Ask and Ye Shall Receive

A few posts and slightly less than a year ago, I was bitching that the players I’d teamed with to do STF missions were unreliable. In one of my recent posts, I said I’d joined a fleet but didn’t remember doing it. Not surprisingly, given my lack of STO playtime over the last year, I’d never even made contact with any of my supposed fleetmates. It wasn’t a matter of animosity or being antisocial, it was just that I had neither the time to nor the interest in getting involved with a fleet at that point. A couple of days ago, I decided that it was time that changed.

When I was still playing Eve-Online, I’d teamed up with another player, Nick, and we created a corporation called Stonewall Interstellar. We were basically a manufacturing corp, and we were rather tiny, perhaps eight or ten members max. What was pretty unique about our corp was that we were openly LGBT-friendly and welcoming. We lasted a few months, but then I had to leave the game for a while. When I returned, I found that Nick had left the game for good and transferred control of the corp and its assets to me.

There was no way I was going to try to run our corp by myself, so after a few days I ended up draining all the assets into my personal accounts, disbanding the corp, and eventually joining a different one, this time in 0.0 (unsecure) space. This lasted a few months until I came to the conclusion that my RL schedule wasn’t going to allow me to play with any regularity in concert with my corpmates. The problem was that in 0.0 space there’s really not very much to do as a solo player, so it was at that point when I decided it was time to say goodbye to Eve.

Fast forward to a couple of days ago. While reading the STO forums in search of an STO fleet with similar values, I ran across a thread promoting an LGBT-welcoming fleet called, interestingly enough, Stonewall Fleet. Needless to say, I had to check it out.

I went to their website, poked around, and noticed that the username of the Fleet Admiral looked awfully familiar. It had been a while and I wasn’t certain, so I dropped him a note in-game and asked if he was the same person I’d gamed with in Eve. Nick responded soon afterward and confirmed that he was, That settled it for me. I knew right then that Stonewall Fleet was exactly what I’d been looking for. I jumped into the in-game fleet chat, found Nick there, and it wasn’t very long before I was one of Stonewall Fleet’s newest recruits.

My new fleetmates who I’ve met and interacted with so far are great, but the most interesting part of all this is discovering just how much I really didn’t and still don’t know about the social aspects of STO. I’m slowly learning the chat functions, many of which are different from Eve, and I’ve downloaded and installed Ventrilo on my PC for probably the first time in about two years. I had it on my old machine, but I’ve never really had any need for it since I left Eve so I hadn’t bothered to install it on my new one until now.

And, on top of all that, I’m slowly getting used to gaming as part of a group again, but it’s a much better situation for me than Eve was at the end. Sure, there are fleet events and plenty of things to do with other players, but I don’t feel obligated to be in-game at certain times unless I want to be. I expect to be participating in a lot of fleet-related events and other programs, but many of these don’t require me to be in-game at certain times. I can pick and choose those I want to join and those I can make, and that works for me. When Nick and I were running our Eve corp we were very loose in those kinds of things, and he’s clearly carried that administrative attitude on to Stonewall Fleet. I like that. I like it a lot. STO is a completely different game than Eve, yet somehow joining Stonewall Fleet feels like coming home.

I have a feeling that this is the start of a whole new dimension of fun for me in this game and I’m very excited about it.

*****

In the Piss Me Off Department: Earlier tonight I fired up STO and went to try to do some of the missions I hadn’t done yet or hadn’t done in a while. I decided to go back to one I’d do all the time when I first started playing, exploring the B’Tran Cluster. That was the plan, anyway.

It took me something like ten minutes of trying to log in to finally get into the game. I accepted the mission and went to beam up to my ship. Suddenly, I found myself staring at the login screen again. After several more login attempts I made it back in and got myself to the Gamma Orionis transwarp gate, where I was booted out again.

Several more minutes of logins until I finally was able to get back in and make it actually into the B’Tran Cluster. When I went to explore a planet, I was booted again only this time it was even worse. Once I finally managed to successfully log in I made it to the planet, found out that I didn’t have enough of the terraforming systems they needed in my personal inventory and so I headed back out of the system to get more. Booted again. When I tried to log in again it still took as long as it had previously to get in but then once I’d successfully made it back into the game I discovered a new issue.

I’d hit the “PLAY” button on the login screen only to have it partially load and then I’d get a “Server Not Responding” notice. I’d sit there as the game would struggle along loading tiny bits, then go to “Server Not Responding”, then load a little bit more, then the notice again, until finally after the notice stayed up for about 45 seconds it would just give up and boot me again…over and over and over.

Finally, I’d had enough. I’d spent the better part of an hour trying to do run across a couple of sectors to get some commodities that should have probably taken me no more than five minutes or so even without using my Quantum Slipstream Drive. When I logged out, the game began downloading a new patch, very slowly.

I suspect (hope) that lots of players downloading the patch was why the servers were so terrible tonight, but even with that I think this is far below the level of service players should be able to expect from any MMO that has been live (read: charging people money to play) for over a year now. I’ve also experienced rubberbanding on missions and in station areas, sometimes to the point of major annoyance.

In a few minutes, I’m going to try to log in again. I’ve spent a while writing this post, so now I’ve only got about a little more than an hour before I have to bag it for the night, so I’m hoping to at least get my commodities and get back to the B’Tran Cluster before then. We’ll see, but right now, I am so not a happy camper.

See ya out there…I hope.