Eccentric Flower:201002/Notes From the Beta Quadrant

This is game-y (as opposed to gamey), but as usual, it's more about larger meta-issues and not so much about details of the particular game - at least until the final part. Ideally you non-online-game types will be able to wade through it and find some interesting bits in it. If you can't, my apologies as usual. -c

So, I played Star Trek Online a fair bit this weekend. Yes, I realize I am already playing one online game heavily, and that I should therefore be over quota, by my own rules.

The thing is, I miss having a space/futuristic MMORPG. All the more SF-like MMORPGS I've played have died. Earth and Beyond was probably the best of the lot, and I was there when they pulled the plug. It was a dark day. It's just a different experience from the more fantasy-based games, and one of the major differences is that the SF ones tend to emphasize long-range and tactical fighting rather than direct combat.

I am not really a close-up melee fighter by inclination. I greatly prefer to kill at range, which is why the first character I try in any fantasy MMORPG is a hunter/archer/ranged tactician class. In the future, people don't fight with swords, unless they are anachronistic Klingon idiots. In the future, people don't even fight with personal firearms unless they have to. In the future, people fight with gunSHIPS, or they nuke you from orbit. (It's the only way to be sure.) Others will say this method of fighting is somewhat ... detached. I say it's sensible.

Also, although I don't admit it much lest I get tarred with a fannish brush I can't stand, I am a "Star Trek" baby. I grew up with the show, faults and all, and while it is not the best SF in the world, it will always have a certain sentimental value to me.

(It was always so revelatory watching a universe in which humans basically tried to act rationally at all times. I'm still not sure when and how that evolutionary leap occurred, since god knows those humans are nothing like the humans we have now. I suspect it was the Vulcan intervention that did it. Not that I care for Vulcans by themselves either - but somewhere between the human "bag of hormones and venality" approach and the Vulcan "cold soulless bastard" approach, a wonderful compromise was reached - which is why the Kirk/Spock team worked so well.)

Anyway, so, the deal is, the game goes live tomorrow, open to the world. Those of us who jumped through some special hoops could begin playing on Friday (the so called Head Start period). And I noticed a few things, some general, some specific.

1. Load prediction is hard, but some people do it better than others. Most games get hit bad in their first week. There's a long-running joke about the early days of any game being basically a continuation of the beta period. If you came to online games late - for example, if you started playing World of Warcraft after it was already more than a year old - you may not realize how shaky the start of almost every MMORPG is. (The beginning days of an MMO I won't embarrass by naming here were so bad that they had to have a "re-invite" - honest, folks, we fixed everything, come back!)

The problem is, as far as I know, there is no way to simulate the effect of 500,000 people trying to actively play your game at the same time. Nasty surprises will happen. But Cryptic (the STO developer) could have done better. The beta was quite popular, and they saw early signs of these issues then, I'm told.

To have a game which crashes due to server load repeatedly, or drops people for fifteen minutes or more when they try to change zones, or has an impenetrable login queue because they're trying to fix the issues by clamping down on how many people can play at once (and it didn't help, anyway) ... and to have all this happen before you have even officially opened the doors ... well, it looks really bad, and it spreads bad buzz. And bad buzz can kill a game dead. Someone didn't do their homework, and someone will pay for it.

2. World of Warcraft has made everything worse. Oh, I'm not attacking WoW. I played it for a long time and I did so for a reason. In general, anything Blizzard does is likely to be better than the majority of the field. The problem is that World of Warcraft has over eleven million subscribers. The one game alone holds sixty percent of the MMORPG market. That's not going to happen again, at least not until World of Warcraft folds. There can only be one game in that majority position at a time, the one that's so big that people play it for the sole reason that that's where everyone else is. But there are some game makers who are hallucinating.

To put this in a film analogy, it's like everyone suddenly is defining themselves by whether they can make the next blockbuster. It's like all the indie studios are either trying to make Avatar, or are worrying that they will fail if they can't make Avatar. It's damned silly. Space games are a hard sell even when they have a popular franchise behind them, but the worry is that the money men behind Star Trek Online will decide they aren't happy with being indie, and pull the plug. It's happened before.

There are a number of people with an axe to grind against Cryptic, who dislike their handling of previous games. The acid word is that Cryptic is going to collect all the early subs and pre-order money and then basically abandon the game. I am not prepared to rule this out (although you'd be an idiot to believe nine-tenths of the nasty gossip you hear in the game world - there are always people with an axe to grind, and in general it's a very bitchy community). But if they do take that course, I think they'd be stupid. You don't have to have sixty percent of the player base to succeed.

I would like to see the time when World of Warcraft finally outlives its usefulness and its player base - now hooked on MMORPGS - goes off to find other, smaller, sometimes better ones which suit their own tastes and niches. A world of indies. But that time isn't yet.

3. People have no imagination. Scott Kurtz is bothered by this too. (Read his notes down the left side.) You can pick a good, realistic-for-that-universe name. The game will help you do this. You can even let it randomly pick a name for you until you find one you like. But no, everybody wants to be Jamestkirk or Therealmccoy or Leonardnimoy or worse. Goddamn it, be your own heroes. No one is impressed. I am so sick of seeing seven million different variations on Aragorn and Legolas as player names in LOTRO, I can't even tell you - especially egregious there since Aragorn and Legolas are actually NPCs in the game!

4. People mostly won't read. I have this frustration even with people I like (sorry, Mel). When I get into a new game, I read everything. I look at the tooltips on all the controls to see what they do. I wander around spending a little time locating everything. I press buttons to see what they do. And most importantly I read the mission briefings and other information the game throws at me. Most MMORPGS do the tutorial phase pretty well, actually. It's not their fault that people refuse to read the damned things.

This problem was so bad in the first two head start days that I thought about making a FAQ. Then I realized that if you're the kind of person who won't read the tutorial text, you won't read an FAQ either.

One particular example has already become a joke. Sulu (he's the grandson of that Sulu) is in the commander's office in Sol Spacedock (which is the major "home" location where you would go for repairs, merchants, bank, etc, so you spend a lot of time there). Apparently enough people couldn't find Sulu (one of your first tasks is to go talk to him), that they made NPCs around the station talk about it. So now you pass two NPCs and one is saying, "I need to find Sulu, have you seen him?" and the other says, "Yeah, I just saw him, he's up in the admiral's office." And people still ask in chat where Sulu is. Ten times a minute. No lie.

This is the sort of thing that makes me despair for humanity.

So, if you go play STO after reading this, here are twenty useful tips, some to help prevent you from being the kind of person who asks where Sulu is, and some which are things you might like to know on general principles. (And if you don't plan to play STO, stop reading now, the entry's over.)

1. Walk around the spacedock. It's arranged like a ring with a single big room in the center. Take a stroll around the ring. Read the big signs on the walls. Get the layout. You'll be spending a lot of time here, so learn the place.

2. Your U key is your friend. The window that appears when you press U is where you equip yourself and your bridge officers, where you commission and promote bridge officers, where you train them and yourself, and where you equip your ship. Nine-tenths of the "how do I do this" questions could have been solved by someone pressing U and poking around a bit.

3. There are two kinds of mail. The mail consoles by the bank allow you to send items. The mail you can get to from "More options" on your HUD does not.

4. When you are out in the sectors, use the map (press M). Asking "where is system X" over and over will not endear you to anyone. Also you can set a course automatically for just about any object on a sector map by clicking it - including the arrows to change sectors.

5. Autofire for ground weapons has been removed. Autofire for ship weapons is achieved by right-clicking the weapon's icon.

6. Artifacts and anomalies you get which say "this needs to be examined in a major research facility" are to be saved to use at Memory Alpha, where they can be traded in specific combinations for good equipment. You will get a mission to go there, if you haven't already. It is in the Alpha Centauri sector.

7. Commodities are used for missions to supply planets (with food, medical supplies, etc). They have no other use. There is a Commodities Broker in the Requisitions area of the spacedock.

8. You have to reach level 5, or complete the mission Stop the Signal (which is rated level 5 anyway), to unlock the ability to play a Klingon. Klingon play is heavily PvP oriented.

9. Two planets on the Orion sector patrol are bugged and will not complete unless you are at least level 4.

10. You will get offered a fair number of free bridge officers as quest rewards pretty quickly, so don't waste time buying them. Don't forget to train and equip your bridge officers from time to time!

11. You will make Lt. Commander at level 11 and will get a new free ship, and certain ship-buying functions will be permitted then. When you get there, don't forget to promote your bridge officers! You're their commander, so they can't go from Ensign to Lieutenant until you promote them - and you can't promote them until you're a rank above the one you're promoting them to.

12. Don't spend all your skill/training points early on. When you make Lt. Commander a new set of skills opens, and so on. But apparently they won't give you Lt. Cmdr. until you have spent almost all your existing points in the first tier of skills. Bah. -c

13. Many space encounters scale in difficulty automatically based on the number of players doing them. These are mostly Open Instances, meaning you'll be teamed with whoever is in the area automatically, unless you fly in with a team of your own. Many of these are not soloable. Most of them are easy with as few as one or two other players. Most players are not actually jerks (so far). Get used to it. If you come into a system alone and it seems horrendously difficult for one person, are you still in a leftover team from your previous mission? Leave the team, exit the system, go back in again, and it will likely be saner.

14. Fleet actions are the only fun raids I have ever encountered in any MMORPG. There's nothing like a space battle with fifty ships to get the blood pumping. You don't want to be the player who is separated from all the other allied ships in a fleet action. Trust me on this. Go where the blue ships are.

15. Remember to use the arrow keys in space combat to try to keep power to the shield that's getting worst battered. Also, spacebar fires all applicable beam weapons, which beats trying to press 1 and 3 at the same time when you are flanking the enemy and both are in arc at once.

16. The people who seem to be able to fly faster than you do have pressed Shift-R which diverts all power to engines. Don't forget to turn this off as you approach combat position. R by itself toggles full throttle on and off. To go into reverse (sometimes accidentally), press Q to throttle down until you are "past" zero throttle. By the by, in ship combat, often full throttle is not an asset - but neither is standing completely still.

17. The "do everything" F key, when pressed again once you are offered a loot/items window, is also Take All. Yellow markers in ship debris (look like a nav beacon) or over ground kills (look like a sphere/grenade) are loot for you. White markers are loot for someone else.

18. Do not forget to scan for anomalies everywhere you go - both ground and space. The scan control is in the middle of the left side of the map-cluster controls in the upper right corner of your screen. The blue beam when you scan shows which direction to go. Most ground encounters have at least two; some space encounters have many. First to reach it gets it.

19. Learn about expose/exploit pairs for ground missions. They are good and useful. (Short answer: If you have a target, and your #2 skill starts blinking urgently at you, press it. Usually it means the target will suddenly vaporize.) Also, don't always be out in front, especially if you have a tactical officer on your away team (and you should). She's meaner than you are. Give your tac officer your best gun. Give yourself the second-best. In general you want a tac officer and a science officer (she has the heals) on your team as fast as possible; those should be the first two bridge officers you take.

20. A tribble will provide slight healing benefits (they are soothing), but if you leave a tribble in your inventory with food items, you will eventually open it to find no more food items and lots of tribbles. If this fact surprises you, you might want to rethink whether you are right for Star Trek Online.