Star Trek Online Goes to Open Beta

Over the past few weeks I have been privileged to participate in the Closed Beta of Start Trek Online (STO). It was a dream come true for me because I've been following the progress of this MMO since it was first announced with another publisher a lifetime ago.

Today the game goes to Open Beta in preparation for a launch on February 2nd and the NDA has been dropped allowing me to post about my experiences with the game for the first time publicly.

Although I am the first to admit that the game is far from perfect I want to say upfront that I consider it a very fun game with lots of future potential. I had fun during the closed beta even with some of the frustrations that are inherent for MMO beta tests. The game has come a long way even in the few weeks I've been involved with it. The development team has been responsive to the findings of the testers and have made corrections to game play in areas where the game wasn't meeting expectations.

The game starts out with a bang as you are interrupted in your relaxation hours in the mess hall and pressed into service to help out in an emergency.

You quickly end up at the helm of you ship as the most senior officer left alive after the attach and are thrust into the world of starship command. And ultimately in an fight with an iconic Star Trek enemy.

From there you move out into the galaxy taking receiving periodic missions from StarFleet Command and otherwise picking up patrol missions to various sectors or exploring star clusters of unknown worlds. You find yourself frequently in combat in a galaxy which is in conflict but you find time for the occasional diplomatic mission or exploration mission as well.

The game includes both a very robust and exciting space combat engine and a very fun ground combat system as well. You can go it alone for most of the missions in the game if you wish but my experience is that almost all of the missions are a lot more fun with other players. The missions and patrols scale to the group you are in. In addition there are massive group actions called Fleet Missions which are essentially large instances where multiple players work together to achieve a goal.

You ship includes slots of Bridge Officers which extend your abilities and assist you on away missions. Bridge Officers can be trained with new skills by players who have acquired the skills to train new commands or by other Bridge Officers who will train your officer and then return to StarFleet Command for further assignment.

As you gain experience in the game you eventually get promoted and are eligible to command larger and more powerful ships. Your Bridge Officers can transfer with you and you can promote them provided they have the required experience. Beyond your first starter ship you choose between three different types of ships Cruiser, Escort, or Science. The differences in ships amount to how many Bridge Officers of each type (Engineering, Science, Tactical) you have and the weapons slots and maneuverability of the ship. You are allocated on new ship with each rank promotion but can acquire others as well if you wish.

There are some elements that aren't in the game that I wish were there. You can't explore much of your ship yet only the bridge and it doesn't really have a function beyond sightseeing and social gathering. The crafting system is very rough and needs to be fleshed out more. The game is far more combat centric than I think most players wished though the combat is fun. Ultimately though the building blocks for a great Star Trek MMO are there and that is really all I had hoped for.

Bittersweet Reunion

On Sunday I made the 150 mile trip to my father's hometown for his family's Christmas celebration. This is the second one I've attended since his death in 2008. For some reason this trip hit me harder than the one before. I guess it was because my mother, in ill heath herself, wasn't able to make the trip this year and for the first time in my life my wife and I made that long trek alone.

My wife and I spent nearly an hour before the trip working out an alternate route than the traditional one my parents taught us all those years. My wife's motivation for that was to try to speed up the trip. Deep down I think I was more interested in changing the trip for emotional reasons.

The trip itself was good, the time went by pretty quickly and we did get there faster using the route we selected. The gathering is in what my Aunt and Uncle call their "little farmhouse" which is a 3 bed room house that has been expanded and renovated over the many years they have lived there. I'm not sure I would call it little but having 60+ people in it sure makes it feel small.

It was good to see everyone again. Many of the younger relatives I don't even recognize any more. I see them as kids running around the front yard playing with silly string instead of the young adults they now are, driving fast cars and smoking.

Seeing my grandmother was tough for me. I can't see her and not think about my dad, especially this trip because she had called me several weeks ago to ask permission to buy my dad a headstone. I hadn't had the time to get to this task with everything we've been through with my mother over the past year and I was grateful that she wanted to do this, but seeing her now just makes me think about it and she hits me hard with a phrase about the headstone, "It's the last thing I'll ever be able to do for him."

The recently added routine of giving everyone a t-shirt for Christmas occurs at the end of the gift giving ritual. Everyone gets a shirt with the family name on the front and their name and the number representing the order in which they entered into the family (by birth, marriage, etc). They have a shirt for my dad. This causes my wife to have to leave the room to get control of her emotions and I stand very still trying to hold back the emotional outburst that struggles to stay under control. In the end I mostly succeed and it is time for the last challenge of the weeknd..visiting my father's gravesite and viewing the new headstone.

The trip out there from my Aunt's house is about 20 minutes and it takes forever. I've only driven out there once before myself and someone was driving in front of us that day. We find it using two different GPS systems and view the new headstone. For some reason my grandmother's words and the t-shirt are more powerful. I feel more at peace here than in that farmh house surrounded by family.

All in all the trip was enjoyable, it was good to see everyone again and making the first of probalby many more trips by ourselves was kind of a coming of age experience. My emotions though are still a jumble in a way they haven't been in a while. All of it just brought back so many memories of my parents and those trips I made as a child.

The Death of Journalism

Watching the news coverage last night of the tragic events at Fort Hood, I couldn't help but be more horrified and offended at the lazy rumormongering that passes for journalism these days.

I watched as CNN spent massive amounts of time and energy with their digital map software showing the area involved and making useless estimats of the parking lot size and the size of the buildings and how close they were to other things only to find out hours later they were focused on the wrong building...hours after they discovered that I saw the same building used as a background shot for the story.

I listened as a senator stated someone had told her the victims were targeted specifically and then heard multiple outlets report that as if it were a fact.

A panel spent the better part of a half hour discussing the dangerous stress levels created in our military by multiple deployments of serivcemen overseas before one of them finally pointed out that we already knew that this particular suspect had never been deployed before. A few minutes later they returned the the irrelevant topic anyway.

I saw another anchor question some minor fact about the schooling of the suspect as if it were materially important that he had never heard of the school while at the same time mindlessly repeating more materially important rumors as if they were established facts.

I was also disturbed by the fact that the cable outlets just kept on with their regular programming hosts and weaved the story into their opinion shows instead of actually covering the story with news anchors like real news.

All in all I was terrified of what media in this country has become. Forget bias, the issue is simply laziness. Its far easier to just repeat what you've heard on some other network as fact than do your own research.

Digital Books: At the Tipping Point

Reading a recent article about the new Sony Ebook device I couldn't help think that we are almost to the tipping point in Digital Publishing where it becomes mainstream instead of niche.

For this to truly happen consumers have to pressure publishers and retailers to agree on a universal format and universal portability. Having to buy a device that costs several hundred dollars is bad enough. Having that choice limit your selection of titles is worse.

Imagine if buying a Sony Blu-Ray player meant would could only buy Blu-Ray discs sold by Best Buy and buying a Phillips Blu-Ray player limited your choices to only those sold by Amazon.Com. That would be nonsensical. It is no less nonsensical when the product is books and magazines rather than movies and tv shows.

The recent HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray wars were incredibly expensive for consumers and retailers and delayed the move forward to high definition video for a couple of years while the battle played out.

Content should not be a captive to hardware. The formats of these books are all relatively similar any way and the only thing that has to happen is for a group to come up with a common rights management scheme that everyone can adopt.

If DVD players can all agree on a standard platform and management scheme so can ebook readers. It is up to the consumers to demand that they work toward this goal.

Star Trek v2.0

I have to admit that I approached this film with great trepidation. The idea sounded way too much like Harve Bennet's Star Fleet Academy idea from years ago. It also smacked of "muppet babies" to me where you take an established set of characters and dumb them down for a younger audience.

I started to hear buzz though that it was much more than that. The clincher for me was reading the prequel graphic mini-series Countdown which laid out the back-story for the future altering events that take place at the opening of the film. The plot was well written in this piece and felt like Star Trek to me.

So last night my wife and I saw the film in IMAX. I have to say that I enjoyed it a lot even though there are a number of things that nag at me as a lifelong Star Trek fan. Changes that occur in the film that just make this version dramatically different from the series I grew up with in the 70’s (I was way to young to have watched them in the 60s).

The movie was very entertaining though, and I found myself liking this story and these characters all over again. Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, and especially Karl Urban make Kirk, Spock, and McCoy come alive again for the first time since the end of the original series, even more so than the original actors were able to do for me in the movie era.

The film is action packed, and the special effects are top of the line and the sets were beautiful.

There are still a few things that bother me about the film. One of them involves Uhura and another character that just doesn't work for me, but overall it is an excellent reboot of the series and I am looking forward to seeing these characters again in a film that doesn't have to spend so much time setting everything up and can jump right into the action.

I would hate to see worst and dimmest!

"[...]we cannot attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff the AIG businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of the American taxpayers — if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury." -- AIG Chairman and CEO Edward Liddy in a letter to Treasury Secretary Geithner.

AIG is seriously telling us that the best and the brightest are employed by AIG? The financial services division had dragged AIG down to the point of losing more than $60 billion dollars in a single quarter. How much would they have lost if they didn't pay millions of dollars in retention bonuses for the "best and the brightest?"

Rule of Law

So just one day after President Obama reminded us that the Constitution was set forth by our Founding Fathers to protect the rights of man and the rule of Law we have United States Senators who are holding up the confirmation of the next Attorney General of the United States because they want him to promise not to prosecute people who might have committed a crime? Is this really what they believe is in the best interests of their states and the country? Trying to lobby the next head of the Justice Department to NOT follow the law?