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Star Trek Online

Ask Cryptic: May 2013

By PWE_BranFlakes | Fri 31 May 2013 01:00:14 PM PDT

Star Trek Online STO MMORPG F2P Sc-Fi MMO game Legacy of Romulus

In this brand-new edition of Ask Cryptic, Executive Producer Daniel Stahl delivers answers to player submitted questions.

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Greetings Captains!

The Romulans have arrived and we are thrilled to see the new Warbirds flying throughout the galaxy. On behalf of the entire team, we thank you for your support and for helping to make Star Trek Online better with each update. The game today is light years beyond what it was at launch and the world is starting to take notice. As you may have experienced, we are seeing an overwhelming amount of new MMO fans making the switch to STO. We’re thankful that you recognize our goal of being a generous free-to-play game. Legacy of Romulus was our first, true expansion and it is free to all. Whether you have purchased a lifetime subscription, have been subscribing monthly, bought a Legacy Pack, purchased items in the C-Store, or haven’t spent a dime, we can’t thank you enough for your continued support. We’re just happy to have you in-game to celebrate Star Trek.

We’ve had a pretty wild ride this last week, and before diving into the Ask Cryptic questions, I wanted to give an update on where we are at. Our Network Engineers have been working around the clock to address both the queues and the emergency downtimes. We believe that the long queue times have been addressed with recent changes, and while you still may see queues at times, the wait times have dropped dramatically. We also thank you for your patience during our emergency downtimes and apologize for it being rough. We are addressing a variety of issues (not all of them game related) rapidly and at times this has meant short notice downtimes. We did buy new hardware. We did upgrade the network. We did plan for all the new people, but sometimes bad things just happen for no good reason. We’ve had to replace some new hardware, rewire some networks, upgrade some firewalls, and pretty much anything else that you could think of from an infrastructure standpoint. We’re sorry and we’re working around the clock to whack the moles as they pop up. But in general, we’ve had more people in and playing the game than any previous update in STO. We’re seeing record numbers of captains creating new Romulan characters. It’s pretty awesome.

We also have several game updates coming over the next several weeks that will introduce a new Fleet Holding and a new Event. We also have a big bug fix update in the works to address many of the issues that you’ve been reporting such as in game mail, Romulan mission bugs, and much more. QA is checking all these updates and fixes now and we’ll roll them out as soon as we can.

It’s a great time to be in Star Trek Online, and so far, Legacy of Romulus is shaping up to be a big success for the game. This is great news because it gives us the resources and the drive to continue building STO into the best Star Trek game ever.

Now on to some of your questions!

 

Q: (rbatalla1977) Any plans to do more voice overs in older missions?

Dstahl: STO has been working to get more VO into the game ever since our first Feature Episode series. While we haven’t had the opportunity to VO every mission, we have put as much VO into the game as our budget will allow. This means that older missions may eventually get more VO, but in the short term, we will be focusing our VO efforts on new missions.

The Romulan missions have the most VO that we’ve ever made for the game, and while not every line is VO’d, it adds a lot of character to the missions. We love voicing these characters and plan to approach other Star Trek personalities to see if they can lend their voice to STO in the future. If and when they do, we’ll definitely retrofit any of their lines from previous missions.

 

Q: (mertyol) Is there a possibility we might get a Scimitar class that is a Carrier?

Dstahl: We’ll be making an announcement about the Scimitar class later in June, so I don’t want to spoil anything just yet.

 

Q: (sean2448) When will the next Fleet Holding arrive?

Dstahl: The team is putting the finishing touches on the next Fleet Holding and it will be announced and released within the next several weeks. It will introduce some new Dilithium based mechanics specifically for Fleets.

 

Q: (cookiecrook) When will other species like Hirogen become available?

Dstahl: The new Romulans and Remans are the first new species we’ve added to the game in a while and we’re taking a good look at all of the possibilities that still exist. You should expect a new species sometime later this year, but we haven’t announced which faction it will be for yet (although it would make sense if it was for the Romulans). Hirogen are a possibility, but since they are so deeply tied to the Tal Shiar, we aren’t convinced they’re a good fit for the Romulan Republic. As always, we will watch out for player feedback on this matter.

 

Q: (bensisko30) Will there be more ship interior options available for the Federation any time soon?

Dstahl: There is a good chance that we’ll be going back and revisit a lot of the early Federation missions because they’re now showing their age in comparison to the new Romulan and Klingon missions. When we do this, the team would really like to take a look at the Federation ship interiors and make them more in line with current models. So while this might not mean a “new” ship interior option, it could mean redoing the existing one.

 

Q: (sterlingwarbird) When will Fleet projects be reduced for smaller Fleets?

Dstahl: This is tied to the new Fleet Holding that is releasing soon which will have a significant impact on a small Fleet’s ability to complete other Fleet Projects.

 

Q: (cehus) What’s next?

Dstahl: Well, chronologically, it would be our next Season – it will be out later this year and will have an emphasis on existing players, but we aren’t ready to talk about anything more than that just yet.

Between now and then, we also have several smaller updates as mentioned above, including new ships, costumes, events, fleet holding, maybe a species…

 

Q: (vengefuldjinn) Any ETA on a Romulan version of the 1000 day veteran reward?

Dstahl: There are some plans afoot to address this but the closest ETA I can give out is sometime in the next couple months.

 

Q: (trekkietravis) Any chance of a “respecies” coming in the future? I’d like to make my human a liberated Borg and my Trill a Joined Trill.

Dstahl: We are considering it. While there are a lot of ramifications of doing so, the Trait System revamp was a step towards making this happen. It isn’t on our short term schedule, but we do think it may happen at some point in STO’s future.

 

Q: (psycoticvulcan) Are any of the Federation or Klingon missions slated for remastering in the near future?

Dstahl: Pretty much all of them if we can find time between updates. We’re already working on Fed ones now.

 

Q: (sollvax) Any chance of dismissing Tovan Khev (or giving him his own command or shooting him)?

Dstahl: While we don’t condone shooting Tovan, we are looking into a way to dismiss him after the Romulan series ends.

 

Q: (cidstorm) Will the ways to get Romulan and Reman species duty officers ever be expanded?

Dstahl: Yes. This is in the works.

 

Q: (dcblackman) The Neverwinter Gateway has functions like selling on the Auction House and Professions. Will we see this implemented in the STO Gateway?

Dstahl: That is the plan, hopefully before the end of the year.

 

Q: (rahmkato19) Can you give us a clue about how the story is going to evolve next, now that the Romulan story arc has advanced?

Dstahl: The clue is related to the Gateway that D’Tan finds and what the New Romulans are going to do with it.

 

Q: (mav75) Any chance of seeing the Achilles-class warship from the Dominion Wars?

Dstahl: There is a chance of this and we are continually working with CBS to look for any and all Star Trek ships we can use in STO. The latest Tal Shiar ships are a good example of this.

 

Q: (nevawinna) Will KDF and Romulans ever get visible kits?

Dstahl: Yes, but it will be through the character creator when we introduce a new kit mechanic we’re working on.

 

Q: (stardestroyer001) What kind of Romulan ships will we be seeing in the coming months (including the Romulan version of the Temporal Science Vessel).

Dstahl: There are a few ships that have been talked about. The Scimitar, a Romulan Temporal Ship, a Romulan Veteran Reward Ship, and possibly even the Romulan science vessel from TNG. Nothing has been formally announced yet, though, so stay tuned!.

 

Q: (fraghul2000) Are you happy and satisfied with the launch of Legacy of Romulus and the positive feedback you’ve received from the community, or does it get outweighed by anger and frustration about bugs and the server problems? Would you consider doing another faction after all of this?

Dstahl: Legacy of Romulus is shaping up to be a huge success for us, as well as a major challenge. From the game development perspective, we’re very thankful for the accolades we’ve received on the expansion. At the same time, like some of you, we’re also frustrated with the downtimes and are relying on the technicians to address the problems and help keep Holodeck up and running. While we have had frustrating downtimes and queues, the issues are getting addressed quickly and we’ve enjoyed having more people in game than previous releases. While we can never predict the future, we would like to think that Legacy of Romulus sets the stage for STO to release more expansions in the future.

 

Q: (ozy83) Please can we have the Fleet Galaxy X now? It’s been in the works for almost a year and a half!

Dstahl: We would like to release this as soon as we can get saucer separation working for the Galaxy-X. As far as I know, that is really the only hold up.

 

Q: (karmapoint) Alright… KDF and Romulans are here. And now what? What is the next big step for STO? Cardassians? Bajorans? DS9 Expansion? Voyager?

Dstahl: While it is too early to discuss, this sounds like a great question for an upcoming poll. What do YOU think should be next for STO? More factions? More Sectors? More Features? We’ll definitely have to put a poll for this one.

 

Q: (superherofan) Will Romulans be getting their own costume variants of the STF ground gear and environmental suits?

Dstahl: At least some of this work is underway. I’ve seen the Romulan environmental suits, but not the STF gear yet.

 

Q: (captaind3) Suliban bridge officers? Or at least Suliban parts in alien gen. I’ve been waiting for them forever. Pretty Please? Is it gonna happen?

Dstahl: Highly likely.

 

Q: (lean18181818) Will the developers and game creators take a pause on creating new content to resolve the actual problems and bugs in the game? Like a few weeks, then return to making new seasons?

Dstahl: Almost the entire team is doing exactly this right now and we’ll have a big bug bash update going live in the upcoming month.

 

Q: (majortiraomega) In the February 2013 Ask Cryptic, it was said that there may be some option to get the IDIC tribble again on new characters during the Legacy of Romulus update. Are there still plans for adding that tribble reward again?

Dstahl: There is a giant, yellow sticky note on my monitor that says “IDIC Tribble!” So yes, this is going to happen, and I keep asking the designers to put it back in, so hopefully soon.

 

Thank you for all of the great questions. Sorry if your question did not get answered, but you can rest assured that I do read the questions and even questions that don’t get answered to get flagged for the internal team to address. Thank you for continuing to make Ask Cryptic a useful feature for the game team.

See you next month!

Daniel Stahl
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online

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Click here to learn more about Legacy of Romulus, our free-to-play expansion for Star Trek Online. Prepare for your journey of rebuilding the Romulan legacy with a Legacy Pack purchase! Click on the logo below to learn more about it.

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