STO News Updates – Week of June 12th 2015

The great forum migration is a go starting MONDAY, with this post from Trendy:

Hey everyone,

So a while back we were discussing moving over to the Vanilla forums. After looking at the migration carefully, discussing it with the team, we wanted to make some changes to the forums before we felt like we could move over. We’ve decided to make some significant changes to the back-end and feel that we are now ready to start the migration process.

Delta Rising Operations Pack is 20% off on Steam
No word on whether this discount will be available again in the Zen store.

Costumes 20% Off in the Zen Store

Some Captains are cut from a different cloth. These players know that to be a respected captain, you can’t just act the part – you have to look it too. This weekend, we’re putting our costume packs on sale for 20% off. Now until 6/15 at 10AM PDT, fashionable captains can grab outfits that they’ve had their eye on.

New T6 Variant for Lifetime Subscribers – and Lifetime memberships are on sale for 33% off.
After going years without an ongoing membership (former gold subscriber who out of frustration cancelled his monthly), I didn’t see the value of going to a lifetime membership without T6 ship options.  That was solved this week with the upgraded Chimera ship.

The ship master option looks interesting, but is it worth $200 (even if it feeds you 500 zen per month as a stipend):

After reaching level 5 in your Heavy Destroyer’s Starship Mastery, you will unlock the Weapon System Synergy trait. While this trait is slotted, each time a directed energy weapon is activated on your ship, you will shunt a small amount of power to your projectile emitters. This is represented by building up stacks of Weapon System Synergy. Upon reaching 10 stacks, your projectile weapons will become primed and deal additional damage and shield bleedthrough for several seconds. After this expires there is a short lockout window before you can begin building up Weapon System Synergy stacks again.

A note on upcoming costume changes and edits from @cryptijoejing.

After all the years of assets in STO, you may have noticed issues with organization, clipping, assets almost randomly working for one species, but not another, and so on…

There are easily 100+ clipping bugs alone. We’ve done some work to improve issues by adjusting the geometry of many assets. But a big chunk of the problem is due to improper categorization.

So coming soon you’ll start seeing our efforts to continually improve not only the way the game looks, but also how you as players interact and use it.

First is a big pass on the footwear and belts with many revised names and alphabetical sorting, and proper category and faction settings. A similar pass is getting addressed for the uniform lower (pants, skirts, etc)

This *might* cause some existing costumes to need a “refresh” to re-validate assets. For example, you may find that any puffy, tucked pants will no longer also be found in the “Pants – Tight” category. Makes sense, right?

We’re trying really hard to make sure you can still make the costumes you want though – again, the categories should just be more logical.

Annnnnddd….we’re also trying really hard to address the many requests we’ve had to actually unlock certain parts to species/factions as appropriate as well as free up more items between uniform and off-duty.

There might be a hiccup or two because this is such a big undertaking with so many linked parts, but we think the end result will be worth it for everyone.

So as it comes in – keep your eyes open and let us know (constructively, please) if you spot major issues. We’re excited about this “little” clean-up and we hope it makes you guys happy too.