Not Enough Boredom

Fuck.

Great. I've done it again. Against all reason and logic, I've gone and installed Star Trek Online again, because I was tempted by the upcoming expansion, Delta Rising, its new tier of ships, new abilities, new missions in the Delta quadrant (which I don't even care about), featuring former Voyager crew members, voice-acted by their original actors (which I care even less about), increased level cap, yada, yada, yada.

This game is my personal World of Warcraft. Erm... I should probably explain that. I have friends and family, who have started playing WoW at some point and they just can't stop until this very day. They have phases where they don't log on very much for a month or two (or fucking 14, because there's no new content), but they never unsubscribe, they never let go and no matter how many other MMOs and online games we show to them, their one true love will always be WoW.

I'm an MMO-whore. I had them all, been with them all for the occasional quickie, but I never get serious. Brief encounters are alright, but then I get bored. And for some fucking reason, I always end up coming back to STO. And I don't just play that shit. I don't just go and look at all 20 or so minutes worth of new content they release every year. I play that shit to the max.

And things just started looking so great with Warframe. Sure, it only took me about 20 minutes to complete the new "week-long" event, but we were having such a great run!

And then there's my sweet, sweet Borderlands. Claire and I had finally arrived in the year 2012, we've gone and purchased every last bit of DLC and we've enjoyed a massive coop-session with a friend just the other night. The massive amount of stupidity and sheer incompetence each and everyone of us has brought to the team is beyond words and we had a really great time on there.

I remember Claire soloing a raider outpost, while I sat in the car with our driver Haggy, who tried to ram his way through the barricades around the outpost - which didn't work, but that didn't stop him from slamming our truck in there again and again for the next 20 minutes. To be fair, that was our second truck. I destroyed the first one, when he told me to drive all the way around the camp and attack it from the other side, which turned out to be a stupid idea, because the outpost was all the way up on a cliff and we ended up inside a pit of giant monster worms. And they started eating the car, so I got out to shoot them and let Haggy do the driving. Problem is, he never noticed that I left the car, so he kept telling me to drive, because the truck was getting eaten. And when I tried to get back in, my character would mount the cannon and avoid the driver's seat. Sure, I could have switched seat with the right hotkey, but I was a noob and very nervous, so that didn't end too well.

I also can't help but notice the fine layer of dust on our Pathfinder tabletop box and I'll admit that this stings a little. I'm hoping to come up with a fun little campaign, but between work during the day, every day, including weekends, and switching my brain off whilst gaming at night, it's difficult to find the time for decent game mastering. And as if all of that wasn't enough for now, I just had to take another look at this black hole of an MMO.

Crap.

I had a long break from STO, because some of the changes and additions that came with season 8 just pissed me off. You see, I'm a very competitive player. I don't just want to finish a mission or some public event, I don't just want to be on the winning side in pvp - I want to fucking dominate. And I absolutely mean to brag when I say that I'm consistently topping the DPS-tables, kill-charts and scoring one first place after another even when I'm using exotic ships and unusual set-ups, which the community largely considers subpar or even useless.

I had not played since November and this is the first thing I did.

I know, I know, everyone is awesome on the internet, but I have countless videos on my youtube-channel showing off landslide-victories in pvp, top-scores in just about any event you can think of and half of the time I get that shit done with outdated, weak ships or unorthodox builds. My STO-videos are the most popular content on my entire channel and the first thing I had to do when logging on after my long break was work my way through tons of fan mail I had received ingame. Which is a lie, it was really just two letters from people asking about some builds I showed off in some videos, but it's still nice to have earned at least some tiny amount of fame with the shit I do on there.

And then Cryptic came along and fucked me. They came up with ridiculously powerful tactical consoles for fleets. Without getting too much into the mechanics, let's just say they're items, which provide a massive damage boost over all previously existing gear of the same kind. And it was only available to fleets (read: guilds). This ruined the game for me in several ways - first of all, I had to farm up millions upon millions of credits in order to afford what was previously the best stuff in the game, only to watch it become subpar from one update to the next. Secondly, that new stuff was so much better in comparison that I could no longer keep up with fleet ships, which were kitted out in nothing but fleet gear. And most of all - I didn't want to join a fleet!

I learn everything I need to know from my cat.

Just reading those ever-repeating, ever-same fleet recruitment spam messages makes me want to throw up. "Looking for friendly, active members!" Well, no shit! Why do you have to stress that so much? It should be pretty obvious that nobody is looking to recruit assholes or people, who don't actually play the game. Who wouldn't even be there to read your recruitment spam to begin with.

And there's my problem - most fleets expect you to be online and take part in their shit for a certain amount of hours a week. But I don't wanna play what other people want, I wanna play what I want. And sometimes I simply can't be "active", because the publisher expects me to marathon-level some character in some other game. And call me crazy, but after 10 or so hours of random MMO grind, I just don't want to relax by switching over to another MMO.

They also make you a recruit or a trial member and you have to hang with them for a few weeks or months before they let you use their facilities and shops. Which is fair, they had to work for that stuff and they don't want any random noob to walk in and benefit from it, but I don't wanna get married to some virtual club in order to earn all the best shit, just because the devs decided that you should not be allowed to have nice items as a solo player.

But fortunately for me, the community of STO is awesome and like me, many players think that all the best shit shouldn't be exclusive to powerful, high level fleets. So a random maxed out fleet invited me, said I could make use of all their shops and stations, buy all their exclusive gear and I never have to hang out with them, talk to them, play with them or whatever. Heck, I can leave anytime I want, if I want to. And you know what? That's so fucking awesome, I think I'm actually gonna stay. And I have all the nice new gear now, so... yay!

They're also offering free TNG uniforms right now.

Best of all, they've finally upgraded my favourite ever ship of the Franchise, the Galaxy-X Dreadnought from "All good things". I don't give a shit about their upcoming new tier of starships, I don't care what cool new abilities, buffs and consoles they're gonna get. I'll be using my beefed-up Galaxy now and nothing but that. Even if that means I won't be uploading any more new builds and pvp videos with weird new ships. I guess I can still do that with the upgraded Galaxy, of course. Oh and did I mention I was already unstoppable with that thing before they put it on a level with all the other "endgame" ships?

Rawr!

-Cat