Greetings!

First off, Happy Holidays from the STO Team! It has been pretty hectic around here and we can't believe it has already been a week since the launch of Season 7! Before we go into the Holiday Weekend, the team and I would like to give you a status update.

Season 7 is doing great. Lots of new players are logging in. Plenty of returning players are coming back to check out the new update. Concurrency is up across the board and generally speaking the team is very proud of the work that went into this Season and we are thrilled by all of the wonderful comments about New Romulus and the new Events. You can expect more large zones like this in future Seasons.

Not everything is sunshine and roses, though. As we mentioned in previous posts, we continue to monitor the Dilithium economy reaction to the changes in Season 7 and as previously stated, we will be making some additional adjustments which we feel will address issues that have been discussed. Some of those changes are going to happen in an update tomorrow (Wednesday Nov 21) and some of them are going to happen in the following week's update on Nov 29. If we feel more changes are necessary after that, we will certainly make them because our goal is to keep the game balanced while ensuring that players are having fun. Even though we've managed to get more Dilithium into more players hands, we agree that STF runs and Dilithium have been a challenging change that needs to be addressed and we are going to continue to do so.

First up, we expect to turn Foundry play back on with tomorrow's update. This is great news for Foundry fans and anyone looking to run the Foundry Dilithium Daily mission. We expect to have Foundry editing online in the following week after we've finalized all of our mission regression testing. So far everything looks good and we are in much better shape than we were after Season 6.

Private Queues are going to remain off for another week so that we can get the cool down timers for the missions to be in synch with the cool down timers in the public queues. Once that is confirmed, we'll turn the private queues back on.

The Reputation System, including the STFs are getting some major changes over the next two weeks. Here is a rundown of what is going to happen over the next several Holodeck updates.

• Omega Conversion Crates can be opened immediately. You will no longer need to achieve T3 in Omega Fleet to open these.
• Reputation XP Project timers are dropping from 40 hours to 20 hours across all Tiers. If you have a project in progress, it will not change, but any new projects after the update will be adjusted. We are also looking into adding the ability to drop a project.
• All XP Reputation Projects (projects that reward progress towards your next Tier) will now grant 240 Dilithium (on average) upon completion. If you complete 4 XP Rep Projects a day, you should earn about 960 Dilithium per day from it. These are in addition to the Marks to Dilithium conversion Projects. Once you've completed a Reputation System, these XP Projects will go away, but the Marks to Dilithium conversion projects will remain.
• Reputation Projects that convert Marks to Dilithium are being moved from unlocking at T5 to being available immediately. This allows you to convert Omega Marks and Romulan Marks to Dilithium similar to how you could trade STF items for Dilithium previously.
• Loot drops are getting added to STF mobs as well as to bosses.
• End of STF Loot Rolls are returning. There will once again be a chance to earn special rewards at the end of STFs or Romulan Mark events. These special rewards will be Bonus marks, Borg Neural Processors, or other items needed for Reputation rewards.
• Reputation Advancement Projects (the ones that unlock each tier) are having their timers reduced from 1 hour to 15 mins. and we are removing Dilithium inputs from these Tier Up projects.
• The amount of commodities needed for Romulan Reputation projects is being reduced due to the lack of drops on New Romulus. We will be adding more drops to New Romulus in the future either through enemy kills or daily missions.
• All Reputation Projects are being changed so that you need to claim the reward upon completion. This puts it in line with how Duty Officer assignments work so you can see the rewards you are getting from each project.

We expect all of the above changes to be live before December. A few will be live by tomorrow, with the rest live around Nov 29th. (UPDATE! As of Friday, November 30th, these updates are now live.)

Thank you for your patience. We realize that players have been asking for many of these changes since Season 7 first started appearing on Tribble. We feel much better about making these changes now that we have a week's worth of data on a full Shard (there were only a hundred or so players on Tribble) and are able to see how a full server load of players are interacting with the new Reputation system. We're confident that the above approach will still achieve our balance goals, while putting more of the fun back in the economy. Our end goal has always been to put more Dilithium into the hands of the average player. The above changes should help get us there and put more Dilithium back into STFs.

Season 7 is just getting started and we hope that you'll enjoy all the updates that will come with this Season. Tomorrow we are releasing the next Duty Officer pack which has been specifically tuned to help with Starbase and Embassy construction. Shortly after the Winter Event will begin around December 6th. Last year's Winter Wonderland has been updated to include new missions, a new track, new rewards, a new ship, and plenty of fun that will run through the new year.

We will also be running a full month of Feature Episode Replay where all the limited time rewards from all four series will be available all month long. So if you've got some new characters that need these special items, December is going to be your chance to catch up.

In January we'll be releasing an Andorian Ship on the Federation side to be quickly followed by the STO 3 Year Anniversary Event. This special celebration will be released with a new one-off Feature Episode. If you were at the Star Trek convention in San Francisco this last weekend, Denise Crosby would have you believe that this episode is going to be all about Tasha Yar and Sela. We'll see... anything can happen.

The anniversary event will also offer a new special free ship for both Fed and Kdf players much like we gave away the Odyssey during last year's event.

Moving into February and March we expect to have some more events to talk about and we will begin to start teasing the next Season.

So there is plenty to look forward to in Season 7 and we thank you for continuing to share your feedback and comments with us. Thank you for the both the kudos and the criticism (although some of you need to learn some manners). We get better with every season and we have you to thank for that. We do listen, and while we don't always immediately react, we do deliberate and make changes based on ideas and feedback you submit. The QA team is still crunching through all of your bug reports and we expect to have major issues ironed out soon.

MMOs are wonderful because everything can change and there is almost always a way to improve things. We will continue to grow and evolve.

Keep an eye on the patch notes for when the above changes will hit Holodeck and thank you for making STO awesome.

See you online and Happy Holidays!

Daniel Stahl
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online

Season 7 News Dev Blog Index

Link to the forum post