patrick ngo - Bloodwine and gagh

Bringing it to the table. (What does the KDF still hold as Faction-Unique?)

By patrick ngo • March 12, 2015 Factions

If you’ve tripped onto any post of mine in the STO forums, you know that I’m a Bird of Prey player.

that is, out of my group of KDF characters, all of them have at one time or another, been wholly dependent on a Hegh’ta after level 40, and that most of my existing characters rely on the Bird of Prey for their ‘ride’…even in the presence and availability (and sometimes ownership) of ‘better’ ships from a pure DPS (Damage Per Second) perspective.

A big part of this, is that nobody else has one.

There are cross-faction Raiders now, and the Fed-side has the Aquarius, which is basically a rebranded cross-faction raider.

But those inevitably have at least one fixed bridge station, and have to rely on a console to cloak.

Once upon a long time ago (game time) KDF had several ‘unique’ types of ship. Continue reading

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Eight Days to Go.

By patrick ngo • March 6, 2015 Events

I’ve gotten an idea or two that may pay off, and may not. don’t know yet.

First idea’s simply thus: soliciting some articles for the site, from players, and not even asking them to write the articles in English.

There are a lot of traits and features of this game, that people kind of…miss. Don’t use, don’t pay attention to, and there are things that were incorporated that don’t work right, or don’t get utilized because (drumroll) you don’t know they’re there.

The forums are a good source of information on the game mechanics of STO-sometimes they seem to be the only source.

but…those sources get buried in thread after thread of…stuff.

maybe we need to build a library of game resources HERE-resources that are particularly useful for KDF players.
even players that aren’t ‘native’ english speakers.

So I had an idea. NOT sure if it’ll work or not, but maybe…just maybe.

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Spec Points and Way of the Warrior: *a thought-experiment.

By patrick ngo • March 4, 2015 Missions

I’d like to suggest, in our preparations for the 14th, a few folks whom are “over fifty” in levels, and still grinding spec trees, try out a few of the wrapper missions and see if we can’t find something better than ‘park and wait’ for gathering spec-points.
The wrapper in mind, is the Pi Canis:Way of the Warrior string that we’re going to be taking the low-and-mid-levels through during the Festival.

Reason I bring this up, is that on the forums, you see constant bleating about ARgala-first about the Argala grind, now about the Argala cooldown.

Pi Canis Way of the Warrior is the PI Canis sorties A, and B. It pays out dilithium (still, at least unless they patch that away) and the missions are pretty straight-forward “Fly here, kill those” missions until you get to the convoy.

Seems to me, we might be able to note decent skillpoint payouts for taking that wrapper on, and best of all, it’s KDF exclusive content (at least, until Geko gets it bowdlerized).

Yes, I know, it’s PATROLS…but it’s KDF patrols, which means it’s raiding, killing (NPC) Feds…

Problem being, one player doing it isn’t a good sample to see if this might be a more palatable alternative to Tau Dewa or Delta “Run/park/run” grinds.

Now, back in the day, back when I was in House of Beautiful Orions we’d occasionally team those runs. It was good practice for teaching new players how to work together until they could actually run STF’s.

That was…a couple years ago.

anyhow, the thought-experiment is this: let’s get some experimental runs done in Tau Dewa at different times, with different players at different levels, and work up some baseline averages using the mission, list out payouts in Dilthium and ‘average’ skillpoint awards for doing that daily.

Discuss your results here, or on the Forums.

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Volunteering for The Festival!

By patrick ngo • March 3, 2015 Events

getting inquiries into how to volunteer, and being as I DO have a day (well, night) job 40 hours a week (not including overtime), it could be tough to get ahold of me in-game before the event (especially if you live a normal 9-to-5 life, I start work at 1400 PST and get out at 2230 PST. 2 to 10:30 for folks who use a normal 12 hour clock).

So, there’s a few ways to work around this that don’t involve you staying up until all the wee hours of the morning.

1: Post here. I’m going to be checking daily.

2: PM me on the STO Forums. It’s not realtime, but I can usually get on them through the phone on breaks at work, and I always at least ‘look’ there when I get home.

3. In-game ‘mail’, send it to “K’ragh the Fool@Patrickngo” on the game itself. I’ll kick you a response.

4. Catch me when I’m actually playing. Weeknights the best times are well into the small hours of the morning-I sometimes don’t get on until around 2 AM Pacific time (12:00 GMT) during the week. I’m a little better during the week-end.

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Leonard Nimoy has passed on.

By patrick ngo • February 27, 2015 Trek

I grew up with Star Trek, like some of you, when I was doing that growing up, it was with “Star Trek”-there was no TNG, no DS9, no Voyager.
Star Trek was a thing you watched after school on the local non-network Affiliate, and we watched it every day.

Then, the movies came out, and we waited eagerly for every one (and I saw them all in the theaters).

Without Spock, it really didn’t feel like Star Trek for a long, long time.

a little dusting of green makeup, some rubber ears-and Leonard Nimoy and Mr. Nimoy created a being that inspired millions of people to be better people.

In his last few years, he wasn’t able to be as active in the scene as he had been, but without him, I think maybe Star Trek wouldn’t have become the phenomena it has been for almost fifty years now, and we wouldn’t even, by extension, HAVE a Klingon Empire to have a faction in a game based on Star Trek to play.

He’s gone now, at least physically gone.

Rest in peace, and remember…

Leonard Nimoy, 1931 to 2015

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Qu

By patrick ngo • February 26, 2015 Cryptic

This Blog has a theme, of course. The theme, is based on Star Trek Online, it’s specifically about the ‘style’ of the KDF, our players, our community.

Not so much our fleets-most of the big fleets have their own sites, blogs, forums…and most of the time, those are pretty empty.

The KDF as a faction, isn’t for everyone. Certainly it’s not for everyone that, say, Al Rivera (aka “Captaingeko”, Cryptic’s lead developer) wants to see in the game. In a way, that’s kind of become the point, even if it shouldn’t be.

We come to Star Trek online, because we’re gamers, and because we’re STAR TREK fans. People choose KDF, because they’re STAR TREK fans, who like the KDF. You don’t find many generic gamers who like Klingons, (they’re usually aware of them, thank you, media saturation culture), so it’s fairly safe to say, that if someone is playing a Klingon in STO, they are, in fact, a fairly hard-core fan of TREK.

A “Trekker” or “Trekkie” (Depending on generation and location, local fandom subculture, etc.) and because of that, we tend to endure more defects in our Trek-themed things, than people who’re just there for some generic online multiplayer game.

Well, things have kind of hit a new crest-the game’s had the basic factional conflict “Resolved” with the specific intent of ending development on the KDF (which has suffered a consistent shunning from Crytpic for the previous four years with only short, often unpublicized breaks from that).

Delta Rising has introduced the most alt-unfriendly environment the game’s ever had, while simultaneously pushing Federation superiority (and rubbing our collective faces in it) through everything from ship design to new game mechanics. (I’ll be going into that more in another article)

The message from Al “Captain Geko” Rivera and Cryptic is clear… Continue reading