space bum right now, it's not that he can even afford to hire professionals. They have to suffice for a bit before he can send them out of an airlock.... scratch that, spacing them would be fun. NO FUN ALLOWED!


Enjoy your space lizard Blaine , before Norfleet berates you for not making a KDF-Romulard, the one and only masterrace. Now with moah ass than you could ever want.
Well, that lizard can always get a job as "additional pylon #1" in the end...

 

[Lazing Dirk]

Enjoy your space lizard Blaine , before Norfleet berates you for not making a KDF-Romulard, the one and only masterrace. Now with moah ass than you could ever want.
Well, that lizard can always get a job as "additional pylon #1" in the end...

Aint no party like a lizard party

Taken shortly before we went and took down a bunch of frigates and shit with 2 runabouts (?!?)

 

[Blaine]

It's just like in the show, two shuttles destroying loads of frigates and science cruisers!

 

[Blaine]

I suppose I can't publicly divulge the details of Master Norfleet's No Fun Woodpecker Style Shaolin method of playing STO, but perhaps an artist's conception will do:

NSFW