STO: Season 6: Fleet Starbase Test 1

Two of the new PvE group content (No Win Scenario, a space combat survival mode, and the ground-based Colony Invasion) has been on the Tribble Test Shard for a couple weeks now, but yesterday the first update to what will be the real meat of Season 6 was pushed to Tribble: Fleet Starbases!

Here are the full patch notes for ST.20.20120617b.6 at Google Docs. As far as I know, they are not officially posted in forum or non-Google Docs format yet and probably won’t be until at least Monday when the Cryptic folk come back to work.

The update covers three things: New Group Content (both Public and Fleet-only), several new UI changes, then of course the Starbases themselves along with the starbase advancement system.

This post will be a huge wall of text and image-intensive, so I’ll put a break here to make it easier on the folk who don’t want to render the whole thing.

Group Content

Unfortunately, I haven’t played much of the new group content yet, so I will be unable to elaborate for this post. I did manage to get into a Starbase Blockade from the PvE Queue so that was public content, and it was quite fun! That’s the only thing I’ve been able to do yet, though. I queued for another one called Starbase Fleet Defense but there’s a bug in the system where Federation players are being pulled into the KDF player’s queues! In some cases, such as mine, I was unable to target anything whatsoever except the Klingon starbase itself. Meanwhile, I got to watch Federation and KDF players duke it out. Keep in mind, this is all from the PvE Queue so I don’t think anyone was expecting PvP to be present! Although it’s a good idea for a new PvP map, so maybe it was intentional? No one seems to know. Finally, I’ve tried multiple times to queue up to defend my fleet starbase but it keeps kicking us out once the timer counts down. Needless to say, I expect a patch for this stuff next week, because it’s glitchy as hell right now. But that’s why it’s on the test server, right?

[Update] I finally managed to get into a Starbase Fleet Defense. It’s a 20-person event, with everyone auto-grouped into four standard 5-person groups. There are multiple objectives and at least three “waves” so to speak with voiceovers between each wave indicating when you should return to the center starbase to protect it or fly out to defend one of the other points. That was a lot of fun being in a larger-scale PvE space battles! I’m looking forward to doing these on Holodeck with my real character.

User Interface

One of the first things players will notice is the minimap / radar has been updated again. First things’ first: remember the account linking drama I mentioned? Well, here we go: the C-Store is now the Zen Store.

Page 1 of 8 | Next page