Want to see what a Rear Admiral, Upper Half looks like? Just like that. My character is sporting the new Veteran’s uniform top and the fleet insignia for the Federation News Service on her left shoulder.
Season Two, which arrived yesterday after considerable anticipation, brings with it not only fleet emblems, new uniform bits and six new levels, but also ship interiors, diplomacy missions, dabo, additional transwarps, holographic ship cloaking, three new elite ships, the vice admiral rank, and a series of missions that put you up against the only foe that scare the Borg — Species 8472, the Undine.
Ship Interiors
I kind of remember being promised that ship interiors would arrive only when they were functional. Maybe function will show up in a later patch, but we can now walk around bits of our ship. My science vessel had the typically cavernous rooms you find all around STO; was the population of the entire galaxy shrunk to half their size recently?
My ship gained a ready room off the bridge. The turbolifts offered to bring me to either the crew deck or the engineering deck. The crew deck contained the captain’s quarters, the lounge and sick bay. The engineering deck had the warp core room, the engineering lab and the transporter room. The regular ship’s crew you never see on the bridge were keeping themselves busy. I was hoping they’d salute or yell “Captain on deck!” when I walked by, but no dice; they didn’t take any notice of me at all.
Hoping for a “Ensign, hand me your agonizer!” emote.
Diplomacy Missions
For those who prefer words to warp cores and meetings to mayhem, STO introduces diplomacy missions. At 10-20 diplomacy points per, becoming a full Federation ambassador at 640 points may seem a ways away, especially considering there’s only about ten diplomacy missions currently available.
Once you’ve rooted out Romulan conspiracies, Changeling infiltrations and dishonor among Ferengi thieves, your diplomatic career is not ended. After you receive the Attache title at 160 points, you will be sent to the occasional first contact mission — as the best the Federation has to offer, it will be up to you to navigate the treacherous shoals of malfunctioning universal translators and aliens who are, quite frankly, not nice folks.
Other mission types, like Aid the Planet and scanning old ship hulks, also gain diplomacy rewards. Diplomacy is folded then into normal play; after awhile, every captain will be an attache or an envoy, but full ambassadors are going to have some grinding to do. In return, they will gain free transwarps to most of the best starbases in the Alpha quadrant and a variety of other perqs.
I’ve already written a bit about Season Two from its lengthy run on the player test realm.
Player reaction to the mega-patch was still somewhat mixed. Most seemed to enjoy the diplomatic missions, while some griped publicly about the bugs they encountered; fleet member Longasc was perturbed that only the first “Aid the Planet” mission could be completed. Many people were upset that it no longer seemed possible to team up for random “nebula” missions — issues that are (we hope) being addressed during today’s down time.
I also haven’t done any of the new storyline mission arcs, so I don’t have any first hand impressions of those. I managed to make a level just doing diplomacy missions and a few random missions in the B’tran Nebula, and am more than halfway to the Attache rank in diplomacy; STO continues to be one of the less grindy MMOs.
And then there’s the Klingon side of the galaxy to play at some point….
Most of the fleet showed up at one point or another last night, and it was great to see so many people on at once. There were even five admirals online for awhile, but we didn’t have time to do one of the task force missions… those, after all, take HOURS.
Nonetheless, a great patch that does an admirable (or should I say ‘admiral’) job of fleshing out the Star Trek Online universe.
5 thoughts on “Star Trek Online: Season Two goes live”
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I’m looking forward to playing with you again Admiral! I’ll see you this weekend.
I’m totally jealous you got your jacket already. My 200-day vet accolade still has 7 days to go, although I’m not sure how you got ahead of me since we were both pre-orders.
Very good summary!
A patch has already been deployed to fix the B’Tran Aid the Planet / grouping issues.
Diplomacy starts at 160 “Diplomatic XP”. The thing is you are supposed to get these points while levelling up, which makes it a bit grindy to get the random missions if you are already Admiral.
There is a trick: Doing the Celes system gives a whopping 160 DXP right away for instance. But episode replay is not yet in, so people have to hope for a noob to take them along.
Ambassador Sugihara gives some 10 DXP random missions, from 400 pts on he gives the”First Contact” missions and later on “Anthropology” missions (what’s that? go and find out. )
Don’t worry Longasc this noob will take people along if he can. Must support the fleet!