As you may know I recently purchased a gaming PC and once everything was set up and ready to go I thought to myself ‘Hmmm, it’s been over a year now since Star Trek Online first came out, I wonder if it’s fixed yet?’ For some background on this we travel back to February of 2010…*wibbly memory music*
The situation: I have played the beta and thoroughly enjoyed myself despite a few niggles, but after all it’s beta so what do you expect? I pre-order the game and play in the 2 week ‘Head start’ for either pre-order holders or lifetime subscribers. I point out here that I was both of these after having being conned by the beta, but more on that story in a bit. The start of these 2 weeks are plagued by server problems and downtime but again, a new MMO launches and I expected a few hiccups at the beginning. Head start finishes and oh boy here comes a metric fuckton of problems. Server wait times are huge, quite often the server is down though so you don’t have to wait. The Klingon side of the game basically doesn’t work; you have 3 charcter slots and have to pay for more if you want them and worst of all is the lag that makes the game damn unplayable. Now the lag problem may have been at least partially down to my machine but everything else? Not so much.
It was at this time when I regretted buying the lifetime subscription, which at the time seemed like a great idea. I mean the beta was fun and I’m a massive Star Trek nerd, what was not to love? I try every now and again to play the game over the next year and handful of months only to give up because of horrific lag. However once everything was installed on my new rig things were…smooth. I pressed W and immediately walked forwards, a quick press of 2 on my Naga mouse fired my phaser’s alt-fire straight away. There was still a lot of ‘Go to the C-store to buy X’ and I think this is a unforgiveable. If you make an MMO do EITHER monthly subscriptions OR micro transactions, both is simply greedy and I can think of a C that describes that store, and I tell you now it’s not ‘Cryptic’. Despite this though things seemed to be looking very much in the upward direction.
This lasted for all of 5 or maybe 6 days before they released the next big ‘Season 4’ patch. First time I log in after said patch I’m playing for about a minute before I’m looking at my desktop somewhat bewildered and reading a ‘Fatal Error has occurred’ message. Low and behold it happens every time I try and play now and I thought that maybe it was just me, I mean my internet connection is truly shocking at the moment so it must be that I foolishly thought. A quick check of the forums shows me that I am most definitely not the only one experiencing difficulties with the new patch.
This is such a shame because in STO Cryptic Studios have something that could be incredible. The space combat is genuinely a joy and I love that I have (sort of) command of my own Starfleet ship. I just wish they could sort out all the technical difficulties and actually let me play the game I so want to love. I’d rather it not take about 18 months this time either, it’s not fair on the people who put their faith in the game and bought the lifetime sub but in a way it’s even less fair for those customers paying monthly and not being able to play the game, but surely still being charged for the privilege of reading error messages.
No comments:
Post a Comment