STO Three Year Anniversary

Since I wasn’t posting anything last week, I missed writing about Star Trek Online’s three year anniversary. Based on the state of the game when it launched, that they’ve made it to three years is quite an accomplishment. The game has come a long way since then, almost all for the better. While it’s still not the Star Trek game I want it to be, it still does a good job of providing entertaining space battles.

For the three year anniversary they are have some fun events to celebrate. Q is back and able to offer some small gifts. One is another party popper which produces balloons that you can spray all over the place. Some of the balloons look like little Enterprise’s and Birds of Prey. They would be very impressive as genuine balloons “animals”. As is, people just love to spray them around Earth Space Dock, filling up the place.

The main event for the anniversary was the release of a special episode. While investigating an anomaly in the Azure Nebula, you disappear into an alternate timeline, ala “Yesterday’s Enterprise”. In this timeline the Federation lost the war to the Klingon’s  from “Yesterday’s Enterprise”, so when the Dominion showed up, they took over almost everything. The Tholians are separate and you end up being a freighter captain working for them.

You discover the crew of the Enterpise-C, including temporally displaced Tasha Yar and must help them retake the ship and continue on their mission of dying at the hands of the Romulan’s back in the past in order to restore history. All in all, a very good mission. They even got Denise Crosby to come in an do the voice work for Tasha. Unfortunately, like all Cryptic voice stuff, it sucked. But it was nice in concept.

The reward for running the mission is a bright shiny new Ambassador class ship. This completes the line of ship’s that once were an Enterprise. STO now has the NX through newly created F. It will be fun to get a group together that flies just the latest five models of Enterprise. Just for the sure nerdiness.

One of the other interesting things to come with the anniversary, as the release of some stats about the game. Included in that was the note that during the three year run, 2 million accounts have been created. Now, most of those came after F2P and that means only a fraction have paid any money. And it doesn’t say how many people currently play. But there were server queues for a short time after the latest patch, so its not hurting for people wanting to log in.

There have also been hints about the next update coming in May will be something big. Dan Stahl has even declared that they aren’t referring to it as a “Season” anymore (STO’s version of update), calling it much bigger. There’s even a teaser image floating around that suggests the update might include a Romulan faction. Since I don’t really ever play my Klingon character, I’m not sure how I feel about that personally. Though, flying around in a D’deridex might be fun.