[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 216: "Agents of Axa" (w/Giveaways)

midniteshadow7

Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 216: "Agents of Axa" has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from:

http://bit.ly/tie216

Carlos Pedraza from AxaMonitor joins the Tribbles in Ecstasy Podcast to update us on what is going on in the Star Trek Axanar lawsuit during our Unofficial Star Trek Productions segment.

We also discuss the Star Trek Online and Star Trek Timelines gaming events and news. Plus, we delve into all the other latest Star Trek news and more.

The topics discussed this week are:

• Star Trek Online,
  • Screenshot Competition,
  • Galactic Development Event,
  • Bringing Leeta to STO,
  • Role Play Blog: Steel and Karma,
  • Agents of Yesterday Expansion
• Star Trek Timelines (0:50:45),
• Star Trek News (1:00:10),
• Unofficial Star Trek Productions (1:03:03),
  • Star Trek Continues,
  • Star Trek Anthology,
  • Star Trek Renegades,
  • Star Trek New Voyages/Phase II,
  • Star Trek Axanar (1:07:01) - Includes a full update from Carlos Pedraza (AxaMonitor),
  • Project Discovery
• Conventions (2:29:45),
• Other News (2:30:08),
• and more!

Our community questions this week are:
1. What are you most looking forward to from the announcements from Star Trek Timelines?
2. What are your thoughts on Tommy Kraft's new film Project Discovery?

Please reply to this post with any feedback you have about any topic we've covered or even about the show in general, we'd love to hear what our listeners have to say. And feedback to us now and be entered in to a prize draw to get yourself a Star Trek Online Legacy of Romulus Starter Pack, Zen and Lockbox keys. Rules are here: http://holosuitemedia.com/tiefeedbackgiveaways2016/ - Just reply to this post to enter.


Please help friend of the show and fellow Star Trek Online player and podcaster Mav with donations to support his recovery with his current health situation here: http://www.gofundme.com/tomsrecovery.

LLAP

alex1ger

Welcome back to "alex writes stuff".

Today's topics are too numerous (and not thought out yet) to mention, so let's dive right in!



Feedback:

Okay, you got this giveaway going and I know the "Starter Pack" and however many Zen you got are due in september (I think), but you keep mentioning some weekly lockbox keys sponsored by stoodogg. Since I couldn't be there for the last couple of shows and there was no mention of the winners in the recorded version, is it a secret who won?
I mean, sun almost made it sound like I won some, but I don't know anything about that.

If this triggers any alarms, feel free to PM me here.
I will try to login every other day over the next couple of days, because while the forum is set to send me an e-mail when someone PMs me, so far that feature has not worked.
Yay for the pretty, new forums that still don't have a devtracker?

About dragon... well, that is unfortunate. Good luck to him.

About my novels: No, sun, I am neither Dayton Ward nor any other novelist. This might not be a popular opinion, but all these novels (no matter whether it's Star Trek, Star Wars or even Warcraft) are nothing more than glorified fanfic (or call it soft canon if you prefer that term) to me.
Well, I guess the Warcraft novels are supposed to be (hard) canon since Blizzard keeps pushing some of these terrible characters on the WoW players, but I choose to ignore them.
If it's not in-game (or on-screen, depending on the franchise), it didn't happen.
Take note, Cryptic!

About Vic Mignogna: Seems like my feedback was not clear enough... So let me repeat it:
They announced Michele Specht. She's a voice actor, just like Vic or Liam O'Brien (Gaul/ Illidan "You are not prepared!" Stormrage...) or Laura Bailey.
Cryptic does not announce voice actors. So why did they announce Michele Specht? Because of ST:C.
Why do you announce Chris Doohan? Because of ST:C. I mean, would anyone announce Adam Nimoy unless he had proven his "Spock chops" before? Probably not.
So, you announce these people but not Vic, when you put him in the friggin announcement trailer?
Announcing Walter Koenig is a no-brainer. Announcing Vic Mignogna, when he voices the trailer, should have been a no-brainer, too.
Did you think we wouldn't notice? Because some of us do...



Star Trek Renegades:
You know, I already mentioned how that production felt "meh" to me, but I read something new... It seems like they are trying to wrap things up with a two-part episode. I wonder whether the reception/crowdfunding was just below their expectations or whether "the naked emperor's" legal kerfuffle got something to do with that decision.



Community questions:

First off, there is a copy-paste error in the op. Those are last week's community questions.

1.) Oh boy, the announcement...
Like I said, I'm not a TOS fan. I mean, I could (and did) appreciate some of the nods to TOS in the federation story and the Devidian arc was actually rather enjoyable, but I just don't go into squeeing fanboy mode. (Same with Enterprise...)
The ships do look like they belong in the TOS era, but I dislike their existence. And I downright hate that T6 TOS skin thing... I already explained why.
So... kudos to the artists and ship artists, because they nailed the look, but the person at CBS who green-lit this... Next up, T6 Connie, eh? You disappoint me. Same goes for the people at Cryptic who came up with this. *headdesk*

So, I could understand, even appreciate a TOS story arc/TOS season. Because of the 50th anniversary.
Maybe some kind of event (like the Temporal Recruitment thing) that asks us to replay the Devidian arc (or something like that) to find some sort of clues for Na'kuhl interference. Kinda like when we had to replay missions and scan some special stuff for Delta Recruitment.
Maybe let us earn (or just give out) a few holographic projectors to make our ships look like a TOS Connie - Klingon D7 - Romulan BoP/D7 to celebrate TOS?

But a whole TOS expansion? Dragging out the mess that is the temporal story arc for so much longer?
This game was supposed to be set in 2409/2410.
Going back to the TOS era for an episode (or even a whole story arc) every now and then? Fine.
But the setting doesn't do anything for me, so the story needs to be even better to drag me in and keep me invested.

The problem is, well, how should I put this... ever since the Iconian War the villains are (without exception) brain-dead drooling idiots. When I go up against them, I feel like... uhm... remember Ivan Drago from Rocky 4 (I think)?
Imagine him fighting against Sheldon Cooper. And because that's not fun, make sure that Sheldon is tied up, so he can't run away and give Ivan a crowbar. Does that sound like fun and/or a fair fight?
I'm not slaughtering at least semi-competent opponents (like before) anymore, I'm slaughtering morons now. Thanks, Cryptic?

And before someone yells at me... Of course would I prefer to get into a battle of wits with some competent opponents, but that is not up to me, if you catch my drift.
I literally cannot understand how a writing team that excels at beautiful storytelling manages to keep delivering stories that suffer from non-compelling villains/characters and plot holes/inconsistencies the size of the grand canyon...
I mean, why did we mourn Kal Dano? Because I sure didn't. If I was supposed to care, you should have given me something to make me care.

Cryptic's writing team uses Enterprise fanservice on alex. It's not very effective!
alex uses common sense on Cryptic's writing team. It's super effective!
Cryptic's writing team faints.

2.) Still not playing Timelines.



STOrytime part 4: The trouble with tribbles... uhm... voices, subpart 2...


Warning, this might be somewhat less coherent than usual.


Did you know that Vic Mignogna and Michele Specht are voice actors? If you read this far, you should.
Did you know that Armin Shimerman did quite a bit of voice work?
Have you ever heard of a show called... "Gargoyles"? There are people who call it Disney's answer to "Batman: The Animated Series". Have you ever taken a look at the cast of that "cartoon"? (As a trekkie, you might want to...)
Have you ever thought about the fact that there may be people who didn't watch (or like) Star Wars, but who love Mark Hamill's voice work as the Joker in a lot of Batman games? Or some of his other voice work?

There are moments when the line between actors and voice actors gets blurry.

Did you know that Liam McIntyre did a kickstarter to crowdfund a card game? I do, because Laura Bailey plugged it on Critical Role. Twice.
How did she know about that? Well, it seems like they met when they were doing voice work (and MoCap?) for Gears of War 4.

Did you know that SWTOR had an expansion that did something to the companions, so that their voice actors might not be needed for some time? Well, Bioware Austin gave Laura Bailey another character to voice in the meantime.
And when Cryptic got a hold of her, they wasted her on a cameo. *facepalm*

You know, someone at Cryptic gets paid to oversee this voice acting stuff.
That person clearly cares about Star Trek actors.
That person also cares about having Dave Rivas do some distinct voices. But that very same person asks Lani Minella to do the same voice (!) over and over again. Sometimes even within minutes of her voicing another character... Yes, the speech patterns may differ slightly, but it's still very obviously the same voice!
You know... couple that with the fact that all faction leaders are male and that Dave Rivas' performance seems more important to you than Lani Minella's, is it within the realm of possibility that you don't really know how to use a female voice actor?
Because I just don't understand the discrepancy...

How much would it really cost to tweet about voice actors? (On the official Twitter...)
I mean, you don't really care, I get it, it was rather obvious, but some of us do.
There was a thread on reddit a couple of weeks ago. Someone asked who voiced Elisa Flores. Another person thought it was Laura Bailey, a few people (!) corrected that misconception.
And then Zeronius_Rex chimed in, saying that she didn't remember, but all voice actors were listed in the credits (just their names, not the respective roles...).

So, Cryptic, why are you so ashamed of your voice actors?
There are game developers out there that publish interviews with their voice actors on YouTube as a promo.

Remember when you had Aron Eisenberg play through that Nog episode? Do #GoPlayAFerengi and #OneJobPhil ring any bells?
I watched a video a while ago... Troy Baker and Laura Bailey played through an episode (the last?) of "Tales from the Borderlands" for... wait, I went to YouTube and looked for it... It was part of a promo:
Telltale Games sent them to "Kinda funny games" to play their game on stream.

Oh, and if that is still not enough... Ever heard of Wil Wheaton? Ever heard of TableTop? Laura Bailey has been on that show. And Wil already mentioned she'd return for an episode of the upcoming season of TableTop.
And she's been part of the TableTop RPG show "Titansgrave" and I suppose she's gonna be back for season 2 of Titansgrave.

But hey, who cares about Wil Wheaton and who he associates with, eh?
See, I don't really care about TOS and Enterprise, but if the story was well-written, I could still appreciate it.
I know, I have been talking about Laura Bailey a lot, but that's because she is a really prolific/known voice actor. I do not want you to single her out, I want you to show more appreciation for all your voice actors!
And get Lani Minella to do a few more different voices (if you INSIST on throwing her at every other character...).

Pretty please?



To those who read all of this... I suggest you take a cookie (or something) now. I think you earned it.

alfheimwanderer

With regards to Agents of Yesterday, I'm tentatively looking forward to it, given that TOS was an interesting time, though I do wonder what's going to happen at endgame? Are we getting ported to the future to join the rest of the galaxy in the 25th Century, along with the rest of our ships and crew? If that's so, how that's handled is going to determine a lot of my enjoyment.

I do admit to some curiosity regarding the Temporal Operative specialization, and the ships designed for them. So far, we know that most are TOS/Fed ships, with the exception of the cross-faction 31st century raider and science vessel, which leads me to wonder if there will be a carrier/dreadnought of some kind that will allow us to use Aeon (Rozhenko if Klingon) timeship fighters (other than the already extant Paradox)? For that matter, are there any more singularity or cloak-using ships in the future? The fact that the R'Mor and Talvath use M/AM warpcores and lack cloaks would seem to indicate otherwise...

I so also wonder if there are plans for a Romulan timeship shuttle, since there is such a thing as Romulan Temporal Defense, and we know that the Federation does allow its members to have militias, given that the Andorians had a Home Guard for quite a while...

In short, cautiously optimistic.