[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 260: 'The Tribbles Return'

midniteshadow7

Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 260: 'The Tribbles Return' has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from:

http://holosuitemedia.com/tie260/

The team are back and they start off talking about Star Trek Online and the recent release of Season 13: Escalation. We then talk about what's going on with Star Trek Online Console news (2:04:06) before discussing this week's Star Trek Timelines news (2:12:27).

Since we were last recorded, there has been more casting news for Star Trek: Discovery that we discuss on the Main Viewer (2:25:21).

Community Questions:
1. What do you think of Star Trek Online's Season 13?
2. What do you think of Star Trek Timelines version 2?

alex1ger

Hello tribbles. It's been a while, so let's see if I still remember how to do this...


Community questions:


1.) Season 13. Uhm... "PvP" for people who don't really want to do PvP. Cool story, bro.
I still won't play it. I don't play queues. I can't be bothered to get into the grind. I only come here for the "Star Trek", the "immersion", the "attention to detail" and Cryptic keeps giving me less and less of that, so... *shrug*


2.) Timelines, eh? Whatever floats your boat.



Feedback:


Let's start with a few corrections, because unlike Cryptic/Perfect World I take full responsibility for my shortcomings:

a) I corrected myself in twitch chat during the show but to make sure people don't miss it: Locarno is NOT an italian city but a swiss city. I apologize for the mix-up.

b) A while ago I claimed that Time and Tide was one of the worst episodes of the Iconian War story-arc. That was another mix-up. I do hate Time and Tide and it is probably the episode I dislike the most, but the episode I wanted to talk about back then was (of course) broken circle. Again, I apologize for any confusion I might have caused whenever that happened.


RP blog "Fusion" and "Mirrors and smoke" review:


I'm gonna go over these together, because I have issues with the whole Lukari story-line.

When it comes to game-play Mirrors and Smoke is fine.
And the art department keeps being, at least in my opinion, by far the strongest link in the dev team chain.
The writing on the other hand... Ever since the Iconian War the writing has taken a nosedive. It's not even impossibly bad, it's just... I'm not sure if there are too many cooks in the kitchen or if Kestrel was just much more passionate about continuity. Don't get me wrong, her writing was not flawless, but I never "hated" the infamous "Divide et impera". I got what she tried to do with that episode and a few minor rewrites might have fixed it.
But that has become the norm. An abundance of minor issues that a "professional" writer should be able to fix within minutes but for some reason no one notices (or cares about) this.

So, what's my problem with the episode? Well, a few logical issues for starters. When we beam down to Kentar... Come to think of it, it would have been nice if we had (at some point in the story-line) been able to beam down to Lukari prime. I would have liked to see the differences/similarities but back to the problem at hand:
The guy lying face first on the ground at the beam-in point. He's "sleeping"? And we just scan him. We don't offer any help? We're breaking all sorts of protocol already, so we might as well go all out and actually help these people.
I mean, a science officer could probably help him. Does our away team have a science boff who could help? Or could we hail our ship and get a medical team down here?
No? Okay...

Btw. this is supposedly a "first contact" scenario. We DO NOT just gallivant around on this planet. What if one of us sneezes and sneezing is a "cardinal sin" on this world? Remember when sun mentioned the Edo? Yeah, Tasha did a bad job at figuring out whether or not "shore leave" was safe. This is even worse. I get that the plot requires us to do this but the given reason is beyond nonsensical.
If you have to, make up some treknobabble about how the nebula seems to have interfered with the transporter or some strange weather phenomenon has suddenly (and conveniently) appeared, making it impossible to transport and the crew needs to reconfigure... and that's the moment when I remember that I am not getting paid to come up with a reason. But someone got paid and that just irritates me.

Moving on... So, the bigger issue I have with the Lukari stories up until now is... I have less than zero clues how much time has passed. How much time since the "great exodus"? How much time since Kuumarke was informed that the Kentari even existed? (How much time since we met the Lukari?) I mean, we talked about it back then... The "enlightened" Lukari supposedly purged this part of their history from public knowledge and here we are and Kuumarke is a Kentari expert? Why? How? When? What kind of data is she using? I have so many questions and not a single mention (or RP blog) about any of it. And in the "Fusion" blog... Thoughts about some sort of potential "re-unification" with the Kentari. Uhm... When did they even become public knowledge? Or did you forget that previous episode?
This is where "the" writer should have intervened to try and straighten out the continuity.
(Disclaimer: Yes, I know that Paul Reed got the job title "staff writer" whenever he writes something. Maybe Cryptic has other ideas about what a writer should do. Or he is not "the" writer. *shrug*)
And the blog even talks about a potential federation membership. Cool. How long has it been since first contact? Can we get a story about some quirky interactions between Sugihara and... whoever is the Lukari's chosen diplomat?

And by contrast the Kentari seem to be well aware of their history. Okay... Once again, how long ago was the "great exodus"?
And how are the Kentari able to tell that Kuumarke is a Lukari? I mean, from my point of view (and the extremely tiny amount of background information we got...) the Lukari are rather pink-ish and the Kentari are different shades of bl...ue. Are there any other obvious differences? I really hope so, because for some reason telling them apart by the colour of their skin makes me feel extremely uncomfortable. Any further insight into their history would be greatly appreciated.

But let's move on. We fight Kentari partisans... Fine. We fight some of them at the central plaza directly in front of the government building. Uhm... First, the plaza looks nice albeit a bit small. And where are the guards? Can you imagine what would happen if there was a firefight in front of the capitol in the US?

And we're still not done. Let's skip ahead to the Tzenkethi. We fight them. Kuumarke and a Kentari observation team beam to the moon, we fight another group of Tzenkethi, we beam to Kuumarke's ship, she uses the device and... it has been sabotaged. Again, there is no indication for any passage of time. That one fight must have lasted for a few hours of in-game time or something like that. *shrug*
By the way... according to one of the previous missions and the "Fusion" blog, that one planet we found was Kentar and the Kentari have resettled to New Kentar. Okay... when did that happen? And why exactly is moving (like locusts) to another planet not an option this time around? Immersion! Attention to detail! Catchphrase!

Have you ever watched a... let's say 90 to 100 minutes movie and thought: "Well, that wasn't bad, but there were so many things that didn't really make sense." and then you sat through the two hours of the director's cut and all those new scenes made the movie so much better? That is what this episode felt like. It was definitely serviceable but it felt as if half of it ended up on the cutting room floor.
And yes, this episode was about as subtle as a wrecking ball. Unfortunately that has happened in Star Trek before, so... nothing to see. Move along.

chozoelder2nd

1.) I've said it before, but I'll say it again. I'm someone who stopped putting most of my attention to the stats a long time ago. Space barbie started becoming my endgame when I started seeing how much better the art team was getting, so balance changes are somewhat irrelevant to me.

Having said that, even someone like me has to agree that the changes were welcoming. I'll get into the queues down below.


Feedback


Competitive PvP

I've played a few games of Core Assault and Binary Circuit. I was surprised by how enjoyable they are, at least when everyone on the team is trying and not being AFK, but I guess I can say the same exact thing for any queue. I was also surprised with how generous the rewards are. You receive about 70 marks if you lose and about 90 if you win. That's on normal without the daily. That seems like kind of a lot. It's probably Cryptic's incentive for players that don't PvP (which is practically almost everyone) to not get discouraged when they get bodied hard, like a person who picks up Street Fighter for the first time and doesn't know how to do a DP. I get destroyed sometimes, but it's certainly more fun for me than doing ISA or one of the battle zones for the Nth time.

However, I have little faith that these will stay popular, even with the generous marks. I just feel as if everyone doesn't like queues that take longer than 2 or 3 minutes, which is unfortunate. Maybe Binary Circuit will stay alive considering how fast it can be finished.

I played Twin Tribulations last night. The first test was the combination lock with all the symbols... only we weren't receiving the combination. It wasn't showing up in front of the door like it's supposed to, so we had to literally guess through trial and error. It was quite annoying, even with the team coordinating which symbols were wrong. The timer eventually ended and we received 5 marks for the entire effort. We all just warped out at that point. It was an awful first run. I haven't reported it yet but I will the next time I'm in-game.

As for the wait times on the queues, I haven't had any issue. I never have to wait more than 3 minutes to get in one, about 90 seconds on average, but that's probably because I've been striking while the iron is hot.