318 – DISCOVERY FIRST-LOOK | PRIORITY ONE: A RODDENBERRY STAR TREK PODCAST

fynncobb · May 2017

Greetings, Captains! You’re listening to EPISODE 318 OF PRIORITY ONE PODCAST, your weekly report on all things Star Trek! Recorded LIVE on Thursday, May 18th, 2017 and available for download or streaming on Monday, May 22nd at PriorityOnePodcast.com!

This week, we’re reacting to the new Discovery trailer, and Seth MacFarlane’s Star Trek spoof as well. In Star Trek Online news, Escalation is coming to consoles, the Miranda gets a facelift, and the Mirror Invasion event is back on PC. Later, our science adviser Dr Hurt is here with another report from the Astrometrics Lab.

And as always, before we wrap up the show, we’ll open hailing frequencies for your incoming messages!

TOPICS DISCUSSED

THIS WEEK’S COMMUNITY QUESTIONS

What do you think about the trailers for “The Orville” and “Discovery”?

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garaks31 · May 2017

Orville is great. so much trek ish stuff coming out, it's wonderful.

Discovery, didn't like mutant like klingons but it's trek ...

brian334 · May 2017

I have high hopes for both shows.

tylermaxwell · May 2017

What do you think about the trailers for “The Orville” and “Discovery”?
The Discovery trailer looks nice, but nothing really stuck out to me as amazing. The lead (Sonequa Martin-Green) seems like another half-Human/half-Vulcan character (who is again shunned by other Vulcans), the McQuarrie-esque ship design still looks awful, the show style has a little more JJ than some people would like (lens flare on the bridge is totally necessary!!!), the blue Klingons borrowed set pieces and wardrobe from The Mummy, and Rubber Head Guy No. 2 apparently "senses death" in the near future. Sounds like an action-adventure of some sort, though I'm not yet convinced that it's Trek. I expect that there's more to the show that couldn't be revealed in a promo for time or plot secrecy reasons, but I can't help but feel that it's missing that 'thing' that makes the other Trek series seem special. I wonder if maybe the lofty expectations and pressure inflicted on Discovery about being the show that 'perfectly embodies Gene's original ideals of Trek' while being fresh for a third (or fourth?) generation audience and not dooming the franchise's prospects on TV for another couple decades isn't causing those folks to trip over themselves a bit.

Compare that with The Orville , which has none of those weighty expectations upon it; all it has to do is look like sci-fi and be funny, which it seems primed to do very easily. Not crazy about the name though; I get that it's supposed to be a bunch of misfits on a no-name sort of ship, but The Orville sounds less 'amazing space adventure' and more 'biplanes and microwave popcorn'.

Everything else from the trailer makes me think it'll be awesome, just needs Seth McFarlane and Co. to refrain from adding too much of the old Family Guy shtick (ya know, the joke that goes on too long until it stops being funny...and then until it becomes funny again...and then until it stops being funny again), and it should be fine.

Keep in mind though, that Orville is dealing with FOX, a network with a not-so-great record with regards to properly supporting their sci-fi shows. *cough*Firefly*cough* If Orville ends up cancelled by December, despite achieving a 'massive cult following' among viewers, don't be surprised.

Fleet Dilithium refinement...'refined'

I suppose that I did not explain that idea particularly well in last week's long and convoluted post (apparently increasing verbosity does not always equate to increasing understanding

). So let me try again, hopefully more adequately:

Let's say you're a STO player that plays only on a single character, for a few hours every day. Throughout your gameplay you gain for example maybe ~15k dilithium ore just for that day. Quite doable between DOffing, Admiralty, PvE grinding, Specialization overflow, etc. You press the "Refine Dilithium" button in your inventory, and you can only convert 8k (9k with the Veteran+Fleet assignments) into refined dilithium that you can use to buy gear, Zen, or maybe donate to your fleet (but probably not). That extra 7k of dilithium ore is unused, and inaccessible to you.

The next day, you earn another 15k dilithium ore. You refine 8k, but now you have 14k of extra dilithium ore left. This pattern continues every single day; you earn 15k dilithium ore, but can only refine 8k dil, so you keep adding to a backlog of extra unrefined dilithium ore that you might not ever get through, and therefore never be able to use. I have plenty of characters in this kind of state, with tens or even hundreds of thousands of extra dilithium ore that cannot be used, and that's with spending just a few minutes a day on each char.

Now, the existing solutions for this issue in-game are two-fold.

Stop playing on that character as soon as you earn 8k dilithium ore. Or even not play on the character at all, just logon, press the "Refine Dilithium" button to drain the extra unrefined dilithium ore, logoff, and do something else. But why would you want to play less? (Certainly Cryptic doesn't want you to.) And it doesn't really help the original problem of casual folks not earning as much refined dilithium per day, or having to choose between fleet donations and personal dil expenses.
Make more characters, and split your game time earning dilithium between them, so you can refine more per day. So you earn 8k dil on the first character, switch, earn 8k on the second character, and so on. But it takes time to build alts to endgame, and maybe you're really attached to playing on your one character, and don't want to make new characters just for grinding for dilithium. 'Alt-hopping' can also become pretty monotonous and tiresome.

My solution instead would be to add a "Refine Fleet Dilithium" button, which would be a separate option that turns an amount of unrefined dilithium ore into fleet-only dilithium. So applied to the previous scenario, you press the "Refine Dilithium" button and get your regular 8k refined dilithium as usual, leaving you with 7k dilithium ore. Then you press the "Refine Fleet Dilithium" button, and the remaining 7k ore gets converted into fleet dilithium. The fleet dilithium doesn't just appear out of nowhere; it's converted from the extra unrefined dilithium ore that you earn that would otherwise just accumulate on your character in your daily gameplay and be unusable. You get your regular 8k refined dilithium, for buying gear and Zen, and the rest of your spare dil ore (up to a sensible limit, dilithium is still a "time-gated currency") can be turned into fleet dilithium so you can help your fleet progress.

I chose this solution over something like increasing the regular dilithium refinement limit or lowering the fleet project dil requirements, because I believe that those two other changes would have a much larger negative effect on the in-game dil economy. Just increasing the dil refine limit for characters would also increase the refine limit for the alt-grinders, who would bring a LOT more dilithium into the game economy, and likely raise the Dil/Zen exchange rates significantly (and by relation, Master Key prices, lockpack ship prices, etc.); this then makes casuals have to earn even MORE dilithium to trade for the things they want, and then they're stuck with the same problem of only have so much dil to buy stuff and donate to fleets with. Lowering fleet project requirements would have a similar effect; as one of the few constant, large dilithium sinks in-game, lowering their requirements means that dilithium from the alt-grinders that would currently go to build their fleets could be redirected to more Zen purchases, raising the exchange rates, and again the same problem for casuals. Any solution to aid casual players with getting more dilithium/fleet dilithium should be made in such a way that alt-grinders cannot scale the benefit to humongous proportions, which would further imbalance the game economy.

The "Refine Fleet Dilithium" button effect would (I think) be less, since all it's doing is letting players utilize some of that extra unrefined dilithium ore which they already have that would otherwise be useless to them. Casual players get an extra hand with fleet dilithium contributions, hopefully without upsetting the exchange rates too much.

Wow, another ginormous post. If you read it and understand the idea now, great! I did my job. If not, well...maybe next week I'll try something with hand puppets.

bberge1701 · May 2017

What do you think about the trailers for “The Orville” and “Discovery”?

I enjoyed the Orville trailer, looks like fun. I hope the show is able to strike a reasonable balance between comedy and drama. Wouldn't it be great if they could get Tim Allen as a guest star? I hear he's available now...

My thoughts on the Discovery trailer: I guess I shouldn't be too surprised that the show has a very "Kelvin Timeline" look to it. That's the "Trek" that modern audiences will probably be most familiar with, continuity be damned. I wouldn't make too much of any story points brought up in the trailer -- I'm sure clips are taken out of context. As far as how brash the Sonequa Martin-Green character seems to be, they may be paving the way for character growth as she hopefully learns to temper her aggressive tendencies.

The one thing that bothers me a bit about the trailer is I'm getting a vibe that our main character is the "chosen one", leading a revolution. That seems a bit out of place for a Starfleet officer. Maybe it will all make sense when we see the series in its entirety.

318 – DISCOVERY FIRST-LOOK | PRIORITY ONE: A RODDENBERRY STAR TREK PODCAST

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