I just got my preorder open beta key this morning. (from Amazon).
The STO website is down for maintenance and unfortunately I twisted my ankle at PT this morning so I’m actually in a fair amount of pain. Enough pain that I can’t feel happy about the key!
My global name is @Pleonast (same as on Champions Online). Like CO, friending works on accounts, not individual characters, so it’ll be easy to meet up in-game for doing missions together and forming a fleet. I’m not too particular about a fleet name, but I suggest taking a Star Trek phrase and morphing it with some SDMB meme. I’m sure anything pure-Trek will be taken, due to the high geek-quotient of its natural player base.
I’ve mostly planned my captain and bridge officer names and species. And I have some ideas for ship names. I’m not sure what the maximum number of officers we can have is. I do know we’ll end up with 13 ships total: 1 light cruiser (starting ship), 4 cruisers, 4 science vessels, 4 escorts.
I’m planning on taking a Science career. The career you choose only affects away missions, I think. I’m picking Science, since I like science. For ships, I’m not sure if I’ll prefer Cruisers (supposedly tankish) or Science Vessels (cc/healer). I’m not a big fan of dps, so I’ll probably not use an Escort much. But since we’ll ultimately get to collect them all, I’ll be flexible.
1920’s Style Death Phaser?
Ha! That’d work. 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starfleet_starships_ordered_by_class
Personally, I like the idea of a Vulcan being captain of the USS Aristotle.
For those willing to go outside canon, here’s wikipedia’s list of ship names from Iain Banks’ Culture series:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ships_(The_Culture)
Probably won’t play; if I did, “So Much for Subtlety” is hard to top as a ship name.
Just built myself a new puter last night so I can play. My old wow system is a little light in the power department.
With a little creative salvage, I got a nice lil box that will do the trick for $250 
Gotta Love Customers who just go buy new machines and never come back for the dead ones.
Sure, stiffed us on the bill, but I got a 2.4ghz quadcore CPU, 2G of RAM, a 500G HDD and a vista home premium key off that box (it needed a new mobo)
I started downloading the open beta from FilePlanet at 6pm last night, should be done by 6pm tonight. Too cheap to subscribe, they’re making me pay in anticipation.
alot of the ground action has a very similar feel to champions online.
Ship combat is pretty cool. As many reviews have mentioned its all about positioning, power management and having the proper arc bearing on target when enemy shields fall…
Always watch your shields and always watch for the torpedo opportunities.
Some of the initial combat missions are almost impossible alone but can be finessed as long as you get your speed to where the guys who can really hurt you cant keep up. The smaller enemy ships can kill you but by keeping the aft sheilds pumped and aft phasers going you can whittle down sheilds then whip around and pump a couple torpedos and smoke them. Via that tactic you can take on 3-4 small enemies at once.
The auto grouping feature is cool too. other players can help you with a mission in progress. I hopped into a zone and was trying to cut an enemy away from the herd when 3 other ships warped in over like a min. The 4 of us had a jolly old time smoking several heavy enemy ships we probably could never have hurt alone.
I’ve been in the closed beta for a month or so. Now that it’s open and the and the NDA’s lifted if you’ve got any questions ask away.
Main points for starting players
All players start off as Federation captains. Once you reach level 6 you can generate a Klingon/Gorn or similar character. These are similar to the monster side in LOTRO primarily PVP.
For Federation characters the bulk of XP comes from completing assigned missions. PVP and Fleet Battles (20 players instances) award very little usually a point or two per ship destroyed.
XP is split into two areas, personal skill points and Bridge Officer skills. Each of your BO’s has 2 skills at each level. One for ground combat and one for space. Increasing their levels in ground skills increases the skills effectiveness. Whereas increasing space skills reduces cooldown time.
Your personal skills are primarily about increasing overall performance of crew and equipment. At Lt. each skill level provides a small boost to a wide range of skills (eg starship command boosts speed/manouverability and power levels for all types of ship). As you increase in rank higher tier skills become available with greater benefits but to more specific areas.
Ground combat has a few nice twists. Firstly if you are playing solo you can bring up to four NPC’s with you, you can mix and match between your BO’s and regular security officers. Secondly you gain a damage boost if you can flank your enemy and hit him from the sides or rear. Also each weapon has either an expose or exploit ability. **Expose **abilities such as stun settings do reduced damage but can leave an opponent vulnerable to another weapons exploit attack. Exploit attacks are more damaging than regular hits and if an emeny is already exposed will do immense damage usually killing your enemy in one hit.
Space combat is very similar to the old Star Fleet games based on the original board game. You have four shields bow/stern/port/starboard. You also have a fixed anount of energy to split between four subsystems attack/shields/engine/aux. Tip - don’t underestimate the usefulness of the aux power. Aux power boosts the effectiveness of your science officers abilities and also determines your rate of turn. If you can’t get your main weapons around onto your target bump your aux level and you’ll turn quicker.
If you back off on the throttles you will tighten your turning circle too.
Oops forgot that.
I was pondering trying for “USS Universal Greeting”
semi Obscure references to canon conecepts might be cool.
ships called “Seeking Jamaharon” or “Found Jamaharon”
USS Memories of Minuet
Fleets called
“The Bajoran Death Chant Choir”
“We are Strong”
I just downloaded it and took a check out. Seems intriguing. The main problem is that I hate reset after beta. It seems like all the time spend before wipe-out is well, wiped-out. So my enjoyment has been tempered with knowing that it doesn’t really matter.
The only thing that surprised me was the auto grouping on my first mission. I really had no idea what I was doing(the tutorials seem focused on showing you how-to-do-it, with little information on when-and-why-you-do-it) and was suddenly on a team feeling like a jackass because I was carelessly flailing away impotently. I prefer more of an opportunity to learn the basic ropes with no witnesses or dependents. 
I always hate the wipes, too, but I understand why they’re necessary. They need to clean their databases so they don’t have to track down bugs due to beta data.
So, when I beta test, I don’t try to advance, but try to play stupid and break things. And write bug reports on anything that doesn’t seem to work right. Once I get bored of doing that, I stop playing the beta and wait for the live version.
From the basics of the game I’ve seen so far, I’ll definitely be getting the live version. I like and dislike the autogrouping. It’s fun to meet players in-game. The autogrouping makes the game feel less instanced. And the scaling of the difficulty to the number in the group is fun.
But I dislike how it can cause you to skip content. If you come into a group later rather than earlier (or if you have to step away from the computer suddenly), you will end up skipping some of the early parts as your teammates complete it for you. I tend to play rather sporadically, so I think I’ll turn autogrouping off.
I am interested in the game and will have to check it out.
Bunny, I have a question if you don’t mind.
I was curious about drops from the mobs. Sometimes after killing something I get the drop indicator, a blinking yellow globe in foot mode, and a blinking yellow prism in fly mode. So I loot it and recieve something shiny. Does the fact that I can see it yellow mean it’s only lootable by me? Like I said before with the teaming I’m not sure what I’m doing. Do the teammates get their own blinkies to loot? Or am I a ninja bastard?
I’ve pre-ordered the game and I’ve been playing it since open beta started.
It’s been a ton of fun, especially the Space combat, and some of the group combat zones where a whole ton of people work together on taking on tougher foes and then get scored on their kills. I just like seeing that many ships in one area blasting things.
Ground combat is fun, but challenging for me right now. It seems so easy to get knocked out. The combat is a bit like KOTOR in that you can move around, but you don’t aim, you just press buttons to fire your phaser pistol or rifle.
I’ve played with autogrouping on, but if someone leaves you are in a bind, as group missions are harder even with everyone in there than solo, because the alpha strikes from the enemies are brutal. Cryptic has said they are working on resolving the issue but right now, group missions tend to involve more dying, but still they are fun.
The cool thing about space combat is it isn’t just a old style MMO button pushing session. It takes real skill to manuever your ship and get within the arc of your weapons while rotating your shields, and trying to hide your weakened shields from the enemy.
One thing I screwed up with was when I was in the tutorial and started trainng my skills, I didn’t even notice all the skills that you can scroll down to see, so I ended up training Starship operation to 9, because I didn’t see any others yet. I’ve managed to recover from that now and it is beta, but that’s something to be aware of.
Supposedly we will be able to check out our ship’s bridge once Live starts. That will be fun as well. Just gives a bit more immersion to the idea that you really are a ship captain.
Yes, that’s the case. The white drops belong to other plays.
So. I am somewhat intrigued in spite of myself; a decent space-combat MMO sounds like fun.
However, I burned out on the Star Trek universe some time around the second season of Voyager, and it kind of irritates me now. Will this be a big problem, or can I just treat the Trekkiness as background noise?