Star Trek Online Gripes

On the whole I’m quite impressed with Star Trek Online (STO). It has had the most trouble-free launch of any MMO I’ve tried, and it has been fun and even refreshing in a number of respects. Having spent a few dozen hours with it, I think I’m qualified to report its problems.

What irritates me most is the AI path finding during ground missions. Despite the rooms and corridors being overly large, my highly trained Starfleet bridge officers regularly get caught on pillars, door frames, crates, and pretty much anything else. There’s nothing more irritating on a ground mission that running into combat and discovering you’re all alone because your four colleagues are busy humping the wall.

Less irritating but still painful is the lack of mission variety, or maybe it’s the way they’re recycled? The first time I had to run around a planet’s surface looking for bits of a crashed probe it was actually interesting. But of late I’ve noticed I keep getting those missions almost back to back when exploring uncharted sectors.

Last night I kept getting versions of this mission over and over. One time I was looking for bits of a crashed probe, another time I was scanning for decalithium, and another time found me scanning for some kind of larval egg thingies. It’s basically the same mission with different text and graphics.

Now don’t get me wrong, I appreciate that they changed up the text and graphics. I just wish that they hadn’t cropped up quite so often. I’m really quite happy to see that the game isn’t all combat, but I’m not sure that its idea of exploration rings quite true to the Star Trek ideal.

Oh, and what idiot thought it was a good idea for uncharted sectors to be filled with pinkish gas everywhere?! That’s just stupid. Unforgivably stupid. Maybe I’ll find something new in the higher-level exploration missions, but so far the lower-level areas are irritatingly ugly.

I also hate it when I warp into some deep space encounter only to find that it must have been started by an admiral who has since left. I’m guessing that encounters scale the ships spawned inside to whomever started it. Whatever the case, it sucks to get drawn into a situation where most enemy ships are 30+ levels above you and destroy you with a single volley.

And that’s especially true when they’re camping the spawn point. I’ve been stuck in such encounters for minutes, unable to get out. I spawn and get blasted right down to component atoms before I can click the button to exit the system. The only recourse of which I’m aware is to keep spawning/dying in the hope of clicking quickly enough to warp out before taking fire.

From listening to other players, it sounds like there isn’t much high-level content at this point either. I have no idea how utterly absent the lives of others must be to allow them to make it all the way to the level cap in a week, as some have claimed to have done, but apparently there isn’t much to keep admirals busy once they get there.

For what it’s worth, I’ve managed to ramp up two characters to Lieutenant Commander, essentially level eleven (with a cap at fifty, I believe), within the month since launch. I don’t get to play a lot, just an hour or two here and there, but it’s clear to me that I’m not alone; the starting areas have a very healthy player population.

I also think the skills system needs an overhaul with respecs issued to players. I don’t think I’ve broken either of my characters irreparably at this point, but it isn’t at all clear to me how the various skills affect the abilities about which I care most. Nor is it clear to me, for that matter, how the various skills become available and what I have to do to acquire them.

The whole assigning-skill-points thing is clear to me, I get that, but at some point my tactical officer suddenly found herself able to activate a particular skill in space combat, and I don’t know where that’s coming from. When I browse her list of skills I see that one, but I also see a bunch of others that aren’t yet available.

I don’t think I did anything to earn them, so I wonder if they just unlock at some level? Or do they unlock because of the skill points I assign? Or am I wrong about the source of the skill; is it coming from my tactical bridge officer instead? Or is it a function of the ship? I understand some vessels give different skills because of their type, so how do I tell?

It’s a fun game, that much is certain, but to no small extent I feel like I’m flailing around in the dark, being forced to spend skill points irrevocably without any clear information about the benefits. I haven’t screwed myself completely thus far (or at least I think I haven’t), but complaints on the forums lead me to believe it’s an easy thing to do.

Finally, I’m still plagued on occasion by jerkiness. The game has smoothed out quite a bit since launch, but every once in a while my view starts “hitching”. And I don’t mean the sort of hitching that occurs with first-person shooter games when frames are dropped because the GPU can’t keep up.

No, I mean the sort of “hitching” that occurs with network code, the sort of phenomena where your avatar’s position jumps or “warps” from one moment to the next. The odd thing is that it usually happens when I’m standing still somewhere, which makes it all the more disconcerting for my stationary character to keep popping about every second or so.

I’m also not fond of the way the quick bars work. In most MMOs, I left click and drag a skill or an item into a slot and that’s where it stays. In contrast, I find STO’s mechanisms confusing at best. First, there’s the inconsistency: most of the time you right click to drag things around, but sometimes you left click. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve confused the two and used some valuable consumable to no useful end.

Second, you can’t always drag and drop the skill/item. Sometimes you have to right click it in your inventory and select the option to equip it, at which point it will appear in the appropriate “devices” slot (your avatar, bridge officers, and ships all have their own devices slots) and on one of your quick bars.

I get how the developers want to limit you to a certain number of items, how a lower-level ship has fewer device slots than a higher-level ship, for example, but they didn’t implement it consistently at all. I can open my inventory in the middle of combat and activate items whether they’re in my devices slots or not, so preventing me from putting them on a quick bar is a useless irritation.

Third, and far worse in my view, is the way the icons keep moving around of their own accord. I unlocked a type VIII shuttle pet from a Del Taco promotion which put itself at slot four in my main quick bar when I claimed it. I didn’t like it there, so I moved it to one of the alternate bars (you get a total of three) and was dismayed to find it moved back when next I switched into ship mode.

So I moved it again, and it switched back again. I moved it again, thinking maybe I hadn’t done something right, but it moved right back again. Nothing I did would prevent that damned pet from appearing in slot four of my main quick bar. I finally put the bloody thing in the bank because I got tired of fighting it. It’s a fun little pet, but the UI hassles alone outweigh the fun.

It’s bad enough to have that kind of problem with something cosmetic, but I continue to have that problem with useful consumables like hyposprays, shield charges, weapon batteries, and so forth. It’s like the game has some inscrutable logic that allows you to move some things around but not others. And while it’s not a show-stopper, it bugs me that I can’t get my quick bars the way I want them.

That’s about it, really. I suppose I could complain about the occasional graphical glitches or the few misspellings I’ve caught, but I don’t think those things even rate. On the whole, STO is a very solid MMO for its age, and I’m excited to see where it goes.