Yesterday was a very traumatic day for Star Trek Online players, at least the dedicated ones. Perfect World Entertainment’s acquisition of Cryptic Studios was finalized roughly ten months ago, and all this time we’ve been able to login with either our Cryptic accounts or our Perfect World accounts, if we had one. No problem, and it seems most of the pre-PWE players just preferred to stick with our Cryptic accounts. Tuesday, however, the STO website was down for nearly a full day and when it reappeared, it had been moved over to PWE’s domain – no longer startrekonline.com but now sto.perfectworld.com — and now requires a PWE account to login to your account or to post on the forums. To login to play the game, though, we can still use our Cryptic accounts. For now.

The forums were also switched to PWE’s system, and most players are extremely unhappy about the way they look, the way they operate, but most importantly because of the way the account linking was handled.

For example, I did have an old PWE account because years ago I tried their main MMO Perfect World, and somehow my account name was the same as my first character’s name. I can’t remember if I did that (not sure why I would because if I post on a forum it’s almost always under my usual handle) or if it just happened out of the blue via some automated process. Now, the good thing is that Cryptic and Perfect World did take care to reserve everyone’s Cryptic @handle so regardless how I login now, in-game I still appear as the same @handle I always have so friends, fleet-mates, and others still know who I am. But… my account name is now the old ugly stupid name I had on the original PWE account, and I am fairly certain that is also my forum name now, which will probably prevent me from ever posting on the forums ever again.

Cryptic/PWE did post a FAQ about Account Linking on the main STO site, and are currently running a promotion for, as the jaded players are calling it, a [Box of Useless Crap]. Snarky, but not inaccurate, as it turns out. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, I figured my days of logging in under the Cryptic account were numbered (I’m surprised they’ve allowed it to go on as long as they have) I took the plunge yesterday and linked my account. The [Promotional Gift Box] tooltip reads:

Opening the box, the loot tables rewarded me thusly:

5,000 Dilithium Ore would take me, at most, about an hour to earn on my own. I’ll always take more dilithium but this amount is less than we’re allowed to refine per day.

All my characters are at the level cap, so the Skill Points are meaningless for now as well.

I suppose the catch here is that when we get down to it, PWE didn’t have to offer us any incentives whatsoever, so I guess even this small promotion is something. In the near future when they force the accounts to merge, nothing will be offered, which is why I chose to bite the bullet and do it now.

The two combat buff items, who knows, maybe I’ll use them in a Ground Special Task Force (STF) or something with the fleet once Season 6 arrives and we’re defending our Fleet Starbase or something.

Finally, the [Promotional Weapon Box] awarded this:

Not sure I really have a use for this either, though I do like Transphasic Torpedoes, generally speaking. Also this is of Very Rare (purple) quality with the [CrtD]x3 modifier. This item is currently selling for 2 million credits on the Exchange and there are only two of them available. So there just might be a third one on the Exchange in a few minutes!