[Bridger]

Translation: "we won't do ♥♥♥♥"

This game has some of the best Devs I have seen but also some of the worst.

[Jestersmith]

Ten Forward Weekly 30/08/22

• TFW moved to Tuesdays because Kael's daughter started school, and parent-teacher meetings are on Wednesdays
• New item: Elite BOFF training tokens
• BOFFs will get all traits taken to maximum available ranks
• BOFFs will learn all standard BOFF abilities. They dont get the TOS versions, or any variant you'd have to craft, just the normal ones from the vendors
• BOFFs will get a kit frame slot, no kit module slots
• BOFFs will get a personal ground trait slot
• BOFFs will get another personal device slot also
• BOFFs don't get a space slot. Thats the same space slot you get on a captain, you'd get several of them from upgrading all your BOFFs, which would blow out the captain upgrade token
• Some traits like "Bond with Life" wont work with BOFFs because that would take 3-4 days of work on its own to make work with BOFFs. Jonathan Herlache says only about 6 traits are excluded due to technical reasons. Other excluded traits are "Tumultuous", "Unconventional Gear", "Rogues Gallery" "Shadow of the Mountain", "Consult the Team", and "Lower Deck's Experience" List might change if QA find any issues with other traits
• Traits that affect captain only abilities, like a trait that improves something like the summon reinforcements ability for Tactical captains, also doesn't work on BOFFs since BOFFs don't have those skills
• BOFFs get access to default trait lists based on their species. Holo BOFFs will get access to something like a default trait list available to humans. Other species like Remans will get access to all Reman traits. So if you happen to roll a Reman BOFF without a specific Reman trait they get those
• When you open a box for a trait it will let you chose between captain or BOFFs. You do need to get another copy of the trait from a lockbox to use it on the BOFF
• No announcement on pricing right now
• These tokens are per BOFF, per character. Even if the BOFF is an account unlock BOFF
• Upgrade will take BOFFs to ultra violet
• Tokens currently don't change anything in regard to costuming unlocks for BOFFs, like rank pips, though Jonathan will ask about it, and see if he can get it added
• Tokens will be coming out "in a couple weeks" with the next big content drop
• Cryptic took a two pronged approached to looking at fleets
• QOL Updates, like transwarp to Bajor now goes to Bajor, and interacting with Klingon transport officer is easier, etc.
• New rewards to added all the old holdings. These require T3 in holdings, some for the whole holding, some are for the specific sections of the holding. Designed around the idea that they want to give us rewards with some "serious mojo" behind them, because its a lot of work to get to T3 in a holding, or T5 in a starbase.
• New item prices were set to be approachable, even if you aren't hoarding dil like a dragon. Nothing is like "a 2 mil dil purchase"
• New suite of ultra rare DOFFs, and ultra rare admiralty ships
• Many new DOFFs have unique features like 3 R&D crafting schools attached, or summoning additonal Kentari security officers instead of normal ones
• Not every new DOFF/Admiralty card is built as unique as that, but they are all designed with an eye for having a good combo of traits, or a unique ability players will find useful. Some have new features, some have old features repackaged on an ultra rare DOFF
• New DOFFs aren't randomized, you just purchase the ones you want
• This is not considered a dil sink since its stuff you buy once, not something you go back and buy over and over. Though they are interested in seeing how much people like/end up spending on these new rewards, and are looking to see if it has even a temp effect on the DilEx
• New admiralty cards have special abilities like time reduction costs for using small craft alongside it
• One new admiralty ship for each holding. These aren't one time use cards
• In general 3-4 new DOFFs, and one new admiralty card, per holding
• Fixed Embassy BOFF bug where buying rare quality BOFF gave you very rare when commissioned, and added new very rare SO Romulan BOFFs. This fix will not roll back existing BOFFs
• If these sorts of rewards are well received, Cryptic will look into making more of these kinds of reward, and/or other kind of rewards to the fleet system.
• Cryptic recognizes that getting any fleet holding to max is a significant investment of time and resources, and wants the rewards we get from that to match
• SROs will be available for each career now(everything subject to change if they discover a stacking bug or w/e)
• Cryptic is still looking at the conversion rate for dil to fleet credits, so you get more fleet credits for your dil donations. Nothing nailed down yet, might not change, but Jesse thinks it will probably go up
• Many ship interiors are not available on console because they ran out of space and time to port all of them over. Maybe someday down the line someone will have time to add those onto consoles
• No plans to allow spending zen to update holdings. They joke you can buy zen, convert it to dil, and spend dil on fleet holdings, and that would make lots of people looking to buy zen for dil on the DilEx happy
• Currently no addition of Reman BOFFs to Embassy, but if these rewards do well they might add them later
• No news on a T6 Patrol Escort(someone asked in chat)
• Cryptic has had "pretty productive" meetings on what to do about VFX spam. Effects artists looking into Kuumaarke set, and Jellyfish bubble, specifically right now. Cryptic is looking at the problem more holistically then trying to play whack-a-mole on specific powers. Something like a setting to filter/disable certain VFX is something Cryptic is talking about
• Al Rivera gets kinda annoyed every time Kael brings up the Beacon of Kahless because they already toned it down like 3 times, and in the show in was a blinding white flash of light
• Elite BOFF token doesn't allow for re-rolling of traits
• Kael knows theres have been issues regarding the tailor and ship tailor, and some things have been focused on it recently, and hopefully more things will be focused on them soon.
• BOFF and DOFF capacity limits are a software issue. Even if most players don't use the new max limits, the changes affect the server. Cryptic would love to offer more slots for players to use
• Kael will shake the Cardassian rifle/pistols cage again to see if they can get made
• Kael doubts they will completely remake the Bozeman map to fit what was seen on LD. Jesse says LD has been particularly tight to interface with because of the art style difference. Even getting something like Badgey requires multiple back and forth approvals
• Cryptic is talking internally about how many DOFFs fleet projects require. Jesse says they have done work in that regard, but its not ready for prime time yet/isn't something thats passed them by.
• Stuff like Holo-Lorca/Landry will probably make it into Mudds/Phoenix Box
• No plans for T7 ships any time soon, or possibly ever

https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comment..._weekly_83022/

[Heyallo]

wow they finally fix the Rare Romulan BoFF giving VR BoFF after how many years? but my torpedoes still don't get no love? wow =P


but seriously, all the BoFF stuff, they really trying hard to get your money for those tokens now heh

[darthnovawave]

I still wonder how much the boff tokens will actually sell. They intentionally avoided permitting boffs to load up on space traits, and boffs don't join you on ground TFOs and not even all ground missions, so it will be a question of how badly people want to up their boff performance on missions and a few oddball maps like Nimbus III and the Dyson ground battlezone. It will probably drive up the cost of ground trait boxes on the exchange and maybe lohlnuat favors, but I suspect these will be short-term changes.

The fleet shop changes seem to be a way bigger impact on the game though. Opening up SRO boffs to Fed and KDF players is likely going to be a huge draw for a lot of players, and will probably drain a lot of the excess dilithium out of the economy at least on a short term basis. The new doff and admiralty cards could be interesting too. The samples they showed weren't "meta-changing" or anything, but there may be some interesting ones being held back too. It might lead to more interest from players wanting to join more advanced fleets like ours too.

[Arno12]

Interesting but I shall remain cautious, if I learned one thing its never be hopeful.

[Petrarch]

The tokens not doing an account wide upgrade on the special boffs like the ship upgrade tokens do, this is where cash is king rules the roost and the money grabbing starts, some interesting changes away from that but we'll have to wait and see if they commit to the pricing that kept leaking out as I suspect that'll be too rich for many player's blood for what's not really an essential upgrade.

[Sorotia]

Well at least they wont be doing T7 ships any time soon if ever...bout all that made me perk up a little

[darthnovawave]

The tokens not doing an account wide upgrade on the special boffs like the ship upgrade tokens do, this is where cash is king rules the roost and the money grabbing starts, some interesting changes away from that but we'll have to wait and see if they commit to the pricing that kept leaking out as I suspect that'll be too rich for many player's blood for what's not really an essential upgrade.

I kind of hope they at least make a Phoenix box path like the ship tokens during Phoenix events too. I could see people easily shelling out dilithium for something like this just to be a completionist, which would at least short term cool off the dilex market a bit. I just don't see a lot of people going out of their way to directly spend cash for zen for something like this. At best this might drum up some cash as people test the waters on selling them on the exchange initially, but the benefits just feel too weak as-is. At worst, they will cite this as a reason to raise prices on future bundles by throwing these in with the rest of the price-inflating bloat to "justify" a higher price tag.

[Bridger]

The question is how popular this is going to be, I mean ground sucks.

[Jestersmith]

Ten Forward Weekly 06/09/2022

• Cryptic is going to announce something big on Star Trek Day(Sep 8th) about the next story update(likely who the Terran Emperor is based on past comments), as well as the exact details about the upcoming event, and lockbox
• New Event Ship: Terran Somerville Scout Ship
• Inspired by the ISS Reskava, Mirror Kuumaarke's ship
• Terran materials from this ship can be used on the normal/fleet Somerville
• Hernandez class(Fleet Somerville) is named after the original artist who made the Somerville for IDW, Angel Hernandez
• Scout Ships will be renamed Scout Vessels because its more "official" sounding
• Has raider flanking
• Trait: Devious Rerouting. Gives +Max HP from EPG when Shields are low
• Console: Iconic Deflector Inversion. +28.5% electrical damage and Starship shield regeneration. Sacrifice shields for EPG, then Electrical Dmg PBAoE
• Console inspired by the Kuumaarke ground set, visuals not included
• Thomas wants to do a T6 Pioneer. Jeremy says when they do it is Thomas' call
• Thomas wants to do the "dragon ship" from LD, but theres lot of higher priority stuff. He wants to embellish it more, when converting it from the LD art style, adding more gilding, boarders, trim, and figureheads, etc.
• The Vulcan ship from LD went well, didn't need a round 2 of talks with the LD staff when making it. Cerritos wasn't bad either. Parliament took a few rounds of notes from the LD staff, but went easier then Thomas expected
• Kael wants a Lower Decks style vanity shield. Thomas suggested doing something like a sky-file, or an item that adds a screen post processing effect, to make the game look Lower Decks-like for people that wanted it.
• Thomas asked Paramount if Cryptic could use ship designs from other Star Trek games, so long as they rebuild the assets themselves, and Paramount said yes. Hinted he's already working on one
• New lockbox ship: The Courier Pilot Raider
• Nicknamed the Cosmo for the courier piloting it in DSC S3 EP 1
• Ship has a unique engine trail
• Cryptic had the art department model from CBS, the basic model made by the art team thats sent off to the CGI people to add extra details/geo, and built off of that that by comparing it to what was seen on screen
• Container pods move/spin while moving/turning. Ships only have one layer of animation, so the cargo pods just spin back and forth regardless of what direction you're going. Ship has a very low bank angle to not add additional wonkiness to the spin, and cut down confusion when you're flying it
• Has the Vesta pattern on the ship material, so you can tint the whole ship whatever color you want
• Trait: Special Delivery. If you activate pilot maneuvers, or pilot BOFF abilities, you drop mines, and gives you a 20% cooldown on pilot BOFF abilities
• Mines from this trait can be teleported with relocate mines
• Console: Debris Screen. +Physical and Kinetic Damage Resistance Rating. +Plasma Damage with Energy Weapons. Front Phys/Kinetic Immune. +Speed/Turn. Ram Kinetic Dmg
• Ship was only seen flying through a debris field, so that was all the inspiration they had to go on. Jeremy decided to dig into that fiction, and went with the idea that these ships were equipped with special gear to fly through crowded space more safely/effectively
• Ship comes with Viridian weapons by default
• Thomas doesn't think the lockbox has new space weapons, only new ground weapons
• New Experimental Weapon: Rotor Rockets. Shoot 5 rockets, each rocket does kinetic damage. Rockets ignore shields. Rockets shoot out of the cargo pods in a clockwise motion, while the pods are spinning
• Jeremy has a pilot power update, similar to the Intel one, on his list of things he wants to accomplish. No timeline for it.
• Animations from pilot passive trait that had your ship "juke" when you got missed were disabled because they were built with the old animation system, and thus overrode every other animation. Need time for Weston to rebuild them in the new system
• No way to turn off the spin on the Courier ship due to the way the animation/layering system works, and how its built into the ship costume
• Things like fire effects from the ship damage effects will create circles in space as the cargo pods spin. Enemy beams will track the cargo pods while they spin because there are hit nodes on the containers
• Jeremy jokes hes glad Cryptic stopped trying to explain how all these ships made it back because he had to write all the lore blogs for them
• Thomas had an idea to explain why the 32c ships are in the game. Lobi consortium found a ship almanac from the future that had images/designs of the ships, but didn't have the exact tech specs. This is why the 32c ships aren't as powerful they would be if they were from the 32c.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comment...weekly_962022/

[Petrarch]

Had this in the chatbox, but the new lockbox ship is seemingly based off this ship:

Attachment 17108

The comment about them using ships from other licenced games is an interesting one, though it'll likely depend on the terms and who owns the copyright. The way it's presented there it gives the impression that if someone uses a design in a licenced title, then anyone else with another licenced title can copy it provided they don't directly lift the models.

[Arno12]

Ship from another game eh? Consider my interest piqued.

[Remsus]

Precedent:

[Jestersmith]

Ten Forward Weekly 20/09/22

• The stacking Infiltrator issue was an old bug, it was never meant to stack. The bug got brought back up when stuff for testing the BOFF upgrades. It didn't really occur to anyone how much it would nerf that particular ability. Kael says it will likely be undone, but no official confirmation.
• Cryptic is looking at the data regarding the Agony Redistributor changes, to see if it got hit too hard with the nerf bat, before changing it again.
• Designers seem satisfied with how Eddy and Tholian changes are performing.
• Cryptic strives for balance so people feel like they have a choice when playing the game. When something is so good that you feel the need to always slot it that isn't good game design.
• The other half of the equation is that people went out and spent money on these things because they were so powerful so they have to figure out the balance there, how to to make people feel like they got their money's worth, but not wanting there to be one item in the game thats just so much more powerful then anything else.
• Kael talked about it Johnathan, and Jeremy, from the systems team during the leads meeting, and theres ongoing discussions about it.
• None of these changes were talked about(with Kael) until they were put into the patch notes, so Kael didn't know about them until they were put into the patch notes. Since this, Kael got access to the build manager, so he can see what changes are upcoming, and so he can talk about them with players/get a dev on stream to talk about them before the changes go live.
• PVP is not a huge focus since a small amount of players player PVP. Kael admits its a snake eating its own tale thing, but says designers are thinking more about PVP while they make adjustments for PVE as well.
• Invisible walls in new mission were caused by the Emperor's ship. A bug caused the ship to fall through the map, but its collision was sticking up through the map in some places.
• Cryptic had backup choices for the Emperor, like Harry Kim, in case Wil Wheaton couldn't do it.
• Emperor didn't rain down phaser fire from his ship, instead of making us go to the other on ground/he didn't fight The Other's minions because he wanted to personally walk to the other personally, and hes "an arrogant ♥♥♥♥".
• Emperor Barclay would've been fun, but his actor isn't really worth touching right now.
• Kael made a passionate case in the leads meeting a few weeks ago about getting the removed Klingon War missions back. There was a question on if players would play a season of just remastering the old Klingon War missions, with no new content, and responses seemed pretty positive. So there's talks about possibly doing a season with just that.
• Captain's Table issues stemmed from the map being very broken with internal facing issues. Fixing that somehow caused the map to break in player facing ways. They're looking into it.
• Apparently the old "Worf's sash" event is broken, and Kael is talking to Jared on how else to get the rewards added.
• Cryptic isn't actively working on the new Titan ship. Depending on the scale it might have interchangeable parts with the Connie.
• Clothing is being looked at by character artists piece by piece, here and there. Things will get updated, but there likely wont be a sweeping "we updated all the clothes" moment
• Changes to Tour the Galaxy were done because Cryptic got an opportunity to design something that matched something in an upcoming show that they could use to tie in. However that fell through for business reasons at the last second, and they were asked not to do it. They couldn't add it back in with the changes, because it wouldn't make sense, so they had to temp disable it, and change it back, but with the new destinations.
• No current plans for a new Voth ship(someone asked about the T5 Bulwark that got removed from the Phoenix Box and has no current T6 version)
• Gearbox San Francisco(the publisher) sets up the third party giveaways, and then asks Cryptic "what sort of item can you give away to X many people". They chose an item depending on how many people they giveaway is going to. Same applies to console specific giveaways like the Emerald & Cobalt one-shots.
• Talks are ongoing if STO is going to be its own universe, like the Kelvin timeline.
• Kael hasn't heard of any plans for a new rep any time soon.
• While Cryptic has access to ships from other games Kael isn't sure if they have access to characters from other games, so its unlikely STO will continue the plot of a character from another games(someone asked about an Elite Force character)
• DSC Andorians are being worked on, but no time table.
• Kael is still pushing for the UI removal option for consoles. Big issue is what button to map it to, since they're using them all on console already.
• Kael believes Jesse developed a cover system for STO once, but it broke too many things.
• New patrols are in the works.
• Kael isn't sure why the T6 ship coupons from Mudd's bundles aren't treadeable since he knows at least some of the coupons were set up to be tradeable.
• Kael will ask about making the platinum vanity shield available again.
• Kael doesn't understand the obsession Trek fans have in regards to killing characters they don't like, like air-locking Wesley.
• No announcement on a Khitomer Alliance bundle right now, maybe in the future.
• Space traits weren't included in the BOFF upgrades because it would allow you to stack too many space traits.
• No current plans for more Borg outfits/outfit updates.
• Kael believes there are 1-2 more updates for the Terran arc.
• Cat's Tale TFO will return this Halloween.
• Unlikely to get Terran faction since most people don't like playing villains.
• Kael asks what would the reaction be to changing Infected Space, and making it more difficult. He does note NO ONE has asked about this internally, its just something he asked in the moment since he was playing it.
• Big software hurdle for bringing over the DPS test map from Tribble is to make it not farmable. Kael might push for it some more again.
• Kael has reminded production several times to bring Hearts and Minds back, he will do so again.
• No news on the Romulan uniforms from SNW. Cryptic doesn't see everything early, and character artists tend to be very busy, so its not something that happens quickly.
• No plans for a TMP bridge pack(someone asked about one in chat)
• Kael doesn't think the vet ships are high on the remaster list.
• Kael has advocated for adding the Grand Nagus ship as a free giveaway, but Cryptic is understandably gunshy about the ship due to how legendarily angry people were about the ship. On one of his first weeks on the job Kael found a pack of Nagus ship codes, but was too afraid to use it. One of the last pieces of advance LaughingTrendy gave to Kael before they left was never talk about the Grand Nagus ship. Will pass along idea of making it available for a ridiculous amount of GPL.
• Kael's favorite TFO is Starbase One.
• Kael would like Cryptic to have more real merch to represent STO.
• Elite TFOs aren't in randoms because they didn't want people to get stuck in a PUG in an elite TFO.
• Cryptic knows they need to do something about crafting since no one really uses it anymore, but talks keep stalling about what exactly to do with it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comment..._weekly_92022/

[Taku]

And still nothing about bald Remans being able to put on wigs.

Also: Try taking a full Emperor's costume to the Vlugta Asteroid Fields. For me, going after the Rich DIL Vein, a helmet gets added, but the Emperor's costume acts like an environmental suit.

--- Click image for larger version ---