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[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 251: 'A Vali Good Talk'

midniteshadow7midniteshadow7 Member Posts: 787 Arc User
Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 251: 'A Vali Good Talk' has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from: http://holosuitemedia.com/tie251/

This week Mr Valikin joins us as a guest panelist to discuss this week's news where we cover all the news from Star Trek Online (Console news from 1:55:37), Star Trek Timelines (2:04:59), Star Trek Discovery (2:20:36), Unofficial Productions (2:49:15), Listener Feedback (3:00:58) and a lot more!

As our 250th episode was posted late we've extended the chance to win either a Krenim Imperium Warship, a Paradox Temporal Dreadnought, TOS Boff Codes, Lockbox keys or a poster signed by the Star Trek Online Developers. Make sure to listen to episode 250 to find out how you win these prizes! Last chance to enter will be Friday, 10th February 2017 at 4pm Eastern.

Community Questions:
1. Looking back on the last 7 years of Star Trek Online, what has been your best and worst moments?
2. What do you think of the Gauntlet in Star Trek Timelines?
3. What do you think about the new Star Trek Discovery logo and production trailer?
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Comments

  • darakossdarakoss Member Posts: 850 Arc User
    Hey there. Great show as always!

    1. Well the worst moment would have to be the year of hell. Best moment was first day playing AOY since TOS is my favorite out of the series.

    2. I tried Timelines. when the paywall hit I uninstalled.
    3. Ugh...kinda hate it. If Discovery is set 10 years before Kirk that means the Enterprise under Pike or April is still flying around so why is Discovery using the Delta then????????
    i-dont-always-funny-meme.jpg
    original join date 2010

    Member: Team Trekyards. Visit Trekyards today!
  • chozoelder2ndchozoelder2nd Member Posts: 440 Arc User
    edited February 2017
    I made it in?
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    Yay!

    1.) One of the best moments of STO for me was the Kelvin Timeline being added to the game.

    Recorded footage of me reading the announcement blog:
    2l7e5jU.gif

    I've mentioned before that I'm a fan of the Kelvin films. The inclusion of not only the uniforms and the beautifully modeled ships, but an entire story episode dedicated to it was enough to make me put on that Andy Dwyer face during the entire time spent reading the dev blogs. I never thought it would happen and I fully accepted it, but then wam. There it was. It was surreal.

    The Kelvin lockbox happened the year after the FF7 remake and Cloud Strife in Smash 4 were announced. Nerd dreams do come true.

    The other of the greatest moments for me was the Galaxy class model revamp. It started when JamJamz was revamping the in-game model of the Intrepid class. This was the first of the ship revamps that closely resembled the canon model. It was done because Voyager was going to be featured a lot in the expansion Delta Rising. When Thomas Marrone set out to make the Andromeda/T6 Galaxy, the ship wasn't going to be featured in anything. There were no actual plans to replace the old model. Thomas then when out of his way to use what spare time he had to put in the extra hours on the Galaxy revamp whilst working on the primary Andromeda project.

    That's such a feel-good moment. It's not everyday where you see employees put in the extra hours to do something because they're fans, big enough fans to give up so much of their free time. Since then, the feedback has been positive and we've been fortunate enough to have even more ship revamps.

    Intrepid, Galaxy, Prometheus, Galaxy-X, Defiant, Sovereign, Nebula

    I hope that list keeps growing. Luna class next please!

    One more shout out to Michael Dorn and Denise Crosby joining STO. The inclusion of Worf and Tasha made me mark out pretty hard. Ater those two, we really started to pick up a lot more celebrities at a steady pace.

    Wait, one more. Legacy of Romulus. I was a TNG guy and the D'deridex is my favorite non-Starfleet ship. To be able to making a Romulan and fly a D'deridex, that by itself was enough to get me excited. I remember saving up Zen to get the T4 and T5 D'deridex and claiming them on the C-Store. Good times.

    As for the worst moments in STO... losing Trendy. That one was pretty bad. Godspeed, clever girl. (Get it? Cause raptors. Okay, I'll shush.) I'm not even going to touch the can of worms on what happened on the Spock/Nimoy memorial monument. Incredibly awkward... I'll leave it at that.


    2.) I have nothing to contribute for this question. Sorry.


    3.) The logo is fine... I think. I'll go into the details on my feedback. The trailer was nice, though I didn't like that they showed what obviously wasn't a ship from the TOS era. It's too early to show stuff like that. You can't really say you can slap a TOS skin on the wire frame model. There's already too much detail just from looking at the nacelles that look like what you would see in STO. To be fair though, almost everything in Trek has some sort of temporal shenanigans going. It's almost tradition by now so it's not like it's a surprise.



    Feedback

    The back and forth that went on with you guys on the delta got me to go onto the Memory Alpha wiki and other sites because I honestly don't know the origin of it. Most of this stuff is copy/pasted.

    I'm not even going to bother with the USS Kelvin and USS Franklin from the newer movies because that gets people salty really fast. So moving on.

    The five-pointed star contained in the arrowhead goes all the way back to MACO. The UESPA probe that launched in 2067 from Voyager: "Friendship One" has the delta on its hull. Early Starfleet also has the delta on their insignia, back when it was United Earth and before the United Federation of Planets was formed. After the UFoP was formed, MACO was disbanded, but UESPA was still a thing though. In 2155, Starfleet's and UESPA's emblem has the delta. Enterprise ends here and Discovery starts.

    It doesn't really matter if UESPA decides to later on change the logo or not. That's irrelevant. By now the UESPA has been known to use it. Since UESPA was still around and that they've been known to use the delta (and that early Starfleet also used the delta), you can infer that perhaps some ships had some sort of variation of the delta before the USS Enterprise did. Discovery having the delta is still plausible. It could just mean that the use of the delta was at least used occasionally here or there before big-huge-brave-boss Enterprise stepped in to do their thing and make it official.

    There's also this that I never actually knew up until now. (Remember that I got into Trek later than most, so bear with me.)
    http://1701news.com/node/192/birth-starfleet-insignia.html
    But according to a memo from Bob Justman, "Star Trek" associate producer, to William Ware Theiss, series costume designer, Gene Roddenberry had confirmed that “all starship personnel wear the starship emblem that we have established for our Enterprise crew members to wear.”

    Dated Dec. 18, 1967, the memo is part of the “Gene Roddenberry Star Trek Television Series Collection, 1966-1969,” stored in the Film, Television, and Theater Archival Collections at the University of California at Los Angeles.

    “Doubtless this situation has arisen due to the fact that a different starship emblem was used last season on 'Charlie X,'" Justman wrote. “However, the personnel of that other ship in that show were the equivalent of merchant marine or freighter personnel — and therefore not entitled to bear this proud insignia on their individual and collective TRIBBLE.

    “Please do not do anything to correct this understandable mistake in the present episode ("The Omega Glory”). However, should we have Starfleet personnel in any other episodes, please make certain that they wear the proper emblem.”

    It’s interesting to note that the Enterprise’s insignia was actually intended to be Starfleet's from the beginning and that the scenes showing the Exeter and Constellation patches were production mistakes.

    There's nothing going on that explicitly breaks this part of the canon, so we're not quite entirely there at "breaking muh immersion" levels... I think? To quote one of the things Sun says sometimes, "I don't know. I honestly don't know." I'm being 100% honest when I say I'm not certain on what's actually canon because I'm not that deep into it. This is just me googling stuff for the first time. But like what Sun hinted at, this is all just pointless nerd banter about an insignia. We do it for funsies, or at least I do. We can literally just be told "That's our retcon and we're sticking with it because we're lazy" and there's nothing we can do about it.

    So idk... Take it as you will.


    T6 Cross Faction Multi-Mission Explorers

    Everybody shut up right now. Gorn. Ships. Once again, nerd dreams do come true. I won't be getting them right now, but I'll save up for them eventually. Thank you, Cryptic, for listening. Maybe now there's a chance that you'll get your T6 Orion ship one day, Sun.

    My goodness. I overdid it again. Sssssssorryyyy.
    Post edited by chozoelder2nd on
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  • alex1geralex1ger Member Posts: 141 Arc User
    Good morning, tribbles.



    Community questions:

    1.)
    "Best" moments:
    - Playing through STO for the very first time, going into sector space for the first time, hearing Leonard Nimoy's sector narrations for the first time, every time I got a new ship during that journey, all those references and nods to all of Star Trek... Sure, some of the stories were not quite up to par, but you could feel that someone put effort into it.
    - flying through the "darker" sector space for the first time (at launch sector space was much brighter and I think "astrometric view" was always on...)
    - Teaser/announcement/launch of Legacy of Romulus... And playing through the romulan (and new klingon starter!) stories for the very first time. It's almost as if someone in marketing actually knew something about marketing back then. *shrug*
    - visiting the Spock statues on Vulcan and New Romulus and having a moment of silence with all those other people I didn't know... (I did not experience the incident you mentioned, probably because of timezones...) I mean, it was a terrible moment IRL, but a great moment in-game.

    "Worst" moments:
    - The bajoran firecaves. You should have seen that disaster. The BOff AI just broke down completely. You could not get them to walk across those... catwalks? walkways? bridge-thingies? Even the move command did not help. It was such a mess. I think they fixed it a few months later, but the first incarnation was... an experience.
    - The announcement of Delta Rising. I mean, the announcement at STLV was not bad, but it happened on... saturday? sunday? And then it took PW until... friday (?) to post an official announcement. No, just no!
    - The "leveling exploit" in Delta Rising. See, I didn't use it, I didn't know what had happened, but when they announced that there was an exploit and they would let people keep some of those "ill-gotten gains", I thought that was surprisingly generous. See, "real" game developers take away all those "ill-gotten gains" and depending on the severity of the exploit and your history with the game you would get an infraction, a temp(orary) ban or even a perma(nent) ban.
    And then Cryptic's fix-up script failed and they let people keep everything. No, just NO! When you call it an exploit (therefore calling all those people exploiters/cheaters) you WILL make that script work or DIE TRYING! I'm not even kidding. Exploits are serious business. You do not just throw that word around lightly. They could have called it an unfortunate bug, given their players some cosmetic item/pet in exchange for the "ill-gotten gains" and apologized a million times. But how Cryptic handled this thing was just atrocious.
    - The iconian war. Specifically Time and Tide. That whole story arc just disappointed me (House Pegh was already... not good) and Time and Tide made me angry. Actually angry. I wanted to yell at whoever was responsible for that one. Not because it was so bad but because a lot of the (many, many) issues I had with that episode could have been solved with tiny rewrites here and there.
    - The Konnie, the Connie, the upcoming NX Refit... but I guess it all started with the endgame version of the Excelsior.

    2.) Timelines? Uhm. Take the facebook out of your browser version and... I still won't play it. You had your chance, timelines. *waves*

    3.) You know... I didn't like the first logo that much and since this one looks much more like the logo we're used to (including the fact that the material it's made of looks MUCH smoother now...), I guess they'll try to cater to the lowest common denominator instead of trying to stick to their vision.
    See, if it's just the logo... fine. Whatever. Brand recognition and that stuff. I understand. But that's not "better" marketing. It's just easier/cheaper marketing.
    If they use it as the "insignia"/"crest"/however you wanna call those symbols for one or more of the ships... That would indeed be lazy. Nobody forced them to choose this time period. Like nobody forced the Enterprise production team to make a prequel. If you DECIDE to make a prequel, I WILL judge you by the way you treat established lore. If you don't want to deal with that, make a new timeline or if you want to use the delta specifically make a sequel/"sidequel"...
    And the warp thing was not a retcon (retroactive change to the continuity), but explained as a re-scaling of warp factors. You CAN question that and call it silly, but they did not rewrite established lore...
    And yes, that other ship looks really advanced. I understand that making a ship look older than those ships that were "futuristic" in the 60s is difficult. So... don't make prequels?



    Feedback:


    Non-combat/"combat light":

    Where do I even begin... Who is this game's target audience? Who are the "whales"? How can you claim that people hate non-combat/combat light missions, when your example is "Of Bajor"? That's like saying people didn't like "Doctor light" episodes during David Tennant's run as The Doctor and then using the abzorbaloff episode as "proof". (Disclaimer: "Of Bajor" is not nearly as bad as "Doctor Who" 's abzorbaloff episode.) "Blink" was another "Doctor light" episode and that episode was not nearly as bad. I mean, when I called "Of Bajor" "poorly paced" you called it "too long". So you KNOW that there may be other issues with it.
    Same with the episode during the breen arc that had us run back and forth on the deferi ship, treating wounded deferi and interrogating the one breen (who presumably ended up defecting to us). I wouldn't call that engaging gameplay either. Don't get me wrong, I don't hate those episodes. I actually liked the change of pace. It's just that "replayability" seems to be Cryptic's main (only?) concern and some episodes work fine on a single playthrough and after that they become... "tedious".
    The problem is not that there is less combat, the problem is that Cryptic seems to have trouble coming up with engaging "replayable" non-combat gameplay.

    I mean, do you remember that "science ships don't sell" and all of a sudden we get one science ship after another? What changed? Were the older science ships "not good enough"? Were they underpowered? Unbalanced? Whenever sun yelled at Cryptic because of science vessels, what did I do? I asked WHY she didn't buy the gorn ships. So I'm standing here, doing the devs' job again... WHY do people "hate" those episodes? I say it's because they do not offer compelling/engaging/interesting gameplay.
    See, I would argue that you could take "What lies beneath" and cut one (or two) of the spider battles (maybe make some other fight a little more challenging) and the episode would still work, because it's not a "balls to the wall" action episode, but a suspense episode. People love (and praise) it for its atmosphere. At least some people. Maybe "the metrics" "prove" that people hate it. *shrugs* You don't "need" to have all these mindless "shoot and loot" story arcs. Cryptic CHOOSES to do them.
    Like 20th century fox CHOSE to produce mediocre (and sometimes downright bad) comic book movies until they took a risk with Deadpool and now we got some amazing trailers for an R-rated Wolverine movie. My brain is SOOO ready for "Logan"...

    And when you talked about this stuff... a lot of the story arcs we played before dealt with rather localized threats that "might" turn into galactic conflicts. The breen story seemed to be about one breen "warlord". The dominion arc made it clear that we "could" have retaken DS9, but the price would have been rather high. The romulan featured episodes dealt with a potential uprising/civil war within the star empire. Delta Rising was about "someone" trying to conquer the Delta quadrant.
    And then we had the potentially galaxy-ending iconian war. And the potentially galaxy-ending temporal war. And what will probably end up as a potentially galaxy-ending tzenkethi war. Because if it doesn't threaten the whole galaxy it's boring?


    Of signs and portents:

    You know, there is something I really wanted to get off my chest. Did anyone else notice how this episode was rather ironically self-aware? I mean, I yelled at Cryptic because of all those garbage scows that end up as T6 ships. And here we have an episode that specifically calls the Povini tech "a hundred years behind our technology" to explain how they were EASILY destroyed. Remind me, how old are the Connies and B'rels and Excelsiors and D7s and K'Tingas and NX Refits and... do I have to continue?

    Or the part with the engineering team. I yelled at the K13 blogs because there were no engineering teams. I mean, it takes less than 5 minutes to write a sentence about how they were the only engineering team in the sector and had to use the only available modern shuttle to answer a distress call. Sure, that is boring because it happens all the time, but it would have been AN explanation... And I'm not a writer. I don't get paid to come up with creative explanations.
    Or tell us how both the iconian and the temporal war left us with no spare personnel at all. But then that little sentence about the advisors and counselors trying to help the K13 crew to get acclimated would have looked stupid... And I would have yelled at Cryptic (again) for not showing us any of the supposedly terrible effects of those wars.

    See, the whole part with the Povini... We make first contact with an entirely new species and I would have loved to see more of that. They didn't know anything about us. We could have been in league with their attackers. They could have panicked and fired at us and we would have had to talk them down (or the klingons might have blown them up or the romulans might have disabled them).

    Heck, we don't really know that much about the Lukari either. It's entirely possible that that planet was not actually Kentar or that the Kentari are still out there. I think that would have made a great final episode. Having a whole story arc traveling around with Kuumarke and and the end of it all we find the Kentari or discover their fate. But the way the story "seems" to be right now it feels like a lot of wasted potential. Again. The team clearly has great ideas and hints at those ideas (in-game and in some of the RP blogs) and then we end up with generic war #xyz.


    Job openings:

    Remember when I said that those job openings do not mean that the team is growing? Well, when we talked about the developer livestream, I made a statement that seemed to confuse sun. The last time I ever heard anything about a lead artist was... I think when you had those two artists for an interview... you know? One of them loved the McD jingle... I can't remember their names right now. Sorry. -.- But I'm reasonably sure that Samuel Wall was still the lead artist back then. And when you had Kate Bankson and Jaddua Ross, he was not the lead content designer (the last lead content designer was Charles Gray (?) Grey (?)). So after AoY launched the STO team "lost" two leads. (I don't know why and it doesn't matter.) That means at least two positions (one content designer and one artist) need to be filled to keep the headcount the same. And the two leads are just the most "visible" positions that have been vacated. We don't know anything about those other job openings and whether they are "new" positions or "replacements".


    Anniversary:

    So consoles do get the PC anniversary event. Just a few weeks after the PC crowd and they get the Krenim science vessel instead? Well, have fun console players.
    And still no infographic, unless I missed it. Actions and words, Cryptic. Actions and words. (If that confuses you, I'm hinting at: Actions speak louder than words.)
  • chozoelder2ndchozoelder2nd Member Posts: 440 Arc User
    Heads up. I edited a few things in my feedback to fix a minor mistake I made in my feedback on the whole delta thing.
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