[PODCAST] Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 263: Voyage of Discovery

midniteshadow7

Tribbles in Ecstasy Take 263: 'Voyage of Discovery' has warped on to Holosuite Media, you can download and stream it from: http://holosuitemedia.com/tie263/

A lot talk about this week – we start with this week's gaming news from Star Trek Online, Star Trek Online Consoles (0:56:51) and Star Trek Timelines (1:08:50).

We then move to the Main Viewer (1:35:00) to discuss The Orville and Star Trek Discovery and more.


Community Questions:
1. If there was a facility to record what ships you have on the web, would you use it?
2. What do you think about Star Trek Discovery's first full trailer?

alex1ger

Hello there, tribbles.



Community questions:

1.) Well, when I was more active in World of Warcraft, doing heroic dungeons and raids and all that gear treadmill stuff... I did use their armory or rather the fact that some player-created gear optimization tools could interface with it and pull my gear/stats from said armory.
So... If I was that invested in STO I would use such a tool. But let's face it, that is one of the things the gateway SHOULD have offered and PW just shut it down. So... uhm... yeah... *shrug*

2.) I talked about it last week, but let's go over some of the details... See, I don't mind the visual updates. I am one of those people who think TOS looks silly. But that does not invalidate the complaints some people have about the visual style. When you call it a prequel and make it look "modern", well, you "can" say they make a mountain out of a molehill or that a 60's style show would not sell, but I would have gotten around that "issue" by NOT making a prequel.
And the uniforms you seem to like so much: Yes, Enterprise used blue jumpsuits. So blue uniforms might fit into the continuity. But guess what, this "prequel" takes place... about 90 years after Enterprise, 10 years before TOS and less than 10 years before "The Cage". The uniforms should look a lot more like the ones in The Cage/TOS. Maybe a more modern variation of them, but still...
And let's not forget that even Enterprise had those coloured linings (for lack of a better word) on their jumpsuits to tell the different divisions apart. At least yellow (-ish) and blue have been present throughout all of Star Trek (even the JJ-verse) and only "The Cage" did not have red, so... the easiest way to get around that would be to pretend that there were supposed to be red uniforms in "The Cage". But be that as it may Discovery decides to just throw a wrench into the machinery and give us gold, silver and copper instead.
Call it a "prequel" all you want but this looks like a re-imagining or even a reboot instead. And let's not forget the rank insignia (look at screencaps that show closeups of the "combadges"). TOS and the TOS movies had very different rank insignia. This is the kind of pip design we had in TNG/DS9 and VOY but baked into the "combadge". A "modernized" version of the TOS rank stripe thingies? I'd be fine with that. The TNG+ pip design? Really doesn't look like a "prequel" to me.



Feedback:



RP blog "Fortunes of War and Peace":

I remember these people. There was a blog about them during the Temporal War. I just can't be bothered to care about them. Uhm... Yes, right, it's another well-written blog. I just really don't care about these people. I've never met them, I don't really know anything about them, they just... exist in these blogs that aren't accessible in-game and have no influence on what happens in-game and did we get an index page for the temporal RP nonsense and the tzenkethi RP stuff?



K'Vort discussion:

I really wish sun had just explained what a K'Vort is supposed to be. So let me do it. A "K'Vort" is pretty much a B'Rel Bird of Prey but you fixate the wings in the upper position and just scale the ship up. It is LITERALLY the same design, just scaled-up. So the only way there could be ANY licensing involved would be the name. So... take an existing "modern" Bird of Prey, scale it up, make it a battlecruiser and *tadah* you assign a new name to it and you've got yourself a 2409/2410 K'Vort. Done.

Does that sound silly? Yes, yes it does. It only exists because the production teams decided to cut corners and just re-use all those old movie models they still had lying around. Like the Excelsior and the Miranda and the Bird of Prey itself and the Oberth that showed up a few times and so on.
So when STO made an endgame Excelsior, they crossed a lot of lines and since the introduction of the T6 Connie, there is literally no reason why the klingons shouldn't get a K'Vort. Wait, they are gonna use the same excuse they use for not including the kitbashes whenever someone ASKS about them (proving that there is SOME sort of interest). They believe those ships are ugly and wouldn't sell. That's it. No need to hide behind "licensing".
No, I wouldn't buy a kitbash, because I think they are exceptionally ugly, but hey, I also believe the endgame Excelsiors, T6 Connie and T6 Miranda have no business existing. Wait, let me rephrase that, they should not have access to the "classic" skins. That has always been my point of contention. 2409/2410 versions of old ships? Sure, why not? But those classic skins are the deal-breaker for me. Always have been and always will be. But hey, apparently my fun is wrong. *shrug*



Game design/Go Down Fighting (GDF):

No, this won't be a full-blown STOrytime. But you might want to prepare for another e-mail soon-ish. I should talk about game design and I WILL talk about voice actors. Because... Cryptic/PW will NEVER hear the end of that.

But back to topic... See, I went over GDF before and how the fact that you can combine it with some sort of Invincibility/Immunity/Cheat Death style ability/trait is bad game design. I argued that the combination should have some form of rather severe drawback.
Why do I bring this up again? Well, during one of the livestreams with Borticus (It would make sense if it was the balance Q&A livestream, but I'm not entirely sure) someone asked, since GDF was changed to update automatically instead of doing "snapshots", if there was some way to account for "troll healing".

First things first, what do I mean by "snapshotting"? If an ability/buff has a certain duration and scales with some of your stats there are a few ways to implement that.
The first of the prominent ones is taking a "snapshot" at the moment of this ability's/buff's activation and using this "snapshot" to set the ability's/buff's strength for the whole duration. "Snapshotting" was a common practice in World of Warcraft. But Blizzard moved away from it because it lead to some counter-intuitive gameplay.
See, people would try to get their important trinket procs and then activate all their available buffs to get the biggest "snapshot" possible. That is fine but it also meant if your trinket did not proc within a certain timeframe, your damage output would be much lower than usual. And the counter-intuitive part was... it was more beneficial to let one of your DoT (damage over time) effects drop and not have it active for a few seconds than to recast it "too early" thereby overwriting the incredibly big snapshot with a much lower one.
The second prominent method is dynamic updates. Whenever the stats change (because some minor ability/buff runs out), the game recalculates the "major" ability's/buff's strength. That's the route Blizzard went when they realized that they didn't like the implications of "snapshotting".

And here's where GDF and the stream question come in. Let us appreciate the notion that healing a teammate could be considered "trolling"/"griefing". That in and of itself should raise all kinds of red flags within the systems team.
I mean, imagine if I came into this game as someone who liked to play support characters. (Those people exist and Star Trek itself kinda promotes "teamwork"...) Let's say I got a Nebula because it looked like a nice support/healing ship. I put in all the consoles to increase my healing output. I put in all kinds of shield and hull healing abilities.
Imagine I did what I (and this ship) should be supposed to do. I healed people so they could focus on making the big bad enemy go boom. And then some tactical captain accused me of "trolling"/"griefing" for keeping him above 50%. Or because I minimized their GDF damage by healing them up as soon as they dropped below 50%.

In what parallel universe does that make any sort of sense? How does that work with "Your fun is not wrong!", if playing a support character and healing people was fun to me? If your game discourages me from throwing a heal out to a team-member, there's something fundamentally wrong with your game design. Wait, let me rephrase that. It would work for a single-player game, but this is supposed to be an MMO.
DOES. NOT. COMPUTE.

chozoelder2nd

1.) I wouldn't have much use for it. I know which ships I have and don't have, but I guess it helps that I do a lot of admiralty. By now, I'm used to it.

2.) I completely understand that CBS doesn't want to fully go all in on the 60s look and aesthetic, to the point where I agree, because duh. Of course it wouldn't look great. Of course people in general would look at that and say "Wow, that looks like stupid. I'm not gonna watch that."

In my last feedback when I said "pull back on the Kelvinverse", I didn't mean set the scale to 0. I'm not asking that they make the show feel 100% like TOS in a way that Cryptic did for STO with Agents of Yesterday. All I'm saying is that I believe a happy middle ground can exist here, or at least 70/30 in favor of modern.

A perfect example is Star Wars: Rogue One. That movie totally pulled it off and made everything look and feel modern while still respecting the continuity. I don't see any reason why Star Trek can't do it also. You don't have to throw TOS under the bus to keep the high production value... at least not entirely under the bus. Everything in Rogue One, art-wise, didn't jump the shark too hard. (The only part that threw me off was when I saw those Hammerhead cruisers that straight up came from Knights of the Old Republic. I digress, however.) Then I glance over at the DIS trailer, look at the EV suit (or basically anything else), and I just can't help but tilt my head a bit. It doesn't bother me as bad as most of the reactions, but I'd be lying if I said I'd leave it as is.

As of right now, DIS just looks like it wants to hide TOS behind a curtain and leave its toes uncovered (by which I mean the uniforms and the flip phone communicator are the only things I can point at that at least somewhat feel like they're from the prime universe).

I still hope it's successful and we start seeing stuff from DIS added to STO.