Pumping Irony

We’re two weeks into Star Trek Online re-launching as Free-to-Play (F2P) and, honestly, it’s been wonderful and crazy. I’ve never seen so many instances of Earth Spacedock and other starbases, and each instance is near capacity. PvE Queues pop within seconds of signing up for one; in fact I typically begin by queuing for all three space STF’s under the Normal difficulty and usually one of the pops before I finish signing up for the third one. I wish I could say the same of PvP Queues, though, but I never see enough KDF queued to actually pop a PvP match.

But I have to give Cryptic – and Perfect World Entertainment – a major kudos for the success STO has seen. It started off with PWE funding Cryptic a few months ago when the acquisition was completed, so Cryptic hired more people for STO (and the other games too). It takes a few months to get trained and up to speed on the toolset but we’re about to see the results, first with this weekend’s brief 2nd Anniversary events, then next Saturday we’ll see the launch of the next Featured Episode.

PWE has also been advertising the game, something Atari never allowed for either Star Trek Online or Dungeons & Dragons Online. STO also reappeared on Steam last week, and yesterday was the featured F2P game on the Steam Store. Between the advertising, the events, and the general influx of going F2P anyway, it shows:

I’ve never even heard of a login queue for STO! But there it is, in all its glory! LOL! Gold players (monthly or lifetime subscribers) get bumped to the top of the queue, and so far no one is reporting anything longer than 10 seconds. My own queue times have been less than 5 seconds. Silver players (F2P non-subscribers) remain on the queue, which is showing well over 1,000 players as you can see here.

While I’m ecstatic for the success STO is seeing in the short-term, I’m not going to go all fanboi and call it an instant win. Players are fickle as a rule of thumb, and the general consensus is that F2P players are even moreso. This weekend with the Anniversary and next weekend with the first new Featured Episode story content will be STO’s "trial by fire" for F2P. Or I suppose, more appropriately, the week(end)s following the initial FE release. Either way, it sounds like good things will be coming in 2012 for STO players if this continues!

Today Cryptic’s Star Trek Online officially launched as Free-to-Play (F2P) for all customers! We’ve had a week or so of Early Access where previous subscribers could login and play but today is the real deal for everyone. The launch of F2P on the 17th of January was no coincidence, either, for those Trek-minded readers. 17-01? Hello? The Enterprise from the ‘60s television series was NCC-1701..

Also check out the new F2P Trailer which uses the in-game engine and features some of the new settings such as Starfleet Academy. Watch it on the official site or YouTube.

Already today I’ve seen over a dozen instances of Earth Spacedock (ESD) with each instance close to player capacity. ESD zone chat is crazy busy, and it’s usually busy anyway. Hopefully this is the mark of good things to come.

Now that F2P is upon us and the bulk of the conversion work is over, the design team can get back to giving us more Stuff To Do!

Acting Executive Producer, Stephen D’Angelo writes in the Season 5 Dev Diary #11 that the next few months are expected to be busy at last with new content. Exciting times!

• February brings the game’s Second Anniversary celebration.
• The Anniversary event also brings the new ships – Odyssey class cruiser (aka the Enterprise-F) for the Federation and a new Klingon flagship – into the game’s lore.
• The Season 5 Featured Episode (FE) story arc will begin in February and continue into March with five episodes. This FE will be centered around Deep Space 9 (DS9) and the Dominion.
• March will see the first expansion to the Duty Officer system as well as the next new set of game features.
• More content and events continuing into April and May.
• The Season 6 FE is currently in development and hopefully will arrive in June.

D’Angelo says it best towards the end:

All told, it’s my goal to have something new in the game nearly every week starting with the second anniversary event and running through the end of April.

I’ve been enjoying the content lately already. I still haven’t completed all the accolades for the Borg Red Alerts yet, so I occasionally jump into one if I’m not already on my way to something else. The new events are a lot of fun, especially the Mirror Universe invasions which are setup in an identical fashion to the Borg invasions but are less difficult and completed faster, therefore leaning themselves to less frustrating pickup groups.

I’ve also been doing a lot of the new space Special Task Force (STF) content, now that they are separate from the ground content, which seems more difficult to me. I’ve only done one ground STF so far. A lot of fun, but I didn’t really have much of a clue what was happening. That was also true the first time I did each space STF so I’ll learn as I go and get more confident what to do with my team.

Also the new Deferi Invasion is a lot of fun! It appears to be the largest ground map in STO and in some sense could be considered a “public quest” type affair. The event doesn’t happen very often compared to all the others, however. You beam down to the base camp and there are three NPCs. Each has two missions labeled Easy. Complete those and you unlock two Medium, then a Hard. At some point a Hard mission from a fourth NPC opens up but I haven’t had a chance to do that one yet. The event only last two hours and my group ran out of time finishing up the final Hard mission and just barely made it back to the base camp before the event ended. But considering the type of ground content STO has always had, it’s damned impressive to see a map that big and all those players running around shooting Borg drones, saving Deferi, uploading new software to anti-infantry turrets, etc.

Star Trek Online‘s new Executive Producer, Stephen D’Angelo, has been busy the past couple weeks writing blog posts detailing the game’s Path to F2P.

The two most recent posts (as of this writing) are each reflective of the new economy that Cryptic is in the process of developing and evolving on the Tribble test server so that F2P will go live with a viable new economy.

First, Blog #10 detailed the new system of starship acquisition. New ships will be added to the game, along with shifting how ships will be acquired and what they will cost. The table at the bottom of the article shows which ships will be available in-game for either the new Dilithium currency or some other means, such as the free tokens for Gold players, and which ships will be in the C-Store. One very important thing to note is that all Vice Admiral (Tier 6) starships will be C-Store exclusive! To me, this seems a drastic departure from what we normally see in subscription-to-F2P conversions, where players – even Gold players! – have no choice but to buy their "end-game" ship. We’re still only a couple weeks into beta testing, and I expect Gold players to go ballistic and throw conniption fits over this.

As for my own take on how it may effect my own game and experience, I’m a bit torn. I do still believe that as a Gold (I’m a Lifetime Subscriber) player, basic "equipment" should remain available in-game. The C-Store has always been around, and I haven’t minded it. I haven’t gotten around to buying any starships yet, because the only ship I ever wanted since starting the game was the Intrepid class science ship. If it had been C-Store exclusive, I would have bought it. That’s just how "right" that ship feels for everything I wanted in my science officer character. Vice Admirals have the most starship choices available, most of which are in the C-Store, and that’s fine, but I do think at least one basic model should be available in-game for normal means for the Gold players.

Blog #11 goes into how Cryptic ideally wants the normal Energy Credit economy to work as the most common currency players will be spending and needing to acquire. Then comes the new Dilithium currency, which is primarily intended for only high-end gear (like players on Holodeck currently barter for Emblems) and non-C-Store starships. D’Angelo says he does want that gear to be harder to acquire than it is now, since it’s most appealing to the harder-core player, and those players will "work" to get it, giving it more "worth" to the player.

New to equation (at least to me, I don’t frequent the forums) is the planned Currency Exchange where players can sell Dilithium to other players for C-Points! Cryptic will not be selling Dilithium in the C-Store, so the only Dilithium available on the economy market will be that which other players are willing to go out and get, then put up for sale. Prices are expected to be reflective of the amount currently on the market. On the one hand, I think this is an intriguing RMT-ish addition to the game. Players who absolutely refuse to buy C-Points for a Vice Admiral starship could grind Dilithium and sell it for the C-Points. On the other hand, I routinely witness just how much the hardcore STO players are willing to grind. When the Borg Incursions went live last month, the hardcore guys went… hardcore… over completing all the related accolades, including the final one for destroying 2,000 Borg ships, and finished them all in about two weeks. When the F2P beta went live on Tribble, several hardcore types got to Vice Admiral rank in under 48 hours. The KDF faction just went live last week, and those players did the same thing getting level capped KDF characters in record time. Now they’ll have a way to make all that time grinding have some value in that they can earn C-Points from other players and turn around and buy stuff from the C-Store! The primary bottlenecks will be two-fold. First, how many ways will there eventually be to earn Dilithium in-game? In the recent (today’s patch isn’t finished downloading yet) build, there were a few new ways to earn Refined Dilithium (the real currency used to buy starships and gear) and a few ways that awarded Dilithium Ore, which the player has to refine (just a button click) and is capped at refining 8000 per day. So we’ll see how this ends up working out. Either way, it should be interesting.

See what I did there?

As I mentioned recently, Star Trek Online‘s test servers have been reassigned. The RedShirt server, which is usually for internal testing or invitation-only Quality Assurance testing, is now assigned as the public test server. Tribble has been reassigned as the F2P Beta server, and that’s where I’ve been spending all my time with STO lately.

Unlike most MMO betas, which are nothing more than marketing speak for glorified free trials, the F2P Beta hearkens back to the late 20th century where, by golly, beta meant beta! So much stuff is broken, it isn’t even funny. If nothing else, this goes to show how many seemingly unrelated systems in an MMO end up being related after all. These things are complicated under the hood! I’ve lost count how many bug reports I have filed already, and several more that I’m debating filing or not because I know other testers have already filed them.

One minor, but cool, graphical overhaul is that the Bajoran wormhole is now visible from inside DS9!

Bridge Officer (“BOff”) AI is broken in the current build in the respect that your BOffs will no longer automatically perform CPR on incapacitated team members when out of combat, so you have to manually resuscitate your team on away missions. Items from a future event somehow ended up in the loot table, so we occasionally pick them up. No big deal other than everyone wonders what they’re for. If you’re quick enough you can sell them for 50 Energy Credits each, otherwise you’ll soon see a notification that you “used” the item and it vanishes from your inventory. There are plenty of others, mostly small bugs and glitches.

R&D (crafting) has been altered so that players can only make odd-numbered tier items. I can’t even imagine the reason for this, unless it’s to force purchasing dilithium in the C-Store (see the Dilithium Conspiracy a couple paragraphs down) but I typically R&D gear for my ship every tier then use badges of exploration to outfit my away team. This not only is a drastic change, it nearly makes R&D completely useless until reaching level cap.

The big show-stopper is broken missions. Unlike the current game, the F2P game will be very story line-dependent for leveling, and the mission journal UI has been updated appropriately for this. The good part of this is that each story line will be given in a linear manner, so we can play through a continuous story to its conclusion rather than the current live game where it’s not always clear which missions are related. The bad thing is that if a mission breaks, your progression comes to a dead halt. Not good. The very first story arc in the game has a mission that is broken in the current build, for example. At the end, you fight an Undine dreadnought ship. The glitch is that it keeps spitting out smaller ships who quickly overwhelm and destroy the player’s ship. Over and over. The workaround for this is to team with other players. Ha! Teaming with other players? In an MMO? Whodathunkit? But, as with most group content (and this is supposed to be a solo mission) finding other players isn’t always easy. Luckily, I had already joined a pretty large and active fleet on Tribble so four guys joined me — one of whom had played for over 24 hours straight, no sleep, no breaks, to reach Vice Admiral! — so we scaled ourselves to the highest team member (VA) and took out the dreadnought in record time. There are apparently other broken missions as well. I keep reading the complaints on the test chat but haven’t reached them yet. But hey, this is why we’re Beta Testing, right?

The other big deal is the new Dilithium currency. I dislike the name, simply for role-play purposes I don’t think trading dilithium makes sense from a canon or lore perspective (but I’m no big Trek fanatic, so maybe it does?) but I was really excited to have the currencies whittled down. In the live game, there are so many that become useless as you level up but you still have all these leftover marks and badges. The only use for them is to go ahead and barter for gear then sell the gear for Energy Credits. Or, I suppose barter them to twink an alt? Now everything will use Dilithium, so no feeling of “wasted” badges and marks leftover. In the current system, you’ll get one large payment of Dilithium when you get promoted to the next rank, starting with Commander. The “glitch” (quotation marks because it isn’t truly a glitch) in the system as I write this is upgrading your starship. In the live game, when you earn a promotion you also receive a token for a free ship of the appropriate tier you were just promoted to. Those tokens are gone now; everything will be bought with dilithium. Cryptic says the intent is for your promotion payment to roughly equal 80% of the cost of the starship, and it’s your responsibility to come up with the other 20%. However, in the current beta build, the other means of acquiring dilithium are not in the game yet. So, in order to afford your Tier 3 (Commander rank) ship, you have to fly your Tier 2 (Lt. Commander) ship all the way to Captain, where you would normally pick up your Tier 4 ship. Essentially, we’re always one tier behind. I suppose on the plus side, this certainly makes space combat more difficult! The flip side for the F2P Conspiracy Theorists is that ships will also be available in the C-Store, so it will be a choice of grinding for the extra 20% dilithium or just buying your ship with Cryptic Points. Also, keep in mind, gear that was formerly bartered for badges will now also use dilithium. And the stuff is expensive! The Test Store gets patched in tomorrow so I’ll see if Cryptic also patches in some other ways of earning dilithium in-game before I put on my “pay to win” foil hat.

Aside from the changes to the existing game, we’re also testing the new feature we’ve been looking forward to for months: Duty Officers! (“DOff”)

Beginning at Lt. Commander, grade 2 (level 12) you receive a mission to receive your first batch of 20 duty officers. From there, bring up the new Duty Officer UI and assign them to positions on your ship or send them on assignments. There are a ton of different types of duty officers, some including civilians (even prisoners in your ship’s brig) with various areas of expertise in addition to the Starfleet (and coming soon, Klingon Defense Force!) officers.

For Starship Duty, you can assign up to five duty officers to provide essentially passive buffs or special “proc” to your normal build. I’m still working with my first batch of duty officers, so I’ve only assigned two to ship duty. One provides a chance of partially recharging my ship’s shields if I use the Brace for Impact ability, while the other reduces the refresh time on Transwarps. I’ve seen several other “proc”-style duty officer abilities but they did not apply to my tactical officer abilities (duty officers will not “proc” for bridge officers, by the way).

Duty Officer Assignments are as varied as the officers themselves. Each has a chance for success, critical success, failure or disaster. Rewards vary as well, but the big deal is the new progression, Commendation XP (“CXP”). Some assignments can reward various types of CXP per the assignment type, such as Military, Science, Trade, and so forth. There are even diplomatic assignments that will reward your captain with Diplomacy XP (“DXP”) to help with his diplomacy progression. Others may reward items such as R&D data samples, a piece of gear, or the new prototype schematics which can in turn be used for shipboard assignments.

As your duty officers successfully complete assignments that award CXP or DXP, your commendation tier in that area will increase, opening up new (and riskier) assignments, as well as “leveling up” your duty officers if I am understanding it correctly. Failure will put that duty officer in sickbay for a certain period of time, so he is unable to be used for other assignments, and I think I read that disaster could possibly result in your duty officer being killed. Permanently. So this could certainly be a risk versus reward system when we get into the Duty Officer “end game.”

Duty Officer assignments also occur in real time. Some of the simpler ones may only take 10 to 30 minutes. I’ve done several of those already. Others take 1 to 8 hours that I’ve seen so far. Still others take 1 to 3 days. Days! Yes, this means duty officer assignments continue when you are offline. For example, after receiving my initial complement of DOffs, I beamed down to Starfleet Academy where a 3-day assignment to recruit another cadre of DOffs was available. I still have 2 days remaining on that. I was also enroute to a mission yesterday when the test channel lit up that the Sirius sector block had a recruitment for an Andorian duty officer, so I warped to Sirius to get that, which also turned out to be a 3-day assignment.

So in essence, the Duty Officer mechanic is more of a long-term system to work towards some minor build customization (I don’t play EQ2 so can’t say how analogous this is to “alternate advancement”), coupled with some limited offline progression of sorts.

All in all, STO F2P looks to be interesting once they get the bugs ironed out and full details on how Dilithium is going to work both in general and alongside the C-Store.

Cryptic put up a new Public Test server, named RedShirt, last night which, for the time being, will take the place of the Tribble test server. Tribble will be utilized as a Beta Tech server for the next few months as Cryptic prepares the Duty Officer system and even bigger, the Free-to-Play (F2P) conversion. They didn’t say otherwise, but I will go out on a limb and assume that once F2P goes live, RedShirt will go back to being an internal test server and Tribble back to our public test server.

Community Rep “StormShade” made the announcement yesterday afternoon in the forums:

Hey gang!

Those of you have had access to Tribble will now have access to a new server, “Public Test (Redshirt)”. This server will be taking the place of Tribble as our test server for all builds that are heading to our live environment, Holodeck, while we prepare Tribble for an upcoming beta, and make use of that server during the beta.

If you currently have access to Tribble, you shouldn’t need to do anything other than transfer a character to STO Public Test, and resume testing as normal. If you don’t have access to Tribble yet, you can gain access to both Tribble, and STO Public Test, by following the steps outlined in this handy FAQ.

Thanks, and happy testing!

The Star Trek Online Team

Those of us already playing, however, caught the update prior to the announcement as RedShirt was stealthily added to the launcher.

Currently, RedShirt is a duplicate copy of Tribble. Monday, however, Tribble gets wiped — all characters, etc. will be gone! — as the new beta build gets implemented. Presumptions, both my own and other players who read forums more, gleaned from the vague forum notes about Monday’s update are that it will be the Duty Officer system, which sounds like requires new methods of inter-system mechanics, which is why Tribble is being wiped.

Cryptic recently pumped out their latest content — Borg Red Alerts — onto Star Trek Online‘s live server, Holodeck last week.

The official page I linked lists enough information to give the gist of how they can work, but I’ll go into a bit more detail here.

These Red Alerts are very similar to the Deep Space Encounters already in Star Trek Online but unlike a DSE, the Borg incursions are not stationary. Once per hour, the Borg send invasion forces into random sector blocks, and random instances of that sector block. For example, if there are enough players in the Regulus sector block to create three instances, the Borg might invade instance #2 but not #1 or #3. So in a sense, I could probably compare the Borg incursions to the random rift events in Rift, I think.

If you are in a sector block (and correct instance) that is being invaded, in the “low priority interaction” box on your UI (where the astrometrics toggle and other switches are found) a big flashing ALERT! Distress Call! button appears. If you click the button, your senior tactical officer will inform you of the situation and ask if you want to assist. An affirmative response will load you into the encounter instance, which has a maximum of five players.

First, and perhaps most importantly, any post-tutorial rank captain of either faction is eligible to participate in the Red Alerts! The battles themselves take place in instanced space, and the players and Borg NPCs are scaled — to an extent — to that encounter, so it makes for fantastic content for low-level players to rub elbows with the admiralty and still contribute. Not only do these battles scale to accommodate the full range of players, they are also cross-faction, as the Borg are a threat to both the Federation and the Klingon Defense Force so these Borg incursions are one of the few times Starfleet and KDF players can team up to fight a common enemy. Having said that, while I’ve been having a blast taking my Commander grade 4 tactical officer into these red alerts, it can get a little frustrating when you have captains joining who are still Ensigns flying their Miranda light frigates. Scaling or not, a Miranda simply doesn’t have enough weapons and console slots, and the other players have to make up for it or fail the encounter.

There are no incursions into the Eta Eridani, Gamma Orionis, or Pelia sector blocks. Every other sector block is fair game. Incursions are typically level 45. Players will be scaled up or down accordingly. However, there are two exceptions: encounters in the Zeta Andromeda sector block are level 51, but players less than level 45 will only be scaled up to 45. (I’ve heard joining a team with a Vice Admiral will scale you all the way to 51, though but have not tested to confirm this.) Players higher than 45 will maintain their level (unless they join a team and scale down to a lower level teammate). Encounters in the Orellius sector block are level 53 and again, lower level players will only be scaled up to level 45. So these two sector blocks will provide the highest level of challenge out of all the red alerts.

Once in the encounter, you’re in a wise space with a lot of Borg ships that are thankfully spaced apart enough to separate the battles. The first challenge is to defeat four Borg squadrons within 15 minutes. Succeeding at that will trigger the next phase: a huge Borg unimatrix command ship warps in, accompanied by various probes. The command ship itself is inspired by V’ger from Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and apparently Gene Roddenberry hinted that the Borg created V’ger. Regardless, it’s becoming common to hear the command ship referred to in-game as “B’ger.” At the start of the battle with the Borg capital ship, it is imperative to eliminate its regeneration probes first, otherwise you can blast away ’til the cows come home, but those things will keep the command ship healed. The other probe types can safely be ignored. The command ship can also fire huge plasma energy blasts which need to be taken out before they hit another player (or a player runs into them) as one hit can destroy a player’s ship.

There are eleven sector blocks which get incursions, and each has its own accolade and daily mission, so chasing incursions nets you eleven dailies. The reward is either a level appropriate (random) item, or a level-appropriate badge. I choose the badge every time because I know those can be used to get new gear, whereas there’s a high chance I won’t be able (or won’t want) to use the random item awarded. In addition to the eleven sector accolades, there is a meta-accolade for defeating all the command ships, ten in all. The command ship in any given red alert is randomly chosen so you never know which one will show up. There’s also an accolade for destroying 2,000 (yes, you read that correctly, two thousand) Borg vessels plus the accolades that were already in the game for destroying Borg ships, taking plasma damage, and so on, so these Red Alerts certainly give the Accolade Hunters out there some goals to strive for.

The space incursions are Phase 1 of the Borg system update. Phase 2 will be ground incursions, which will be interesting since the Borg are tougher on the ground now and their shields adapt like we saw on the tv series. Phase 3 will be revamped versions of the Borg Special Task Force (STF) missions, which are end-game missions for only players, no bridge officer companions. Then Phase 4 which is the Into the Hive STF where players finally fight the Borg Queen. Phase 4 is hopefully scheduled by the end of the year, or at least prior to Season 5 launching, so take your best guess then work backwards from there to guesstimate when the other phases might arrive, at least until Cryptic makes the official announcements.

Final thoughts:

One one hand it’s almost difficult to say these Borg incursions are “new content” per se, since the basic tech for them has been in the game all along. They could be looked at as “merely” randomly placed cross-faction Deep Space Encounters (DSEs). Like anything else in an MMO, including STO, concentrating too much on a single activity gets old. Grinding exploration missions, or patrol missions, or chasing Borg Red Alerts all day can get old real fast. But for someone like myself who likes to switch up between various activities, a sudden Red Alert in my sector block is a welcome change of events. The randomness and overall presentation of the Red Alerts can make them feel like “new content,” though and I suppose perception matters a great deal in that context.

It’s a shame there is no global notification system for these incursions. One would think that if these were that big a deal and the Borg were that big a threat, that Starfleet and the Klingon High Command would be sending out fleet-wide alerts to all captains. Instead, we only see the alert if we are in the sector block (and correct instance of that sector block) being invaded. To alleviate that, two players created and run a custom global chat named REDALERT that is strictly for reporting incursions, so if you’re into chasing after them, for now that is the best way to find out where the Borg are invading at any given moment.

My only real negative point to Red Alerts is that, unlike DSEs, players are not auto-teamed. When it’s only a 5-player battle it would certainly be helpful to not only have everyone scaled to the same point (especially on the two higher-level incursions) but speaking as a science captain who flies a science vessel for buffs and heals and working on an assault cruiser for higher spot healing on shields, I have one helluva time targeting ships I’m not teamed with, or even having a clue what their ship status is unless that ship happens to have my target’s aggro. I, for one, enjoy being auto-teamed in DSEs and I think it would certainly be helpful in these Borg incursions.

Finally, these Borg Red Alerts have one goal above all else: to be FUN.

Mission Accomplished!

I am still on yet another of my MMO Malaise breaks, which tend to be rather lengthy, but I did login to Star Trek Online last night and got a couple very nice surprises!

First, as soon as Arwellyn loaded in, the following Accolade popped up:

That’s the 400 Day Accolade! A few other things scrolled by onscreen very quickly so I checked the Accolade tab in the Journal to see what exactly it is.

Free respec token? Nice! I don’t think I’ve used any yet (probably need to once I come back and attempt some of the Fleet Actions and Special Task Forces) so one more added to my stack is appreciated.

Captain’s Table? No clue what that is. Should I care?

Captain’s Yacht! Now we’re talkin’ baby! Arwellyn was already in Earth Spacedock so she strolled over to the shipyard and turned in her token to get the sleek new personal yacht shuttle.

Sweet, eh? As Arwellyn was flying around ESD and I was trying to line up camera angles for screen shots, I swung around and saw she had the Arkenstone flying towards Earth. I was about to suggest she alter course then remembered Cryptic was supposed to be working on Starfleet Academy. I haven’t been paying attention to MMO news, even for the ones I play, so I wasn’t sure if it was in-game yet or not. Sure enough, the control to beam down to the Academy appeared on the UI! Off to the transporter room we went, and…

Starfleet Academy is truly a gorgeous zone! Check the scenery! Shuttles zip by overhead and of course the ubiquitous San Francisco bridge in the backdrop. No, you can’t jump the fences and explore. That would be cool someday, though.

Arwellyn ran around the entire zone checking out the sights. There are several memorial plaques placed all over the Academy zone that give historical information about the Academy. Reading them all rewards another Accolade!

Finally, after exploring the outside zone, time to enter the Academy building itself. The interior reminds me of an airport almost. There are NPCs waiting in turnstiles as if to buy tickets, though the vendor NPC is the tailor variety to change up one’s costume. At the far end is a bar, the 602 Club with two bartender NPC vendors.

Arwellyn did some exploring and Starfleet Academy even has three Holodecks! Want one!

Mechanic-wise, the Holodeck simply lets players select previous missions to replay, the same as the terminal in the captain’s ready room on a starship does. But it’s a friggin’ Holodeck! What might be neat,though at the risk of being considered a mandatory content gate, would be to say, have players craft a Holodeck (whether that makes sense or not is immaterial, bear with me) in order to play specific Holodeck content such as the TNG episodes where Picard played 1940′s-era detective Dixon Hill, and other episodes on the series that took place in Holodeck environments. Sort of alternate adventures that don’t have anything to do with the overarching storylines occurring in STO’s space sectors. Of course, that could also allow for more environments, etc. available for Foundry authors to create their own content as well.

The 602 Club is apparently going to be another of STO’s role-player’s hangouts, just like Quark’s bar on Deep Space 9. Indeed, for the time being, the entirety of the Starfleet Academy is what Cryptic calls a “social gameplay” environment. I don’t think (could be mistaken; again, I haven’t kept up on MMO news) the new Federation tutorial that starts in the Academy is in-game yet, so there’s no actual content to play here yet. Just run around, enjoy the view, read the plaques for the accolade and perhaps role-play at the 602 Club. In the photo above, you can clearly make out two vendor NPCs who sell drinks. There are a couple other NPCs there too, the others were players role-playing. Even the bartender on the left facing the wall was a player! He was playing the chatty bartender role and even went through the motions of going to the wall there to mix the drinks while talking it up then walking back to the customer with their drink and a smile. Funny stuff.

The July 2011 edition of Ask Cryptic for Star Trek Online is up and once again, Executive Producer Dan Stahl does an excellent job of fielding player questions (50 this month) regarding the game. Considering how busy the team is on finishing up Season 4 for its launch in a couple days, I’m impressed Dan took the time out beforehand to do this.

Bits of revealed information that appeal to me include:

• The next Feature Episode will take place around Deep Space 9, and the team hopes to get the Federation DS9 Fleet Action fixed up and back on the queue as well. The FE will also open up some missions in the Gamma Quadrant!
• Season 4 adds a new starbase for both Federation and KDF!
• The team is definitely looking at adding more sector blocks but Stahl has his R&D team looking at whether or not they can remove all the sector block instances in favor of a single, massive open space. If the tech works, he hopes they can include that change for Season 5! How freakin’ cool would that be?
• Season 4 did a complete overhaul to Kits and ranged combat on the ground, but didn’t touch melee. Prior to Season 5, the team hopes to overhaul melee to finish out ground combat.
• End Game. Not that there is currently much of an end-game to STO but that is becoming a priority now that Season 4 is about ready. They’re working on rebalancing and overhauling the existing STF’s first, adding hourly Borg Incursions, four new Fleet Actions coming in Season 4, then hopefully continuing with more end-game content. Sweet! I hope to do some of these someday, though I’ll either have to PUG or join a fleet that’s more active than our little blogger fleet, I fear.
• The new Qo’nos should go live with Season 4, and Starfleet Academy is planned for the end of this month as well. Each will be used for new tutorials for Federation or Klingon characters, and each new area will ship with Foundry hooks so that UGC authors can build missions in those new settings. Sounds like they’re also working on a Kobiyashi Maru scenario for the Academy tutorial also.

Plenty more good questions and answers from Dan Stahl. Go read the whole thing! As always, he is a shining beacon of a good role model for communicating with players.

I had planned on asking a question too since Vivox just launched in Champions Online and should go live with Season 4 in a couple days so I wondered whether Cryptic would allow players to create custom Vivox channels that could be used out-of-game. They allow players to participate on custom chat channels with any XMPP chat client such as Pidgin, and Vivox had their standalone client, Voon. The operative word there is “had,” unfortunately. Before asking my question, I thought it would be wise to check if Voon was still around (I still have it installed on my system) but apparently Vivox stopped development. Oh well.

Two weeks after Infogrames Atari announced it was divesting itself of Cryptic Studios, this morning’s Big Announcement was that Perfect World Co. Ltd. would be acquiring 100% equity in Cryptic for a cool $50 million USD. After their breakup with NCsoft, Cryptic was acquired by Infogrames Atari in 2008 for $28 million.

Naturally, MMO gamers immediately organized their Short Bus Army, driving by forums everywhere screaming the Chinese were taking over, all Cryptic games would be converted to a “pay to win” item shop and Star Trek Online would be converted to Free To Play (“F2P”).

Perfect World Entertainment developed and operates several Eastern-style MMOs, starting with Perfect World International, Jade Dynasty, Ether Saga Odyssey, and others, including their latest entry, Forsaken World.

The majority of the titles PWE developed have indeed been unapologetically Eastern in style, game play, and business model; a very particular style which does not go over nearly as well for Western audiences. PWE has been trying to expand its reach into global markets. Forsaken World is its first in-house title that PWE did research and made design decisions specifically to target Western consumers. I haven’t played myself (just finished installing FW but it’s updating while I write this) to have any personal opinion how well that turned out for them.

However, as part of their global expansion, PWE is not only developing and publishing their own in-house games, but are looking at publishing other studios’ work. PWE published Runic Games’ popular Torchlight last year, then ended up acquiring Runic Games. PWE has maintained a “hands off” approach for Runic, who continues to support Torchlight and are busy at work finishing up Torchlight 2 with a Torchlight MMO also on the back burner. This is an important consideration! To date, PWE hasn’t declared themselves automatic experts on Western gaming success (only 10% of sales of PWE’s games are from non-Eastern consumers) and so has left its first Western studio to their own devices. So much so that there is no mention of Perfect World on the Torchlight website and only a single text-only mention in the “About” section of Runic Games website. Compare that to pretty much any other video game — MMO or otherwise — where you’d see the publisher’s name and logo in several spots. I don’t recall Torchlight fans whining for the past year, do you? But no one whines and cries like the oh-so-self-important MMO Gamer.

More factoids to throw into the puzzle:

The original May 17 announcement from Infogrames Atari stated that Cryptic Studios was considered a “discontinued operation” as of March 31. That announcement wasn’t any sort of “up to the minute” news at all; it had been effective with full knowledge of all parties for over six weeks.

In the May 16 — the day before the Infogrames Atari divestiture announcement! — edition of Star Trek Online‘s Engineering Report, Executive Producer Dan Stahl made the following note which, at the time, no one picked up on: (emphasis mine)

STO continues to get great support at Cryptic and the strategic partnerships they are working on for our near future will be a huge benefit for our game. Together we are working on ways to ensure STO has many season to come.

Again, all this was in-the-know at Cryptic for some time. Buying a corporation isn’t quite the same as simply placing an order at a drive-through, paying at the window then driving off with your prize. It takes time, during which meetings take place. If Cryptic is happy with the solution that PWE presents — as Runic Games has been — I see no reason to immediately join the Short Bus Army and proclaim “d00m!” as if the sky were falling.

Cryptic has hired developers after March 31, apparently already knowing more money was heading to the studio:

We also have new blood starting in June as the team adds a new character artist, a new software engineer, and a new content designer. We’re still looking to hire an additional systems and content designer as well. I don’t know about you – but that has me really excited. Anytime our team grows like this is means more awesome is on the way.

Perfect World CEO Michael Chi made the following statements:

“This strategic acquisition will add attractive game titles to our portfolio, which will help us further penetrate into the U.S. and global online game markets.  More importantly, Cryptic Studios’ highly reputable development team and its technology platform will further strengthen our well-established R&D capabilities.  We deem this as another noteworthy achievement of our global expansion efforts.”

Again reinforcing their strong desire to break into Western markets. PWE’s in-house titles might be big in the Eastern market (I seem to recall Perfect World International having something like 22 million players?) they just don’t cross the gap to Western sensibilities, so it makes zero sense to think PWE will force Cryptic to adopt an Eastern style of microtransactions. Additionally, Mr. Chi makes it very clear that PWE is happy to have Cryptic’s technology in their fold. The Perfect World Engine isn’t a slouch but it’s certainly got its glitchy spots and rough edges but also caters to a different type of game environment than what we’ve seen the Cryptic Engine used for. It is possible PWE could wish to use the Cryptic Engine for their own in-house games? It’s also possible PWE could want to translate Cryptic’s games and bring them to the Eastern market, and that is where it’s not only possible, but very likely, that an Eastern business model could come into play.

Simply going off the satisfaction that Torchlight players have had over the past year of being published then acquired by Perfect World, I see no indication that any harm would come to Cryptic and their existing games. If anything, PWE has the funding to ensure continued development — and therefore continued market expansion– which Infogrames Atari did not, considering they’ve spent the past decade in a perpetual state of financial woe.

The Champions Online team still needs to work on their communication (compared to the Star Trek Online team, nearly every MMO’s Live Team pales, however) but the (new?) Producer is working on it. The May 2011 edition of Ask Cryptic came out a couple days ago (20 days after the STO version…) and answered, to various degrees, thirty-four question presented by the Champions Online players.

Some nice tidbits?

• Vivox integrated VOIP will be going onto both CO and STO test servers in June.
• As rumored, Champions Online will be starting story-based content updates called “Comic Series” similar in nature to Star Trek Online‘s “Feature Episodes.”

Our first Comic Series is called Aftershock. I am not going to give the story away but I can give you some ideas about the size and rollout of the series. Aftershock has a total of 6 issues. The first issue is scheduled to release Wednesday June 1, 2011 and each subsequent issue in the series will be released each Wednesday of the following weeks. Each issue will be available to play following its debut along with any previous issues. You will need to complete any previous issue in the series before you can play the latest in the series. Aftershock will wrap up the first week of July and once the entire series is out it will be playable as a complete adventure. Each issue targets about 30 minutes of gameplay, however, that time can be affected by a number of factors.

• The Comic Series will be free for Silver (ie. F2P) players also!
• The Foundry will be coming to Champions Online at some point but not in the next update.

At this time there are no solid dates for The Foundry for Champions Online. There are a few Foundry features I would like to see get wrapped up before we start porting The Foundry to Champs. Getting The Foundry working in Champs is actually easier than getting Champs ready for The Foundry. When we have a solid plan or an update we will be sure to let you know.

Both teams have their animators working on new run animations, though it sounds like STO’s may arrive before CO’s do. Hideouts are still coming along with shared storage. I’m not in a SuperGroup yet so I don’t know if there’s already the equivalent of STO’s “Fleet Bank” or if they just mean that currently in CO your characters have independent banks whereas in STO your bank is automatically shared between characters?

No news whatsoever from the Neverwinter team itself, just the occasional blurbs from the CO or STO team about importing (and exporting) tech to and from Neverwinter and some of the Foundry stuff they’ve added there. With Atari owning the license to D&D products, Neverwinter may be in a bit of a pinch. Atari claims they want out of the development side, so I’m not sure they would essentially “buy off” the Neverwinter team and spin it into its own mini-studio or not, especially since it’s using Cryptic’s tech (unless Atari by default owns all Cryptic assets?). I have high hopes for Neverwinter; an online co-op RPG is right up my alley after years of same ol’ same ol’ MMOs, especially if it uses a decent F2P model.

I also say it would be a good candidate for Cryptic to finally get a product onto the consoles as well, if it’s not an “MMO” and if it uses microtransactions, well, that’s what we’re accustomed to anyway over in console land. Buy the game, it connects to Cryptic’s dedicated servers, play for free and purchase content updates, fluff items, and they could have Avatar costumes and props as well. Think outside the box!