*raises hand* Yeah, me too.

Because I tend to run doff missions on alts even when I'm not actively playing them, each alt I roll has gotten less far in the episode chains than the previous one by any given level. My level-capped Klingon captain, Kaluma, the second character I rolled, has the start of the Borg Collective in her mission queue, while Dehara, my level-capped Rommie, as the third one I reached endgame with, is, appropriately, currently at the start of the Cardassian Struggle episode. S'erro, my Fed engineer captain, who reached the level cap about a month ago, and did much of her leveling through the duty officer system, is currently about about halfway through Romulan Mystery. R'Mukka, my KDF tac captain I rolled about the same time as S'erro, is in the low 30s and currently still in the middle of Fek'Ihri Return. Momonga, my Fed science captain, is, at level 20, all of about four missions into the Klingon War episode.

Also, all of the mission rewards match your current level, so you can get some fair end game gear from some of them. Me, I try to skip the Cardassian mission, they are very tedious to me. I usually skip most of the 2800 missions as well. If you're doing it the first time, I might wait until season 9 comes out to do the undine missions, they are being revamped and I have to say they are now much better in my mind.

But all of the above is my opinion, you are of course free to have your own.

They only have minimums to start? Ye gods! Can the Cryptic team actually have learned something from CoH and applied it to a subsequent project?!

--G.
inconCEIVable
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

Yep. The one thing I'll add is that if you've leveled up a bunch between acquiring a mission and starting it, drop it and re-acquire it, because, in my experience, the mission reward scaling is set by your level when you acquire the mission, not when you complete it.

They didn't originally. In fact, the minimum level would increase two to three levels per mission, and said mission would only grant enough XP for half a level it that. Because you were supposed to fly to the exploration clusters and run a lot of the random missions until you could start the next one.

I'm not sure when that changed. That problem was why I gave up on the game somewhere in the mid-thirty range about three months after launch, but by the time I returned to the game even semi-regularly about two years ago, they'd changed the requirement system to the much more reasonable approach they use now.

This, as with certain other elements of the game, again strikes me as a certain someones 'vision' being quietly thrown out the airlock while no one was looking.

Also, on the 'how much of the story before hitting 50' front, I managed to hit it while still marching across Nimbus. (They used Star Trek V! I was expecting them to bring up Code of Honor before referencing THAT.)

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

Nimbus is actually an interesting idea; it's not its fault it wound up in a drekfest of a film. I'm all for STO redeeming misused or misplaced stuff from elsewhere. (Redeeming the Borg from Voyager alone is worth the money I've spent in the C-store.)

I started a Science officer so I could grab an Exocomp the other weekend, and suddenly he's sitting in dock staring at his new Soverign and wondering how the hell he got there.

That reminds me that I never wrote the story depicting "Cosmonaut" Buchanan's first day at the office. Admittedly, that would mainly just be the STO equivalent of Employee 2814, but still. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I've gotten not one but two alts to the level cap in the course of the XP weekend. It's a bit nuts.

Of course, my head-canon is that the flag-officer thing is purely a game convention -- flag officers don't, as a rule, do the sorts of things our player-characters do, and a game about a flag officer's actual job would be about 80% paperwork simulator, 15% office politics, and 5% everything else. I figure my characters actual in-universe ranks are somewhere around Lieutenant Commander to Captain (in Starfleet terms), depending on the kind of ship they're commanding and the kind of missions they're running, on average.

I assume Swede is of the Jim Kirk "screw you guys, I work for a living" school of admiral behavior.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

You know, I hadn't thought to articulate it until this post, but I think, in the back of my head, the reason Kirk got away with the sort of behavior as an admiral that he did was that:

(1) With his service record and visibility, there was no way he couldn't be promoted to the Admiralty.

(2) With his service record with regards to bureaucracy, there was no way they'd be able to lock him down with paperwork for any length of time.

My suspicion is that they tried to at least keep him pointed in a productive direction whenever he went off on an adventure.

(There's a tie-in novel I read many years ago, entitled The Lost Years if I remember correctly, which described Kirk's promotion as being "kicked upstairs"; that is, he really didn't want to get promoted to the admiralty -- he just wanted to stay in the captain's chair -- and it happened over his objections.)

Even then, one wonders about sending flag officers off to a ground campaign like the Dyson ground battlezone. There's also the fact that the in-game year is, at the latest, late 2410 (the Enterprise-F's dedication plaque has a stardate that puts it in, IIRC, August 2410), and the earliest start date for any character is sometime in 2409, when the Vega colony is assimilated (Federation) or Virinat is destroyed (Romulan -- I'd have to go digging, but I'm under the impression that Hakeev's invasion of Virinat happens in early 2409). That's an awfully fast promotion track. :)

The intro video confirms that takes place two weeks after Vega Colony.

I tend to mostly ignore the fast promotion part. And, for the most part, even the 'rapidly promoted cadet' routine. My brain insists that the characters that did the Tutorial had been back at the Academy for a refresher course, likely on command, and were more or less due anyway.

As for the others, they've clearly been in Starfleet for longer then that, with the lower level ships being ships they served on in the past. A bit of gameplay and story segregation, but one my brain insists on.

Of course, Romulan characters have a bit of an easy explanation. The Republic Militia is expanding as quickly as it can get its hands on more volunteers, after all, so they'll give ships to anyone that gets results.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

The dates are clearly nonsense anyway; if you do all the story Missions then you're doing more stuff in nominally a year than Kirk managed in his entire 5 year mission...

>Of course, Romulan characters have a bit of an easy explanation. The
>Republic Militia is expanding as quickly as it can get its hands on
>more volunteers, after all, so they'll give ships to anyone that gets
>results.

I think canonically most Roms are on their second (or third if you count Virinat Security) career too; which has to help. Plus the boffs you pick up have diverse experience too. Although I can't help but think my Terellia's crew is more like a bunch of mercenaries than starship officers.

S.

Officially it's still 2409. Unofficially, according to whatever bizarre, madness causing equation is used for stardates, the Enterprise-F launched in late 2410.

And I wasn't referring to the dates, for the most part. I can believe that most of the playable missions are a season or two of a show. I was thinking more of the odd promotion system. I still mentally insist most of my characters are Captains or Commanders, even at level 50. The only exception to that is the character I used to create the fleet my friends and I use. Because she's stuck with the job, so at least she gets the better pay rate.

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter

STO uses the same stardate system that was started with TNG, where an increment of 1000 = 1 Earth solar year. (This puts the epoch at 2323.)

The stardate system in TOS was vague by design, with nothing defined save that it should only increase within an episode (in practice, it also incremented from one episode to the next by production order, though Roddenberry and the other people he was working with on designing it, who I've forgotten, wanted it to be able to decrease between episodes even if the episode with the lower stardate range happened chronologically later, because *handwave-relativity*) and be four digits, a decimal point, and then two digits.

What a year.