Busy week for me, personally and at work, AND I downloaded Galactic Civilizations 3.  If you like turn based 4x strategy, this is the new gold standard.

Holodeck Updates this week are sparse, in part do to the holdback on the release of ‘House Pegh’ from the 21st to the 28th of May.  The holdback is a great sign that the team is willing to take the time to get it right, and allow a little more time for the QA necessary to improve the player’s experience.

What was interesting was the announcement that Specialization points would be added as a 1-time, account bound reward for players.  This is significant and it means we will be seeing this as a reward again in the near future.  Z-Store options please!

HOUSE PEGH DELAYED FOR MORE QA

Last week we announced that we were going to release a new Featured Episode, “House Pegh,” on May 21^st, and that it would be our next chapter in the continuing Iconian War story arc. Due to a critical technical issue, we are unable to update the game with new builds with tomorrow’s maintenance.  While we have a great mission in-house, we aren’t able to get the changes that make it that way onto the live server tomorrow. 

The inability to integrate these changes for our update has led me to delay the release of the episode until May 28^th, which is our next standard weekly maintenance. We could release the episode as it sits on our current build, but after a leads playtest today we determined that we would rather wait a week and release the episode as it is intended to be. 
While I can understand there may be frustration in waiting an additional week for content that was previously announced, I hope everyone can understand the reasons behind this decision and that our goal is to deliver a polished and fun mission.

Typically, you would now be getting the blog that describes the rewards for “House Pegh” today, but since the episode is being delayed we are also delaying that blog. That being said, I would like to take this opportunity to reveal a slight change to the once-per-account weekly reward that I think everyone will appreciate.  

We are still offering a reward for playing the episode each of the first three weeks of its run, just as we have in the past. However, this time we’re giving you an option to choose the reward you receive. When you complete the episode you will earn the main reward for that week, which will be announced next week, as well as a choice of either an Enhanced Universal Tech Upgrade or one Specialization Point. That means each week you can choose to make significant progress on upgrading an item or pick up a single Specialization Point for any one of your characters. I’m really looking forward to this reward update, and we’ve pulled together a really exciting set of standard weekly rewards as well. I can’t wait to reveal them to everyone next week. The Specialization Point will come in a box that cannot be opened by any character under level 50.

I thank you for your patience regarding our delay, and I look forward to seeing you all in game.

Steve Ricossa
Executive Producer
Star Trek Online

Earlier this week more progress on tracking down and stamping out the various issues that impact the atrocious server lag was reported by Salami Inferno.  This has lead to a ‘substantial redesign’ on how some powers and abilities impact players throughout the game.  While not all of the fixes are complete (1 page down, 2 more to go) there has been a small, but noticeable improvement on the games performance.  Additionally Trendy has commented on several of the outstanding mission bugs that have prevented many of us from completing the Delta Recruit.

This week in Holodeck updates:

General:

• Summer Event Buyback Store:
  • Added the ability to purchase R&D Packs and Upgrade Tech in bulk, up to 20 at a time.
  • Reduced Starship Emote shared cooldowns from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.
• Foundry: Updated the Herald NPC Groups so that all of them are actually Heralds, and not those Bluegill impostors.
• Resolved an issue where occasionally when a Duty Officer project failed, the project would disappear.
  • It will now go into the Completed category to allow the player to acknowledge them as failed.
• Resolved an issue where chests and arms of male Remans were sometimes missing.

Systems:

• Reduced the server performance impact of several types of powers.
  • These changes do not alter how these powers function.
• Manheim Device: Disabled healing interactions with past and future self in order to prevent excessive latency when interacting with certain Starship Traits.
  • This functionality may be restored at some point in the future, but was removed to improve server performance.

Content:

• Episodes “Blood of Ancients” and “Delta Flight” have been moved into the level 60 journal tab The Iconian War.
• “Brotherhood of the Sword”:
  • The Syndicate operative for the optional objective now should start with full health when he begins following the players for extraction.
    • This should make cases where players triggered the escort and he immediately dies less common.
    • Players will still need to kill any Heralds that target him in order to keep him alive.
  • The information for this queue in Advanced and Elite now accurately states the crafting reward is Craylon Gas.
• The Federation freighter group in the Xarantine Sector is back.

Known Issues:

• Occasionally, when accepting a new Episode, the sub tasks under the episode name will not initially appear in the mission tracker.
• All ranks/qualities of Ambush Kit Modules above Green have the same effectiveness.
• Many special commodity Duty Officer missions such as Haggle or Shortage assignments are missing in the Alpha Quadrant.

Lastly a comment from Borticus on the rumor that a [CrtD] cap was coming…

Jeremy Randall
Cryptic – Staff Systems Designer
“Play smart!”
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