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  • edited April 2017
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  • sirboulevardsirboulevard Member Posts: 722 Arc User
    You know, this might actually go a long way in helping explain the un-Vulcan-like hostility that T'Nae seems to have against the Romulans.

    Kestral before she left Cryptic told the foundryroundtable a few years back T'Nae's racism stems from the fact she was on the rescue ships the Federation was sending to help the Romulans that Nero attacked. Following that up with the s--tstorm that is Sela's rise to power afterwards, its easy to see why she grew to hate them so much. That being said, Kestral is gone now, so I guess its whatever the current writing staff wants it to be.

    [SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]

    TRIBBLE Hydra! Hail Janeway!
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    velrenn wrote: »
    Am I the only one who is a bit put off by the way the temporal agents talk about the "anomaly growing over time" (and how this is bad), needing to find the secondary anomaly "before it gets worse" and "not having enough time" because the anomaly is "accelerating"?

    Aren't they time travelers? And isn't temporal shielding a thing in the 29th century?

    Daniels, the temporal agents, and the other time travelers are the godsdamned anomalies. Their incompetence in failure to properly secure various superweapons and their utter disregard for the Temporal Prime Directive started the ball rolling, and it continues to grow with each successive incursion and will continue to do so until they get it through their black hole-dense skulls that voluntary time travel is anathema to a healthy multiverse and start actively seeking out and destroying any and all ability to travel through time past, present, and future, finishing with their own.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • vorwodavorwoda Member Posts: 698 Arc User
    velrenn wrote: »
    Am I the only one who is a bit put off by the way the temporal agents talk about the "anomaly growing over time" (and how this is bad), needing to find the secondary anomaly "before it gets worse" and "not having enough time" because the anomaly is "accelerating"?

    Aren't they time travelers? And isn't temporal shielding a thing in the 29th century?

    No, you aren't the only one. The way STO's time travelers talk is flat-out ludicrous, and usually so they can make what they think are clever or dramatic time jokes. (They are neither, just ignorant.)
    B. Time traveling requires that they know of a change being made, which means they can only ever arrive after it happened.

    No, it means they can only start their own time travelling after it happened. They can certainly arrive before it happened because they can travel, at will, forward or BACKWARD in time.

    If you're a time traveler, and on Friday you discover that someone screwed something up on Thursday at 3:52 p.m., you can travel back to Thursday at 3:45 p.m., and be waiting to whack them over the head with a frying pan BEFORE they TRIBBLE things up. You then leave yourself a note so that even though they DON'T do it THIS time around (because you stopped them), you'll still have the necessary information and reason to travel to that point in history and stop them (again and again, etc.), thus avoiding the potential paradox, maintaining the timeline where they didn't TRIBBLE things up on Thursday. You FOUND OUT about their action after they did it (or even after you prevented it), but you still arrive to prevent it before they do it. That's kind of the whole point of time travel.

    The fault is that STO's writer's are using a very misleading shorthand for the Temporal Agents' dialogue as a lazy way to create dramatic urgency. It's not that someone is messing with the Battle of Waterloo NOW, it's that from our vantage point in our temporally shielded bubble we can see that the timeline of the universe around us is shifting to one where the Battle of Waterloo had a different result. So we need to send someone back to fix it. But whether we do that in 5 minutes or 200 years doesn't make a difference, because we still can (and will) arrive before the problem happens. So realistically, it just ends up on Walker's ToDo List, but as long as his Temporal Shielding holds out, and as long as he gets around to it EVENTUALLY, everything will be the same.

    The trouble from the writer's point is that as long as you have time travel capability, you can have dramatic situations, but not urgent ones.
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    vorwoda wrote: »
    velrenn wrote: »
    Am I the only one who is a bit put off by the way the temporal agents talk about the "anomaly growing over time" (and how this is bad), needing to find the secondary anomaly "before it gets worse" and "not having enough time" because the anomaly is "accelerating"?

    Aren't they time travelers? And isn't temporal shielding a thing in the 29th century?

    No, you aren't the only one. The way STO's time travelers talk is flat-out ludicrous, and usually so they can make what they think are clever or dramatic time jokes. (They are neither, just ignorant.)
    B. Time traveling requires that they know of a change being made, which means they can only ever arrive after it happened.

    No, it means they can only start their own time travelling after it happened. They can certainly arrive before it happened because they can travel, at will, forward or BACKWARD in time.

    If you're a time traveler, and on Friday you discover that someone screwed something up on Thursday at 3:52 p.m., you can travel back to Thursday at 3:45 p.m., and be waiting to whack them over the head with a frying pan BEFORE they **** things up. You then leave yourself a note so that even though they DON'T do it THIS time around (because you stopped them), you'll still have the necessary information and reason to travel to that point in history and stop them (again and again, etc.), thus avoiding the potential paradox, maintaining the timeline where they didn't **** things up on Thursday. You FOUND OUT about their action after they did it (or even after you prevented it), but you still arrive to prevent it before they do it. That's kind of the whole point of time travel.

    The fault is that STO's writer's are using a very misleading shorthand for the Temporal Agents' dialogue as a lazy way to create dramatic urgency. It's not that someone is messing with the Battle of Waterloo NOW, it's that from our vantage point in our temporally shielded bubble we can see that the timeline of the universe around us is shifting to one where the Battle of Waterloo had a different result. So we need to send someone back to fix it. But whether we do that in 5 minutes or 200 years doesn't make a difference, because we still can (and will) arrive before the problem happens. So realistically, it just ends up on Walker's ToDo List, but as long as his Temporal Shielding holds out, and as long as he gets around to it EVENTUALLY, everything will be the same.

    The trouble from the writer's point is that as long as you have time travel capability, you can have dramatic situations, but not urgent ones.

    As @shevet pointed out way back in the Temporal Accords mission, if you make time travel, or really anything, too easy to do in-story, then you can think of ways to break the story in half if you bother to take five minutes to think creatively. The case in that instance was the theft of the Krenim Mary Sueperweapon, which could've easily been averted by just going back in time an extra few days and telling Starfleet Security to take the damn keys out of the ignition.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
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  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    No it wouldn't. The Federation formed because of the Romulan War, not the Xindi. Apart from the Andorians the other founding species had barely any role in the Xindi War at all.

    Or wait! Are you saying that, there having had to have been an original, unpolluted timeline before any of this nonsense started, the Federation is in fact an aberration that would never have existed to begin with but for people from the future tampering with the past? Now, THAT is an interesting prospect.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • thay8472thay8472 Member Posts: 6,162 Arc User
    I want to shoot Daniels. TRIBBLE you future feds! We make our own future!
    zx2t8tuj4i10.png
    Thank you for the Typhoon!
  • antonine3258antonine3258 Member Posts: 2,391 Arc User
    reyan01 wrote: »
    The original 'storyline' for this game was based upon a predestination paradox.

    The three Borg STF's were once part of one unified storyline which basically had our 'Captain' character severely hampering the Borg's efforts to to send ships back in time to Vega colony - where our character was also present as a newly field promoted commanding officer of a T1 Frigate (i.e the old tutorial).
    The scenario therefore being our Ensign- rank character fighting Borg ships/drones that were crippled by our character's future self.

    The current storyline for the game is also based on a predestination paradox, to be fair (a really, really lengthy one), with the Iconian situation.
    Fate - protects fools, small children, and ships named Enterprise Will Riker

    Member Access Denied Armada!

    My forum single-issue of rage: Make the Proton Experimental Weapon go for subsystem targetting!
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    What is it with this obsession with predestination paradoxes, anyway? That is practically NEVER how time travel, intentional or not, has behaved in Star Trek. The '09 movie excepted, time travel has nearly always outright CHANGED the existing timeline, not merely revealed new information about past events.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    vorwoda wrote: »
    The trouble from the writer's point is that as long as you have time travel capability, you can have dramatic situations, but not urgent ones.
    My read is that they know something is messed up, but haven't managed to figure out what it is, so they can't predestination paradox it out of existence.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
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  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    ^Oh, so in that case, all time travel-induced changes to the timeline that CAN happen have ALREADY happened, ergo the timeline is immutable, ergo therefore there is no point to having timecops of any kind in the first place because nothing anybody does to the timeline actually affects how things play out. Nor indeed is there any point to any of our actions at all.

    Do you see the problem here? You basically just argued against the existence of free will.
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • edited April 2017
    This content has been removed.
  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    Wrong again. If there are static points in time at all, then there must necessarily be further static points that lead up to​ them, and it's turtles all the way down from there. So if you use the predestination paradox argument, you automatically argue against the existence of any choice in action whatsoever.

    Can't have it both ways. Either we are slaves to fate all the time and nothing any of us does matters, or we can make our own choices all the time. And if you take the second option, that means that the timecops are imposing their preferred version of the future, the one that led to them being in a position to impose it, on free-willed beings. Which is no less tyranny than the man who declares himself king of all he surveys by force of arms, and the exact thing that the Federation is supposed to OPPOSE.

    "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied – chains us all, irrevocably."
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • questeriusquesterius Member Posts: 8,487 Arc User
    Polaron - Heresy!!
    Nice mission though.
    This program, though reasonably normal at times, seems to have a strong affinity to classes belonging to the Cat 2.0 program. Questerius 2.7 will break down on occasion, resulting in garbage and nonsense messages whenever it occurs. Usually a hard reboot or pulling the plug solves the problem when that happens.
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  • megawolf0megawolf0 Member Posts: 114 Arc User
    I came here to talk about the new episode and I see talk on temporal mechanics. I'm not getting involved with that and will just talk on the episode.

    Seems my hatred for Sela died down ever since we last saw her which maybe has been months in game time though I still don't like her.

    Was confused with few things though think I'm good and the ending was satisfying since she seems to be in that prison where you get the changeling and possibly Data came to visit her which is a surprise.
  • vorwodavorwoda Member Posts: 698 Arc User
    vorwoda wrote: »
    No, it means they can only start their own time travelling after it happened. They can certainly arrive before it happened because they can travel, at will, forward or BACKWARD in time..

    Doing so would create a temporal paradox where you go back in time to stop an event from happening before it happens, thus meaning you never had to go back in time to stop it, thus meaning you didn't, thus meaning it did happen, thus meaning you had to go back in time to stop it, ad infinitum.

    What you suggest is not a viable solution, which is why all known instances of the Temporal Police going back in time is to stop the people causing the disturbance from making it a big disturbance, rather then stop them from causing any disturbance at all.

    your entire argument is based on a nonsensical basis.

    You really need to read my entire argument before you can say that my entire argument is nonsensical. Especially since I accounted for a potential paradox, and refuted YOUR counterargument before you made it (and I didn't even have to do any time travelling to do so!) :)

    Here, I'll quote and bold the relevant part again so you won't miss it this time.
    vorwoda wrote: »
    No, it means they can only start their own time travelling after it happened. They can certainly arrive before it happened because they can travel, at will, forward or BACKWARD in time.

    If you're a time traveler, and on Friday you discover that someone screwed something up on Thursday at 3:52 p.m., you can travel back to Thursday at 3:45 p.m., and be waiting to whack them over the head with a frying pan BEFORE they **** things up. You then leave yourself a note so that even though they DON'T do it THIS time around (because you stopped them), you'll still have the necessary information and reason to travel to that point in history and stop them (again and again, etc.), thus avoiding the potential paradox, maintaining the timeline where they didn't **** things up on Thursday. You FOUND OUT about their action after they did it (or even after you prevented it), but you still arrive to prevent it before they do it. That's kind of the whole point of time travel.

    Your entire argument is based on a lack of reading comprehension, apparently.
  • nommo#5819 nommo Member Posts: 1,105 Arc User
    I enjoyed the episode. Good storyline which offered more development & depth of a couple of characters. Maybe it resonated with me a bit more since I had recently redone the Temporal Ambassador mission but I liked it & want a continuation of it even more. I also liked the puzzle feature with the episode. It wasn't too difficult, but it definitely helped in the solving process if you paid attention. The weekly reward is always appreciated. The mission reward would be the only subpar critique I would give since it is very familiar to the other Romulan Navy set from another mission & the continuity with the Polaron weapon doesn't make sense to me & could've used some explanation. I like the development of the Sela character in this mission especially since it involved Tasha Yar, & T'Nae too. Well done on this one Cryptic.
  • paulbowmanpaulbowman Member Posts: 35 Arc User
    vorwoda wrote: »

    QFT!
    And, yes - Trask her!

    I got that one without a second thought. I doubt many here will but from myself - well played, well played indeed!

  • vorwodavorwoda Member Posts: 698 Arc User
    paulbowman wrote: »
    vorwoda wrote: »

    QFT!
    And, yes - Trask her!

    I got that one without a second thought. I doubt many here will but from myself - well played, well played indeed!

    I was hoping someone would get it! Thank you for making my day, sir!
  • edited April 2017
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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    Yeah, that's why I loathe the idea that temporal loops are actually meant to be that way. To me at makes more sense to say that breaking the loop would cause more harm than good.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
  • legendarylycan#5411 legendarylycan Member Posts: 37,283 Arc User
    but we don't KNOW what harm breaking a loop will cause, because the dipstick at cryptic writing this TRIBBLE won't LET us to find out

    it's not like time itself will shatter like it did in doctor who when his GF broke a loop by failing to kill him (or let him be killed by someone else - i forgot what the exact circumstances were)​​
    Like special weapons from other Star Trek games? Wondering if they can be replicated in STO even a little bit? Check this out: https://forum.arcgames.com/startrekonline/discussion/1262277/a-mostly-comprehensive-guide-to-star-trek-videogame-special-weapons-and-their-sto-equivalents

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  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    enh, it's an application of the butterfly effect. Small changes might go unnoticed, or they might cause bigger changes.... like tossing a pebble onto a hillside covered in loose boulders, it might cause a landslide, or it might not.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
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  • starswordcstarswordc Member Posts: 10,963 Arc User
    edited April 2017
    starswordc wrote: »
    Wrong again. If there are static points in time at all, then there must necessarily be further static points that lead up to​ them, and it's turtles all the way down from there. So if you use the predestination paradox argument, you automatically argue against the existence of any choice in action whatsoever.

    Can't have it both ways. Either we are slaves to fate all the time and nothing any of us does matters, or we can make our own choices all the time. And if you take the second option, that means that the timecops are imposing their preferred version of the future, the one that led to them being in a position to impose it, on free-willed beings. Which is no less tyranny than the man who declares himself king of all he surveys by force of arms, and the exact thing that the Federation is supposed to OPPOSE.

    "With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured...the first thought forbidden...the first freedom denied – chains us all, irrevocably."
    No, that isn't how it works. Predestination paradoxes only work on there being two static points that create them
    1. Being the point in the future that causes the action to go into the past
    2. Being the point in the past that causes the action of the future

    There are a million and one ways one could reach those points, and thus, there is no such thing as a set point in time outside of those two points.

    Just like you could wear a different shirt color in a million different universes, and still have the exact same day at work regardless of your shirt color, since your shirt color has no effect on your day at work, there are millions, billions, trillions even, number of possible variant timelines that would all reach the exact same event in that fixed point in time regardless of the myriad number of differences between them.

    You literally have no idea what you are talking about, and are arguing against some of the most common basic cliches of time travel used across countless scifi universes.

    That's not free will. That's Morton's Fork, a constrained set of predefined choices all leading to a small number of preselected outcomes that differ in insignificant details but not in the main thrust. To use a rather morbid example, you get to choose between death by spacing, death by beheading, death by firing squad, or death by hanging, but you do not get to choose life.

    It's not free will unless you get the option to simply defy the temporal agents' preselected future entirely and create one that doesn't lead to the one they knew.

    And furthermore:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2U4pssEqHY

    Side note, there's a counterpoint I wish Picard had brought up here. What if one one of those people he saves, rather than becoming the next Hitler, instead grows up to be the next Martin Luther King or Surak? Or better yet, what if they grow up to be the next Randall Munroe and spend their days drawing stick figures on the Internet instead of plotting world domination?
    patrickngo wrote: »
    enh, it's an application of the butterfly effect. Small changes might go unnoticed, or they might cause bigger changes.... like tossing a pebble onto a hillside covered in loose boulders, it might cause a landslide, or it might not.

    or maybe it's exactly what they advertised.

    The thing is, I don't think the writer at Cryptic really puts much thinking into the high-concept way Trek-the-series approached time travelling, instead it's kind of treated like nicking down to the chemist for some aspirin.

    I think they're absolutely afraid of even confronting the potential that a person from the present, might want to have a say in their own future, rather than merely going through motions as scripted by some future operative to preserve that operative's past.

    IOW nobody, not even characters that are NOT Federation operatives, stands there at New Khitomer and asks, "Is this really a future I want for my kids? is there any future that I might prefer more??"

    doesn't happen.

    instead, even a Klingon that beat the access codes for utopia planitia out of a Federation captain is going "Yay, we become part of the nation we were just at war with-and kicking the **** out of for betraying us!"

    I'm trying to figure out how that would even be probable-that is, cheering on the effective surrender of your own nation to another. I don't see it.
    QFT. I get the definite feeling that some at Cryptic never wanted to create a genuinely multi-factional game to begin with and keep hoping people will just give up and play only Fed. Or they prefer the easily led Klingons who will put up with anything if it means "I get to kill SoSDaj wInga'chuq* for being ugly", rather than the ones who actually think about their actions.

    * I hope I conjugated** that right.
    ** Pun unavoidable. This is why I like Romulans better: Romulan women don't conjugate, they decline. :P
    "Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
    — Sabaton, "Great War"
    VZ9ASdg.png

    Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
  • markhawkmanmarkhawkman Member Posts: 35,236 Arc User
    patrickngo wrote: »
    The thing is, I don't think the writer at Cryptic really puts much thinking into the high-concept way Trek-the-series approached time travelling, instead it's kind of treated like nicking down to the chemist for some aspirin.
    high concept? You man the same series that never used time-travel the same way twice? Nah. Time Travel in Star Trek does whatever the writer wants it to.
    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
    My character Tsin'xing
    Costume_marhawkman_Tsin%27xing_CC_Comic_Page_Blue_488916968.jpg
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