任是无情也动人

It's all Greek to me.

I only play STO casually, so I really hate it when I have to go out and redesign my character sheet, and all the EQ I've spent so much time getting suddenly become obsolete. At least these things don't happen all that often, I guess, and at least I haven't invested in the REALLY meta builds like plasma leech which apparently has gotten nerfed to the ground.

For the phaser beam builds which I use, it sucks that FAW has been nerfed, because I don't like any of the other phaser abilities (and it's not efficient to use more than one given shared cooldowns). DEM seems to have been nerfed too (boo). And I want my money back from all the copies of Destabilizing Resonance Beam purchased for my science officers (:p).

On the balance (ha!), tanking and healing skills all seem to have been...buffed? Hrm.

T'Meril was born in the late-24th century on Eirhess III.
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Was sort of just browsing through youtube and I came across this. Wow. This is a *big* change from the original tutorial I played on STO when it first went F2P. It hits all of the right buttons - almost every core mechanic got blatantly shoved in your face (that's a good thing, really), and it kept the general "flavor" of Trek (even the dumb parts, like the 'newly graduated cadet taking over as captain when the real captain dies' that probably got borrowed from the reboot Trek).

Makes me want to replay the STO tutorial again. Also, it seems they've introduced the Romulan faction too. (With Sela.) Mmmmmarrrrgh......

I did a little more digging and found that the revamped tutorial was released in Nov. 2013. So almost 2 years from when it went F2P... and like 4 years after it was first released.

Gives me hope that GW2 will eventually gain a decent tutorial as well in a couple of years. =P

EDIT: Oh wow, prophetic!

"To prepare the game for its eastern release, we’re building a new comprehensive “level zero” optional tutorial that teaches the core basics of the game. We’re also adding new story steps at levels 5 and 10 to help better teach core mechanics as players grow. We will also be adding a much better hints system, and a new level-up messaging system all to better teach the game.
All of these systems will be added to the game not just in the east, but to help future new players in the west as well."
--Anet

http://tanithryudo.tumblr.com/

Because I got tired of having to mess around with imageshack, even if tumblr does shrink the images down some. *shrug*

EDIT: Someone else posted pics of the new Ent-F Bridge. My thoughts: Is someone at Starfleet over-compensating? You could fit a stadium in there! Also, are holographic consoles really a good idea? Sure, it means hopefully no more exploding consoles killing hapless redshirts whenever you get torpedoed, but don't you run the risk of losing all control if the power gets cut or (more commonly in Trek) when your main computer's on the fritz? Thirdly, why is there a transporter on the bridge? Seems like it has a perfect targeting view of the captain's chair too. Finally, not a fan of the main viewscreen and the big hide-n-go-seek space behind it; looks clunky and it's just begging to have some big-bad/stowaway jump out at you... In short, yeah I can see this being designed by the geniuses at Utopia Planitia. *facepalms*

You know, say what you will about GW's playerbase, but I have noticed that they are generally quite... anally hardcore? :-p Yeah, even...especially the PvE folks.

I don't know how other pay-to-play games like WoW has it, but I've been reading some general whining on the PWI/STO forums about grab bag items and how the players demand transparency from the devs on the percentages of certain rewards.

And I can't just help but compare it to the Guild Wars fan base, which instead of demanding hard numbers...start tallying up the #'s themselves across large numbers of people, and then estimate a drop rate/spawn rate/etc. from there which then gets posted to the wiki or wiki discussion page. Now, yes, I do get that there is a difference here in that the GW players are crunching numbers on largely non-purchased stuff (drop rates, spawn rates, holiday mystery box rates, etc.) But given how fast the grab boxes in STO/PWI sell (only the keys need to be purchased with $$), I don't think there are any less sources of datapoints there either; just no one getting together to crunch some numbers.

Even in general, the GW wiki (and related wikis like PvX) is a pretty awe-inspiring place. Quick updates, complete records of every bit of minutae in the game, strategy suggestions that get updated according to game/skill balance, statistical analysis of all sorts of stuff...

They're all free-to-play games. But what's so unique about the GW crop of players?

Assimilation walkthru

For my own reference...

Master Loot Table
Sets

Space:
Shields - Klingon: Past Imperfect (Paratrinic)
Engine - Klingon: Past Imperfect (Efficient)
Beams - Klingon/Devidian: Everything Old is New
Torpedo (1) - Klingon: Doomsday Device (Hargh'peng)
Torpedos (green) - Klingon: Diplomatic Orders (photon/quantum)
Console/Eng (green) - Klingon: Secret Orders (hull alloy)
Console/Eng - Romulan: Ground Zero (EPS - up to VIII only!)
Console/Sci (green) - Cardie: Suspect (Field Emitter)
Console/Eng - Cardie: Tear of the Prophets (Shield Amp)
Console/Uni (purple) - Borg: Assimilation

Ground:
Weapon - Klingon: Spin the Wheel (no fighting)
Shield (purple) - Klingon: Skirmish

Boff:
Klingon: Stop the Signal, Doomsday Device


current projected pts (respec goal?)

More potential ship names:

USS Asymptotic Curve
USS Common Sense
USS Just Testing
USS Signal to Noise
USS Standard Deviant
USS Techno Babbler
USS Voice of Reason

Ah, AT&T, how you make me run around and have to call customer support again and again to get one little thing resolved, and then demand my money like you're entitled or something. Blah. >.< Damn bloodsuckers.

In lighter news - GW1's Winds of Change is finally done. I don't quite find any of the Imperial Weapons skins pretty enough to be worth my effort to do the quest chain though. Not even for the oddball greens (staff-skinned wands & scythes, sword-skinned wands, focus-skinned wands... o_O). New hero is an assassin which...I don't see the need to have 3 of. >.> And a panda pet, which I may or may not get using Zcoins instead (verging on 10 gc atm)...dangit I wanted to get the large EQ pack. :(

Did get three celestial dragons over Canthan New Years. Sold one for 80k. One went into my HoM. The other will go into Aoki's HoM when I get a chance to log both accounts.

Oh! And I got a new computer last weekend. Yeah, yeah, mainly cuz I wanted to try out Star Trek Online and it was complaining about the old computer being too...old. STO is ok, I guess. I've been playing pretty causally my Vulcan Engineer on board the Spark of Genius. Still a Lt. (Jr. grade?) at the moment. Not a very demanding game, and really I'm just in it for the geek factor.

EDIT: Reference for self, potential ship names - kinda like Opaque/Fuzzy Logic, Statistical Anomaly/Outlier, Common Sense