[Sorotia]

Lol....do these guys even Star Trek?

There's a tonne of canon Vulcan ships even going by ENT/DSC era on screen alone. Memory Alpha lists at least 16 types, that's more than most other races that have stacks of ships in the game (e.g. Terrans, Hur'q, Voth, Gorn, Nausicans ??????).

Just the usual nonsense excuses from them.

I was hoping we'd see the Vulcan carrier they showed the schematic for in Enterprise, but that's probably a pipe dream

[Bridger]

I was hoping we'd see the Vulcan carrier they showed the schematic for in Enterprise, but that's probably a pipe dream

Vulcan's do they have ships?

[Tain]

Vulcan's do they have ships?

Not really, as they were one of the last to achieve space flight


P.S. That was sarcasm directed at Cryptic..

[Noram]

>There aren't any good vulcan ships

>uses a vulcan ship for an anniversary reward

[Miles]

There have been conversations about moving stuff from the Infinity Box into the Phoenix Boxes. Don't know if/when that is going to happen.

"moving stuff" is the key here. I think it would be traits, consoles, weapons; no ships.

[Sul-Matuul]

The infinity box is way too bloated now; 99% of the contents never gets picked and as such is non existent on the exchange.

They need to seriously thin it out a bit to give the contents some actual value. The volume of choices there is simply overwhelming I think. Plus much of it is just next to useless anyway.

[Jestersmith]

Ten Forward Weekly 07/02/23

Big one this week from u/TheSajuukKhar remember when it's not our own go give the guy an upvote

So a note before all this. Jonathan goes into incredible detail about all the specifics behind each of the power changes. But it not only difficult to transcribe it all in a consumable format, but it takes up too much space on the post, so I'm going to keep it to the bare basics. I recommend you watch the full video for everything.

• Cryptic is having discussions on what to do about the V-Rex issue of the Voth BZ. Kael doesn't know what will become of it, but theres been lots of ideas, in Cryptic, posited on how to fix it
• The reveal for the remaining ships in the 13th anniversary bundle will come on Saturday
• Revamping the pilot BOFF powers was something of a personal crusade for Jonathan Herlache
• There's generally two big restrictions on how Jonathan gets to fix stuff in the game/embark on improving things
• 1 Scheduling: Getting time of his own to work on something
• 2 Dependencies: Anything that takes over people's time, like character/FX artists, makes doing fixes harder to do
• This brought him to looking at balance passes he could do on his own. Nerfing is disruptive, but buffing is pretty safe. Starting with pilot, he looked for places where things aren't really working like they're supposed to, all they need is a little bit of love, and where he doesn't need to catch a VFX artist to do it.
• The work on a pilot skill revamp started around the time Jonathan started working on ships, but it would've happened independent of that/didn't have anything to do with that timing. There was an inception period where he was selecting pilot to revamp. They were looking at upcoming ships, and pilot made sense as a specialty for some of them. But part of Cryptic's thinking is "is the ship going to function", and if all the BOFF abilities are bad, and he can't find a reason why people would want to use the abilities/specialty seating, it made pilot an obvious place to "move the needle" to make it better.
• Bigger shield system revamp not in the cards/Cryptic isn't looking at that, but looking at shields is something thats ongoing. Jonathan has a couple questions about shields as a mechanics. First is why does he want to be a shield tank instead of a hull tank, or is that even something that you want? Maybe shields and hull are two elements of tanking that appear on the same builds. But in Jonathan's head he likes the idea of being able to fly a "Protoss Archon" in space, where you just want to be shields with like 1 HP.
• One of STO's strengths is that the space combat is really good compared to a lot of other games, and shields are a part of that. It would be cool to come up with a clear description of what they're supposed to do. They were originally the mechanic that stops torpedoes, but that led to players getting killed by a D'Deridex at level 40 all the time, so thats evolved in a different direction. Kael mentions the tutorial tell you to use beams to take down enemy shields, then kill them with torpedoes, but no one plays that way when they get to higher levels. Jonathan can see shields having interaction with critical hits, since they protect the critical systems on your ship.
• The reason they aren't looking at shields is more budgetary than priority. If Jonathan was given a free hand to dig around in the game systems shield would probably be the first thing he touches. But thats pretty disruptive, it touches a lot of things, and isn't easy to do while "the plane is in the air". That's one of the thing you want to do when "the plane is on the tarmac", but STO doesn't land so... you shouldn't hold your breath over a major shield rework. There's maybe little thing Jonathan can do here or there, things like these changes that help a little bit.
• Jonathan doesn't think its super likely, though he can see it happening, these updates affect player drain builds. There's a couple issues standing in the way of that being problem. He didn't change the way the AI interacts with the engineer abilities. So the AI isn't going to be using them to try to protect their shields, its just going to use them when it has them. Second, they tend not to give the AI a ton of heals anyways, and these are both big shield heals. Says reverse shield polarity would be particularly "troll-y" to put on AI ships
• Fully unlocked tailor wont happen because of clipping/body type issues that could make the system "explode"
• Kael says one of his "favorite" things is that Tzenkethi have been in the game years now, and what they do is pretty well known, yet you still get people dropping gravity wells on them. Jonathan says Tzenkethi are an enemy type with a sharp strength. He wants to like the Tzenkethi defensive mechanic, but its not communicated at all, and thats an obstacle for him liking it. Jonathan made a pitch, and has been messing with it internally(says it MIGHT happen, no guarantees) is instead of getting more resist the more that are together, its a threshold where once you get to like 5 of them it switches on, its a binary on/off, and uses one of the various shield bubble visuals around the ships to telegraph it.
• When asked about putting some of these changes on engineering captain abilities, so people can maintain near perfect uptime on shield drain, Jonathan says there wasn't really the same weakness on engineering captain abilities, or captain abilities in general, the way there was on engineering BOFF abilities. The more he spreads the ability around the less good it does to that problem. Unless there is a pressing need where players need to overcome the shield drain resistance of other players its kinda hard to imagine the 100% uptime being a problem. If you want to make a ship that has 100% uptime shield drain immunity from Borg Jonathan recommends DPS league, and murdering them. Your shields stay up if they're dead. More seriously he does respect there is a design issue with immunities. You don't players to run away with it, you don't want them to have 100% uptime. There is potentially a world where they would put some kind of immunity lockout the way they have on other immunties. He doesn't want to pre-judge it as "guilty until proven innocent". He wants to see if that problem occurs in the game because he's pretty suspicious they aren't going to encounter it. But if it comes up that's something he would consider.
• Jonathan has a parser, and a set of meta builds he updates from time to time, to test changes. Typically uses an A tier build, but for edge cases will bust out an S+ tier build. For the most part its about comparison to other points, and having an understanding about what kind of footprint it has. When the footprint looks suspicious is when the parser comes out.
• Cryptic uses STO wiki all the time. Have internal pool of knowledge they want to be as large as possible, but would be fools to ignore player knowledge.
• When asked about joining the STO builds discord: Jonathan says the idea of being a fly on the wall in those kinds of discords has been interesting, but theres a difference between that, and being an approachable presence in the Discord. Hes seen the latter go really wrong in the past. Also a difference between playing the game and arriving there naturally vs playing the game as a more causal person who has a deep systems understanding/works on the game coming in.
• Secondary only specs are high on Jonathan's radar, especially constable. Has thought about working on them. Unlikely to make them full specs with BOFF powers, but reworking them on the radar. He wants specs to have a direct/feelable impact on gameplay, but right now they(the specs) don't have the power budget for that, and theres not room to give them that sort of power budget. And hes hesitant to screw around with the passive if he doesn't feel like he could make them good. So he'd like to deal with the larger problem first, but probably wont be prioritized due to resources
• Reworks/updates to carriers a lot closer on the horizon then secondary spec reworks. *see reinforcement squadrons for more info
• Cryptic will keep making new squadrons, but unlikely they will convert old things to be squadron.
• Squadron player ships almost work. Just a few more things they need to fix for everyone to be happy with them.
• Not looking into adding upgrading omni-beams for weapon sets that lack them
• While there is sometimes a gameplay distinction between a hazard, and an anomaly, Jonathan doesn't think there should be.
• Cryptic is not going to make new PVP maps, talk about PVP in regards to pilot team(see below) is Jonathan being a good designer and taking into account how changes will affect PVP.
• Cryptic can't just update PVP all the time. Jonathan can't easily nerf things people bought, has to restrain balance changes to global powers, etc. It will be a "cold day in hell" before he nerfs something like Agony Redistributor on his own. He wants to be sure hes onto something good that will improve the space before he pushes a change out because thats how the model is. If that was a more PVP focused game where he could patch every few week then it'd be different. Then he'd be trying to promote build diversity do incremental changes, collect stats, wait and see, look at win rate data, but STO isn't that kind of game. PVP in STO is a niche audience land, the people who've been here have been here for a long time so hes going to default that the people there like it, but just have a few problems with it.
• Moving STO to the Unreal Engine wouldn't magically make it look better. It would look/play the same as it does now, except on Unreal. Jonathan says "no world" where STO reboots the engine. If Cryptic made another Star Trek game it would be on another engine, but this one isn't changing.
• When asked about making Tyken's area scale with stats Jonathan says he doesn't like how Gravity well's area scales with stats because you can't tell how big the thing is. If you fire a rocket in a game, you should be able to trust the explosion effect. Unless he can take a sprite of Tyken and stretch it over the cosmos hes not in favor of letting it scale.
• Racial traits unlikely to get updates. bigger problems to wrangle. Space is radioactive in gaming in general.
• Jonathan's priority list for changes. 1 Things that he can do by himself that harm nothing. 2. The DilEx. If hes willing to get his hands dirty/ask other people for help hes going for DilEx help.
• Tribble testing for these changes was going to happen, but things happened and instead they are coming out this week.
• Jonathan unlikely to touch G-well. Unlikely to do high profile nerfs unless its immediately after release, and its obviously broken. Nerfs don't pass Jonathan's test of "how much does the game get better for how much work goes into them". Having things people paid for change out from under them sucks, but before even getting to that Jonathan doesn't think the game gets appreciably better by moving around what stuff gets typed on DPS league's website. That doesn't change the experience for most people, only upsets the apple cart in niche communities.
• Its possible to lower the activation time for team(intel/tact/sci) abilities. TBD if its desirable. More likely they would put into a way to opt into it like a power that lets them cycle faster. Low odds of it happening.
• Call emergency artillery is "♥♥♥♥ing haunted" with its interaction with crit. Power has been secretly scaling off your crit chance the whole time. The powers that work like this don't have their own crit severity, interact via a very buggy code path that Cryptic will likely try to clean up behind the scenes. Removing the fake crit text where it looks like they crit, but can't actually crit, caused their damage interaction with crit chance to fail to boost damage like it should. Thats what caused them to tank in parses. Surprising number of abilities in STO that work this way, that secretly care about crit chance and modify parses. No plans to adjust CEA's DPS , but might take another whack at solving the crit text problem. But that requires them to decide on what to do on the crit summoning entity situation, which is in turn waiting on stat scaling pet tech.
• Jonathan doesn't know why Tyken's Rift and G-well share cooldown. It was before his time, and he assumes the intent was that they were being positioned as alternatives. But that's not where STO has landed. G-well has become a core part of the meta to the point you can't easily mess with it anymore. Sees a possibility where Tyken's is decoupled, but art isn't happy with the Tyken's effect, and not sure if they want to have yet another effect drawn on the screen. Thinks its unlikely to be let out of the bottle any time soon.
• Unlikely to make Painful Memories work with pilot abilities since that changes the identity of it.
• Jonathan's favorite pilot ship hasn't been announced yet.
• The idea that the last two hops before your connection reaches the server are the cause of lag spikes isn't true.
• Last 9 minutes or so of the video are Jonathan and Kael talking about communication, playerbase flack, etc. Not going to type it all out here since it always gets warped, and used to attack the devs in the very way they're talking about in the first place. If you care to hear it watch the last 9-10 minutes of the video.
• *edit* user u/evilmark443 pointed out that, at the end of the video, what seems to be an in-game DPS parser result is shown.
• Engineering power changes(Emergency Power to Shields/Reverse Shield Polarity)
• Borg drain the hell out of your shields, and they didn't want to change that, but the way Borg drain your shields doesn't really play nice with drain resistance. In order to get enough drain resistance to stop the Borg from draining your shields you would need an incomprehensible amount of it. In Jonathan's view its a good thing the Borg have a sharp strength like that, he doesn't want to take it away from them since its one of the main things they did on the show.
• The idea was to give player's a way to play around it, while giving engineers some love, because the higher rank engineering BOFF abilities are a little bit less desirable. So its a win/win there, and makes sense within the fiction of Star Trek. Reroute emergency powers to shields/reverse shield polarity are actions you take on the show when someone took a crap on your shields and need to fix it. So it makes a lot of sense that thats what you do about the in-game problem too.
• Emergency Power to Shields question from Kael: since it grants immunity when shields are reduced to these specific values depending on rank, since the Borg just rip your shields off entirely this doesn't stop that as much as reverse shield polarity would?
• Answer: Kinda. The way Borg shield drain works is that its a proper shield drain, tagged as a shield drain, so it does get affected, but it trucks you every tick. So if you're using the rank 1 emergency power to shields its only going to activate once you hit that threshold, but the Borg likely have enough drain power to get you to zero in a single tick from that threshold unless you have a ton of shields. Generally speaking the more shield your ship has the lower the emergency power to shields you can get away with to stop the incoming drain. But you're probably going to want a higher ranked value. Once the immunity kicks in the Borg shield drain does nothing, it just bounces off.
• Pilot power changes
• Energy weapons: Reroute Reserves to Weapons
• Biggest issue with all the specialization firing modes is that they share a cooldown with the normal firing modes, but they aren't near as supported. It almost doesn't help them to make them stronger without improving that ecosystem. Going forward we will see more stuff like "when you use a specialized firing mode" so they can get passives/bonuses going, but thats a more over time thing.
• This one specifically had a bit of an identity crisis. It was a single target power, but its not BO, but its doing the same job as BO, putting it in a weird position. Jonathan didn't want to change its identity as a single target power, but instead of being "hipster" BO its a "burn the candle on both ends" sort of power. With weapon haste, and 8 engine power per shot, you're probably going to spend all your engine power on one opponent. Cooldown being refunded means you can run it alongside BO, but not on top of BO.
• Engine power return rate isn't instant, its based on all energy generation stats.
• No cost modification like "Bounty Hunter's Friend" works with this. It negates weapon cost and imposes its own engine cost. Unless something is built specifically to work with it, it can't even see the cost.
• Clean Getaway
• Power didn't have a reason to exist before. A lot of powers where you "press button and try to achieve safety" this one was too restrictive. Instead of trying to make it the best escape power, tries to give it a situation where you would want to use this over another escape power. If you can get to the point you're no longer taking damage it gives your cooldowns back.
• Control tag on powers is not something Jonathan chooses based on balance, its being based on definition. Clean Getaway has a placate, placate is a control power, so it has the control tag.
• Larger talk about control effects: Movement speed slow is a control ability, damage debuffs aren't, what about an accuracy debuff? Gets fuzzy there. Generally it comes down to "is it restricting your ability to access a game action, instead of the effectiveness of a game action", that makes it a control ability
• Deploy Countermeasures
• Basic mirror image power. Power still does kinetic immunity. Confuse chance was too hard to feel/too little benefit/too niche to deserve a place on the power.
• Reinforcements Squadron
• Immune to core breaches should've been there, was weird it wasn't.
• Big issue with minionmancer builds is that they're blind to your gear. You have to collect various enumerated powers targeting them, and collect items that spawn them, but theres no stats they scale with. So theres this weird missing tool in the arsenal. Taking opportunity to not only buff this power, but experiment with stats directly scaling your pets. How this works out in player's hands will determine if they add baseline scaling, traits that add scaling, etc. Scaling might be different per pet. These are things that can be done without VFX/character art so they are on the higher end of likelihood to occur. Wouldn't say north of 50/50 right now, but Jonathan is thinking about them.
• Form Up
• Previous version was too tight/conditional, rewards too stingy/taken away for any deviation. That's archaic game design. Want crisp rewards for significant action. When player accepts strict restriction like staying to close to another ship they should be rewarded in a more impactful/upfront way. Having range scale wasn't great from a design perspective. Don't want the way a player learns to use something to wildly fluctuate.
• Didn't touch the teleport facing on the power. Will look into making sure you keep the direction you were facing before. Having player spin to face the same direction as the player you're teleporting too likely would be too nauseous/cause too much confusion due to the sudden perspective jump.
• Subspace Boom
• Previous version just sucked at what it was trying to do, made you wait a long time to get the reward and was stingy with the reward. Wanted to give it something to make it more than "an explosion" since theres a lot of those, hence accuracy penalty. Cryptic has done comparatively little with accuracy, lowering your opponents accuracy/caring about opponents accuracy. This was a trial to see how that feels.
• Should work with spore infused anomalies since it spawns a hazard.
• Lock Trajectory
• Picked crit chance because the power is fun for the people who like the playstyle, and he wanted the power to be more effective.
• Pilot Team
• Immunity to placate lasts the full 10 seconds, and works on anything that uses the placate attribute. Previous immunity times were too low to be effective.
• Jonathan says hes aware this change will be far more impactful in PVP than PVE. Admits he's not entirely sure on how PVP works, but will try to learn/listen. He doesn't want a world where placate dominates PVP interaction. Will keep an eye on it, and if he needs to nerf some weird uncleansable crowd controls he'll do that. But the time/effort he can devote to PVP is extremely small. Hes not trying to upset the apple cart, but there comes a point where letting it sit in the state its in is unacceptable, and to him placate is across that line/miserable experience.
• Idea here is that PVP teams will be incentivized to bring pilot team to cleanse placates. The more placates you run into, the more pilot teams you want on your team. But pilot is also good at applying placates so theres some weirdness/fuzziness there. Cryptic will see how it goes.
• Hold Together
• Throttle scaling is a unique mechanic of pilot powers, but it was too tepid. Made it more powerful.
• Fly Her Apart
• Another situation where they asked the players to do something difficult, were stingy with the rewards given, gave it to players slowly. Just made it all better.
• Coolant Ignition
• Power looks cool when the coolant catches fire. Was weird it didn't do anything special so added some damage to it. Same as other pilot powers, it took too long, compared unfavorably to other powers like Tykens and G-well, etc.
• Attack Pattern Lambda
• Has placate now because confuse without placate is hard to feel. Placate originally was going to work on NPCs and players, with a long lockout time. Didn't want to muddy the waters. Didn't want to measure what a new placate is doing alongside a placate immunity interaction. So made it not work on players.
• Removed restriction where Lambda only worked on energy weapons because he didn't see the reason for it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comment...d_weekly_2723/

[darthnovawave]

At least Johnathan seems to recognize the shortcomings of his predecessor's approach with nerfs. Interesting that he brought up that he tries out "top tier" builds to test stuff, but at least in these notes he doesn't talk about how good he is at playing them. Bad piloting can't be fixed by gear, so surprising they didn't inquire about how much he actually plays. Looking forward to seeing how these changes pan out once they hit the game.

[Sul-Matuul]

Biggest problem with the game these days is that power creep is making content last mere minutes or even seconds and teamed stuff is over nearly before you’ve had a chance to move.
Not everyone has massive DPS but there’s enough creep that missions are over before they even begin quite often.

I’m not sure how they can address this issue really as the gulf between new an older players is getting pretty vast now and the content just isn’t there to separate them anymore. Everyone is playing in the same maps for the same meagre loot/rewards; part of last resistance leads to top and bottom tier players all getting lumped together is a mess.

In short I think the game is starting to get dated in its approach; and it’s running out of ideas to keep things fresh. They need to reassess how they provide content, what it means to players, and what people expect from it. Adding in the millionth iteration of a timegated, grind fest event map; or the billionth variant of x weapon flavour is getting old and shows a lack of inspiration.

[Jestersmith]

Ten Forward Weekly 21/02/23

• Klingon event came before the anniversary event on consoles because the anniversary event wasn't ready to go to consoles yet. Anniv event for consoles in March
• Cryptic is aware of the issue where many weapons on ground no longer have sound, and is looking into it right now
• Christian from QA is going to start watching the stream chat logs to write down any bugs people mention so it can be directly handed over to QA
• Kael asked Christian to add a suggestion about getting a warning for buying reputation item you already own(someone suggested it in chat). That some TFOs lacking advanced/elite versions. That the Hestia lacking torpedo launcher ports. That female captains don't have access to both Beverly hairstyles. A "no decal" option for the D'Deridex. That the Hydra trait is keeping people in combat. That the emergency medial BOFF is always wearing a helmet when using Beverly's medical coat. That the SB1 evac ships give off "under attack" warning when warping out.
• Cryptic will look into the Monitor/World Razer/Excelsior II not being able to use the consoles from the other Nebula/Galaxy/Excelsior variants to see if thats actually a bug or WAI
• Eagle torpedo console(Covert Warhead Module) bugs, such as it shooting torpedoes endlessly, have been fixed internally
• No plans for an ENT arc right now. Future stories are likely to be STO original stories rather than tying into a TV show
• Terran Valkyries unlikely to be changed from their prime counterparts any further. They were designed to be the normal ones, just with a different texture color
• Cryptic can't read any story arc ideas from the playerbase due to legal reasons
• There is a technical reason, Kael thinks it has to do with costume parts but he isn't 100% sure, why gender change in STO is hard to implement. Though Kael keeps pushing for the programmers to have time to try to solve it
• Omega mini-game being busted on PC will be fixed on Thursday, and the event is being extended to Monday
• Kael will pass along the suggestion that the Terran Valkyrie craft be updated to use agony phaser damage
• Kael isn't sure why the Klingon recruit drops boxes of dilthium to pick up instead of it going directly into your inventory. He remembers discussions about it being something that was difficult to implement, and that may have been the solution they came up with.
• Unlikely they will update ESD to match PIC S3
• There has been some talk about having ship bundles be discounted for the ships you already own
• Can't just unlock all male/female tailor options for all characters. The game was built with separate male/female skeletons, and outfit options were built for each skeleton, but not every costume part was made for both
• Kael doesn't think STO will ever do large raids with lots of mechanics to go through because past mechanics/hard content like the Tzeknethi, and the old Borg TFOs, weren't considered fun by players. He doesn't think it would be super popular, though does say something is coming, though it could be months and months down the line, that is meant to be a little bit harder
• There's been no discussion about a Ross class dreadnought
• Kael would like more interactive elements in TFOs, but there's two things that happen when they try to do that
• A. People get annoyed that they can't just warp in and shoot everything to death
• B. Those kinds of TFOs require a lot more iteration. This means it can come down right to the wire on it getting finished in time, and thus release in a more buggy state. so the design team is being a lot more cautious in what they do
• Kael doesn't know exactly when the Oddy remaster will come to the game
• We're not getting a Borg Cooperative faction, new factions in general are unlikely
• Hydra has been the most popular ship from the anniversary pack, with the Eagle pulling a close 2nd
• Kael will ask Thomas about putting the 7A material on the Jupiter
• Cryptic has been talking about letting people use the default bridge for their faction on ships that aren't necessarily aligned with their faction. Kael doesn't know if it will happen soon.
• Kael will ask Travis about an auto-loot feature with auto discard/auto-salvage filters
• Team is still looking into fixing the VFX spam
• Unlikely legendary bundles will ever be parted out like non legendary bundles are
• GPL store is not a high priorty
• A huge leap of progress has been made on the making the new Starfleet bridges playable
• Kael will ask about making the old Maco/Omega outfit unlocks available from elsewhere.
• Kael isn't sure why they stopped doing ship trophies, but will ask about it. It interests him to.
• Kael doesn't know what the plans are for the SNW Romulan uniforms, and has repeatedly mentioned to the devs that the Picard uniforms are one of the most asked about things, but hasn't heard anything back about it in awhile.
• Kael said yes when someone asked in chat about any plans to fix defense of SB1 being AFKable
• The PVP unviersal endeavor may have been removed from the list because it wasn't fun for people who didn't normally PVP.
• MVAM getting wingman control is unlikely
• Cryptic has been talking about the dino camping issue in the Voth BZ, and Kael hopes its fixed soon
• Titan A isn't coming in the next couple of months
• Kael feels bad that someone from Cryptic apparently said, years and years ago, that they would only put alien ships in lockboxes because it was wrong. Says what makes a ship go into a lockboxes is how popular they think it will be. Also mentioned people don't really buy alien lockbox ships anymore.
• It takes the art team around 3-4 months to make a new ship from scratch. Time frame for new uniform creation is a lot longer because theres so many more parts/pieces. Anywhere from 5-7 months.
• No plans to make a new UI theme for the PIC S3 Lcars colors because making a new UI theme is a metric ton of work
• Its on the radar to update STO to take better advance of the new consoles, no timeframe when.
• There are plans to update older missions, but doesn't seem likely it would happen in the next couple of years.
• Cryptic did work on a Mario Kart like shuttle TFO, and had it developed enough that Kael play tested it a couple times. But they could never get it to work the way they wanted it/was never as fun as they wanted it to be, and it would take far more time then they could spend to get it to that level, so it got shelved.
• There has been talk about the Styx pets available to use on other ships. Kael will follow up on that.
• No current plans for a new reputation. Though Kael will make a point to the devs about a new reputation.

https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comment..._weekly_22123/

[Tain]

People don't buy alien "non faction ships", maybe because they are not very good? There was a time when they sold very well, because they came with META traits. I would say that is the true piece which decides how any ship sells.

Some ships will sell regardless of the stats, simply because people want the barbie. I myself am waiting for a Borg sphere/cube, for which I will pay a foolish amount for. I suspect we will only get additional Borg ships in the twilight hours of the games life unfortunately.

[Sorotia]

Look at some of the last alien ships...they're either ugly and meh or like that Romulan ship was just a copy and paste boff layout of a another ship

This is a common tactic with Cryptic, they make alien ships lousy and when they don't sell they use it as a excuse to not make more

[darthnovawave]

Ten Forward stream is delayed until Thursday, but they revealed the Texas-class from Lower Decks is coming to a lockbox soon. Sounds like blog will drop tomorrow for it.

[WelshAvenger]

Texas class. The fully automated, doesn't need a crew or a captain class.

STO with each passing lockbox or promo box...

Attachment 17849

[Petrarch]

Ten Forward 09/03/23 - short one this time from u/TheSajuukKhar.

• 13th anniv bundle will be available on console in April
• Kael will follow up on the new Fed bridges being made playable, and progress for getting the advanced/elite versions of new TFO's turned on
• Voth mech kit module has the following abilities
  -Single target normal attack
  -Spray area attack(similar to weapons like the Tommy Gun)
  -What seems to be a backwards dodge
  -A charge up target attack on a single target(like a sniper gun secondary fire)
  -Some sort of electric AOE, around the mech, science ability
  -A continued beam attack on a single target
  -Siege mode that puts up the Voth mech shield
  -Artillery barrage skill usable when in siege mode
• Voth mech kit works on a timer. Seem to last 90 seconds based on the video, with a 3 min cooldown.
• Uses the B critter tech used to transform the player into other characters in story missions
• Kael isn't sure if the Voth mech suit NPC will be getting the new model, or if the mech suit scales to player level
• Mech suit doesn't work in social zones
• Texas class in STO is based off of the design from LD, but Kael believes it was modeled entirely by the STO team, and that they didn't get the model from CBS/Paramount
• Lights on the Texas class start off as blue, but go to red when you enter combat
• Experimental weapon fires big torpedo that splits into little torpedoes
• Console does the same thing as the experimental weapon, but fires multiple large torpedoes
• Experimental weapon/console torpedoes will seek out primary target, but if its too far away will seek out other targets, or miss
• If main torpedo hits before it splits it does large damage, but less than if all the split torpedoes hit
• According to Kael, his own tests show that the torpedo will not have time/distance to split if fired at 3km from the enemy
• If primary target dies while torpedo is in route, it will change course for new target
• Kael followed up on asking the devs about playable Fed Orions, got a response back, said he will pitch it to production to get it made. Does ask if we would pay for it.
• Kael said he will type up a bug report about signs being broken on console