The first night of headstart went quite smoothly, aside from some initial hiccups where people couldn’t authenticate. This morning it’s been a bit unstable, with a lot of rubber banding, missing crew members, and so on. They’re bringing the servers down now for maintenance. Overall, a very smooth launch (I do realise that I’ve probably just jinxed it).
Initial thoughts:
- Being able to take a screenshot of your beta character and then apply all of those options to your new character is wonderful – what a great feature. I’d created an alien character that I quite liked the look of, and you can never successfully re-create those exact features a second time. So being able to load all the options that I wanted from a screenshot was wonderful.
- Turn off general chat, people are idiots. One of the first things that I did was create a new chat channel that had all the same options, except general chat was turned off.
- I’m really hating the “go back to WoW” fanbois. This isn’t specifically a Star Trek problem, of course – it was actually a lot worse in Aion. But every time someone points out a feature that is currently bugged, or makes any criticism of a new game, you always have tons of idiots chorusing “go back to Wow, noob”. As if that was easier than this one, which so far is extremely easy and new-player-friendly.
- Being dumped in groups with people is quite uncomfortable. I very much liked the public quest feature from Warhammer, and thought that STO would work like that. But this is like a LFG tool that dumps you in small groups without warning (unless you change your settings). I would have preferred something less personal. Remember, I’m a real antisocial type. :)
- As rabid a Firefly fan as I am, I wouldn’t be caught dead with the name Mal, flying in Serenity. Not in a million years. I like my good ship, the USS Lollipop. lol…