Tender Borg: The revamped endgame content of STO

2nd Tier MKXI endgame armor set

While you do get your usual assortment of (mostly younger) complete assholes in the community - especially since the F2P transition - a huge part of the STO crowd consists of people, who actually grew up watching the original series with Captain Kirk. And by MMO standards, that's pretty damn old. And it makes sense: The new Trek movies are all happening in some parallel time line and the original Star Trek universe is standing still, thanks to the complete lack of a new tv show. And STO is officially canon.

For the better or worse, this online game continues the Trek story, it tells the stories of the original characters' children, and while the narrative certainly doesn't compare to some of the better tv shows in the series, it's the only fix a die hard fan can get. Aside from the books and semi-official fan-made internet shows, of course.

STO caters to the average, aging, hardcore Trekkie. Folks who aren't necessarily serious gamers. In fact, many of them have never touched an MMO before - or any computer game, for that matter. And you can tell: STO is - and I'm saying this with all the love in the world - the easiest MMORPG I have ever played. You can get all the way from level 1 to the cap of level 50 in a week with absolutely no clue what you're doing, entirely without powerful gear or clever skill points management and the game will even reward you with free ships and insanely mighty level-scaling weapons, shields and other goodies.

I know. Much of this has also applied to WoW for a long while now, but STO is a tad more extreme. Unless you willingly, knowingly crank up the difficulty level as you play among the stars, death has absolutely zero consequence - you blow up your ship or get your away team killed and a few seconds later you'll respawn a couple feet away from where you kicked the bucket. No penalty, no durability loss, no nothing. No matter how many times you might die, you can keep running back to the same bunch of baddies over and over again until they're all toast. The only way to actually "fail" a mission is by walking away from it altogether.

And then comes the endgame. So-called "Special Task Force" missions against the Borg, where five people must team up and cooperate to win. Originally, these missions were so extremely, unbelievably difficult and frustrating that the vast majority of people simply ignored them. But that's a thing of the past, the whole endgame has undergone major difficulty adjustments and now these missions compare to a run through the Deadmines at the appropriate level on WoW. Vanilla.

I'm not talking about some level 85 guy boosting you through there or a bunch of morons in full heirlooms, but an actual weak, inexperienced bunch of total newbies fighting their way through their very first dungeon. Some of you might still remember what that was like. The warriors had to figure out they can and should take the hits, the healers learning that they should focus on their tanks. Going from a shaky start where everybody does what they've been doing solo for 20 levels until they all realize they have special abilities, which help their team get stuff done.

The endgame missions on STO, especially their non-elite variety, are very close to that. You may get lucky and end up in a group of players, who have played plenty of MMOs before, who know everything about aggro management, buffs, heals, boss attack patterns and the proper timing it takes to pull off certain actions as a group. If you're less fortunate, however, you'll be stuck with a bunch of 60 year old Trekkies, who have absolutely no idea what the stats on the tooltips of their gear mean.

Mind you, I'm not being sarcastic, I'm not exaggerating and I'm not making fun of anyone. This is a fact. There are quite a few people on this game, who cannot tell which item to use, when the tooltip on one of their weapons quotes 20 dps and the other one shows 100 dps. They don't know what dps is. And when you try and point out boss battle strategies or simple gameplay mechanics you have to follow in order to beat the mission, they might ignore the ingame chat completely. Well - imagine you're a first generation Trekkie, you've never played anything like this before, you're trying really hard to focus on what the hell is going on and some guy is talking to you at the same time - there's a high chance you won't even notice.

The average skill level on this game is somewhere between Hello Kitty Online and La Tale, up to a point, where it reaches comical levels. As acquiring all the most powerful endgame gear is as difficult as finishing the original version of the Deadmines, you can probably do so within just a few hours if you have a few mildly-talented friends available. Ironically, there is a huge amount of players, who simply find this sort of thing too difficult, too complicated and too challenging. And while this might make me a terrible human being, it's incredibly fun to point out just how mediocre their gear is when they try and brag about it or to talk about how STO is the easiest MMO around when they moan about how they cannot finish certain missions. STO is a game for people, who aren't gamers. And when you point that out, they get incredibly angry. I genuinly love it.

This weekend, the Clairebear and I are gonna repeat every single mission on elite difficulty - they all scale to our level, so it should be challenging enough. I just hope it's gonna keep us busy for a while. With all the most powerful items obtained and the most difficult challenges mastered, we're running seriously low on content. I wish her family played this game a little more seriously, so they could join us and we'd do the whole thing together. Ah well.

-Cat