How Did I End Up Here?

If you had jumped back in time (haha, if I had a nickel for everytime that happened in…well, you’ll see) to two weeks ago, and told me, HZero (some of my internet friends have a disconcerting habit of calling me Zero by the way 0-O ),  a few weeks from now, you will voluntarily give up a night of playing TOR to play some STO, I would have laughed at you.  And in fact, I did, literally “lol” at the person who asked me to play with them.  And then I felt bad, so I went and downloaded the game and logged in.  And went ahead and got my Akira (what the hell, that goal has only been on hold for like, 13 months, right?).

 

My Akira/Zephyr class. Yes, it is rather awesome looking, isn't it?

 

And along the way I realized that Cryptic and Perfect World have done a great job of improving the game.  Granted, some stuff is still just plain bad.  Ground combat, for example, continues to be unresponsive, boring, and at times, just plain odd (why is that AI alien armed with a plasma mini-gun trying desperately to get as close to me as possible?).    But there are a lot of things being done absolutely right.  Ground combat, bad as it is, is much improved over a year ago.  The Foundry delivers some excelling user-generated content.  The Duty Officer system is fantastic.  The Episodic story format, with its weekly story-driven missions, are great, almost like an interactive online comic book.   You can actually fail missions if you don’t read the text.  The opportunities for RP are so deep its hard to truly appreciate them all (it occurs to me that, despite the lack of true dialogue interaction with my bridge crew, I am far more attached to some of them than I am to any of my TOR companions…).  And perhaps best of all, the atrocious grind is gone, and replaced with a decent leveling curve.

 

But this might come at a good time.  I’ve about tapped out World of Tanks.  Or, more specifically, I’ve about opened up all the tank lines I wanted to, with the possible exception of some individual historical tanks, which can honestly wait until they put in actual historical matches.  So it may be time to step down from a premium account there, which has acted as a sort of “second sub” for me, and put the $5-10 a month I was spending there into STO instead.  I see no reason to sub up to STO, since a subscription offers me nothing of interest at this point.  But with 400-800 Cryptic points a month, I would be in heaven with a well stocked duty roster, fun uniforms and ships, and a regular XP boost.  Even if I do nothing more than log in on the weekend to play the new episode, and occasionally during the week to piddle around with duty assignments.

 

So, in summary, I’m not sure how I got here, but I’m glad I did.  And my friend is too, because those continuing missions are more fun with a second ship and captain at your disposal.