You know, if a battlestar galactica MMO ever happened, I might have to quit my day job.

Anyway, for those of you wondering at all the STO coverage lately, never fear!  You will be seeing regular reports from EVE and LOTR resuming soon as well.  Actually, as soon as this weekend.

STO is shiny and new, and as such a lot of our folks are over there right now.  But we still have people in both of the other games, and more importantly, we still have plans for both of them.  I wanted to give everyone an idea of what we have planned.

In STO, obviously, our members are busy exploring the galaxy, trying to secure peace, etc.  They're starting to team up for missions and fleet actions, and it's looking like we're going to be designating two "fleet nights" each week to help make that teaming up a little easier.  So ideally you will see at least two (and possibly more, if people get sick of me pestering them to post) captain's logs each week, although not all will be on the front page.

In EVE, we're going to be back at work mining and shooting pirates.  You'll see more pictures of the various ships we fly and encounter, and soon you'll hear details of our super secret project there.  Our EVE fleet operations will continue on the weekends, so you'll see reports of those posted here as well.

In LOTR, our fellowships are going to continue to fight the evil of Sauron.  We have a fellowship night each week, and generally when something memorable happens, you'll read an account of it here.  We're active the rest of the time of course, and our agents roam the lands of Middle-Earth constantly in their quest to hold the darkness at bay.

Anyway, now I have to go do that work thing (bleh).  But I hope that this reassures everyone that we're not abandoning any games right now.

Meet some of the members of Task Force Shadowfire when we took some shore leave on the pleasure planet of Risa.  (Note:  any rumors of Tal getting drunk and falling in the lagoon are purely fictitious and bear no resemblance to actual events.)

 
From left to right:  Cyrano, Arkhan, Trace, Desnar, Sarbis, and Lesai.

It just seemed appropriate to do this:

 
 
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the USS Shadowfire.  She's an old ship, but one with a proud history, and she's still in service today.

On stardate 87687.83, Starfleet Command commissioned the creation of Task Force Shadowfire.

 
Task Force Shadowfire is comprised of Starfleet officers who have shown exceptional courage under fire.  The primary objective of the task force remains classified, but its members participate in all normal Starfleet operations, with a particular emphasis on investigating incidents involving extremely advanced technology.

Star Trek Online's Head Start has begun, and we're there!  You can check out our Captain's Logs forum for accounts of our adventures, and occasionally we'll highlight them here as well!

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Captain's Log - USS Phoenix, Stardate 87685.11 - Acting Captain Trace reporting

 

When I joined Starfleet, I figured that I would probably see action - Orion pirates, Nausicaan Raiders, even the Klingons....

But I never thought the Borg would come back.

The Phoenix was pulled from sector patrol duty and sent to the Vega Colony, but we were almost too late.  The Borg had already destroyed most of the fleet.  We were able to rescue some survivors and some colonists, but we had to hold out until more reinforcements arrived.

I was lucky, I guess.  The captain sent me over to the Khitomer to help repel the Borg that were attempting to board and assimilate the ship.  While I was there.... they hit the Phoenix.  All of the officers were killed.

I took command of the Phoenix when I beamed back aboard, and we managed to make it through the rest of the battle intact, although the engineers say they'll need two or three days to get everything back in some semblence of order.  I've been ordered back to Spacedock to speak with Admiral Quinn.  It sounds like we weren't the only ship that got hit hard.

I guess we'll see what happens from here.  The Phoenix might be an older ship, but she has a good crew.  With the fleet stretched so thin, who knows what our next assignment will be.  I don't even know if there are any qualified captains available to transfer in.  But I suppose we'll have to make do as best we can.

We're here.  I'd better not keep the Admiral waiting.

We haven't posted much about it but a lot of us have been in the STO open beta for the past week or so.

The beta is actually doing rather well, and while there have been some issues due to the number of people on the server (which is expected during this phase of a beta), the game itself seems to be in pretty good shape for launch coming up in two weeks.  It's a lot of fun, and we are hopeful that our fleet there will take off once the launch happens.  So you'll be seeing more news about STO in a couple of weeks.

For now though, you'll have to excuse me, I have more exploring to do.


 

So, I am a slacker and did not get the wednesday post done by the time we did the sunday fleet operation.  Therefore you all get a combined report :)

Wednesday, January 13th

On wednesday we all took some time out to give some pirates a good beating.  You know, it's one of those things you can do that really just brightens your day.  No matter how annoying things were at the office, coming home and blowing up space pirates makes it all better - or well, at least a little.

 
A Raven-class battleship.  When we have pirates to kill, we bringeth the pain.

Usually we pick up missions from a friendly agent and run them together, and that was our plan for Wednesday.  Of course, the agent had good reason for sending us after these particular pirates.

 
Seriously, if I were a pirate, I would take over the station rather than shoot it full of holes.  What a waste of a perfectly good site for my lair of evil.

The pirates were ready for us when we got there though - with lots of missiles.

I haven't talked much about the mechanics of EVE - but essentially, the type of weapon you're using will dictate how you fly.  Missiles, as you might guess, are long-range weapons.  They can be pretty devastating if the enemy can't shoot back.  Thankfully in this case, we had brought missiles of our own.  The downside to using missiles is that because they tend to be used at extreme range, a sensor dampener that lowers your targeting range can really be a buzzkill.  Also, missiles tend to fire a bit slower than other weapon types, which means that if you bring a missile to a gunfight, you better kill the other guy before he gets close enough to start shooting.

 
They may have had missiles, but I brought drones.  Muahahaha!

EVE also has plenty of the "pew pew" besides missiles though.  The next weapon type down the range weapons are railguns.  Railguns don't do a lot of damage individually, but they fire pretty quick and have long range.  Then there's artillery - these are big guns that have long range, a relatively slow firing rate (for guns), and do respectable damage per shot.  In the middle there are lasers - you won't get quite as much range out of a laser as you will out of a railgun or artillery gun, but you will get consistent, respectable damage (and lasers don't need ammo, just power).  Below lasers, there are blasters and autocannons.  Blasters do massive damage at short range, and autocannons fire extremely fast (at short range).  Each race in EVE has a preferred weapon type, and their ships tend to be optimized for that type - although you still have a lot of leeway as a pilot with how you want to load out your ship.

Anyway, we dusted those silly pirates.


Sunday, January 17th

Like last sunday, this monday was a mining op.  Today we demolished about half an asteroid belt (a normal one, not a hidden one like last week).  We got lower end minerals out of it, but that's ok because that's really what we needed most for our production.

 
These poor asteroids don't stand a chance...

For the last week or two there's been a thing going on in EVE called "Hulkageddon".  Basically, this is where a bunch of idiots got bored enough to organize themselves and fly around with the goal of suicide ganking mining ships (hulks).  This is pure griefing really, as there's no legitimate reason to do it other than to annoy other players.

 
An Osprey-class cruiser.  The osprey is a good all-around ship, but it gets a bonus to remote shield repair units (aka shield throwers) that makes it an excellent logistics platform for fleets.

Of course, if we stopped mining, they would win.  So we didn't.  We went out and mined like we always did - and apart from a pesky little frigate that came out and wanted to play bumper cars with us right at the end, we didn't see anyone try anything at all.  But we were prepared just in case.

You see, the thing about suicide ganking in EVE is the ganker only has a short amount of time to try to kill his target before the NPC cops show up (like seconds, actually).  So our method of dealing with suicide gankers is pretty simple - we bring along a ship equipped with remote repair modules (shield projectors, etc).  If anyone did attack, the remote repair ship can keep the miner up long enough to warp out - and by then, Concord has usually shown up.  Sure, it's possible that a swarm of people would come and overwhelm us, but the truth of things is that most gankers are just flying in groups of one or two, so we felt pretty confident.

Anyway that is all for this week.  We will have another next week, and then we'll be off for the super bowl, and come back with another report in two weeks.

Note from Tal:  I have a writeup for our EVE fleet operation on Wednesday that I need to post, but the site was having issues yesterday so I wasn't able to get it up.  It'll be up soon.  In the meantime, have an editorial.

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Editorial

It's been a while since I participated in a beta for an MMO.

I guess over the years I've gotten a bit used to the sense of entitlement that MMO players have - at least in released games.  If you visit any game's official forums you'll see post after post where some player is bashing the devs because they haven't done enough on that player's pet problem - or because that player disagrees with what they have done.  Most of the time, I don't think this is really deserved.

Don't get me wrong - I think it's important and useful for players to provide feedback to MMO developers.  And that's the whole point of developers having forums, really.  I also think that there's a responsibility on the part of the developers to communicate with their playerbase.  A LOT of development teams really fall down in that responsibility, and so they do indeed deserve some of what they get.

But us players tend to take things way too far.  Melodrama, exaggeration, nerd rage, whatever - we basically make arses of ourselves on forums all the time, with no regard for the consequences of our actions.  It simply doesn't register on most people that when they post a highly negative rant, it's not going to have the effect they want.  Instead of alerting the development team to the issue (which, let's be honest, the dev team already probably knew about), they're going to cause the development team to give less weight to their posts now and in the future.  Instead of starting a discussion with other players, and soliciting ideas and suggestions on how to make things better, they've opened up a flaming pit of vitriol, bringing out the worst aspects in their community and driving away the better people - and the new players.  Yeah that's right, new players read forums - and when they see a bunch of flaming and whining and ranting, they get worried about the game.

Like I said though - I guess I've gotten a bit used to it for released games.

But it amazes me how, four days into STO's open beta, which is by definition a stress test, people have this horrible sense of entitlement about the game.

I mean seriously, the point of a beta is to break things.  It's to find the bugs.  It's to crash the servers.  It's to pile as many people online as you can so that you can find the things that will break down and get those fixed before launch.  Stuff's not going to work.  It's going to need to be tweaked and fixed.  There's going to be places where the design is just flawed and the devs are going to probably have to go back to the drawing board.

To their credit, STO's dev team has done a good job aggressively fixing issues - over the past three days, performance has improved considerably from the first night.  There's still obviously work to do, but the game is a damn sight better now than most MMOs are on launch.

And most players in the beta aren't registering that fact at all.  They will go on and on, both in-game and on the STO forums, about how the game should be absolutely perfect AND conform to their vision of what it should be, and how they've played tons of other MMOs.  They have this horrible sense of entitlement - devs should immediately respond to their posts.  Bugs should be fixed within hours.  Patch times should be whenever its most convenient for them.  It is utterly amazing to me how completely self-centered and blind to reality most of these people are.

The reality is this:  Like every MMO, STO will ship with some bugs still in it.  There will be work ongoing for months to balance things, smooth things out, and fill holes in content.  Cryptic to their credit seems to be on the ball with a lot of this and is far more efficient and effective than most of the larger publishers in the industry (NCSoft, SOE, and Blizzard to name three).  Anyone who has played MMOs previously, especially titles at launch, should understand this.

The danger is not that STO is going to be a bad game at this point.  The danger is that us players will be too busy with our sense of entitlement to appreciate the game that we get.