Star Trek Online/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • And the Fandom Rejoiced: Man, there is nothing connecting this game to Star Trek at all! There's too much combat! There isn't enough Klingon content! It won't feel like Trek at all! Cryptic is just trying to - wait. What's this? This... This video. Hey, it's that AWESOME voice!
    • Not long after the game was released, many players complained that they didn't believe Cryptic listened to them. So Cryptic made a section of the forums to let everyone know exactly what they were planning to add with each update in advance, and to answer questions about that content. Players are extremely happy with it.
    • Dstahl stepping back into the Exective Producer role, after having previously left for a different job, has many of the fandom welcoming him back with (mostly) open arms.
    • Basically, every new season of the game brings something squee-worthy for longtime Trek fans (and, very often, quality of life patches and improvements to old missions that had grown stale and annoying). Of course, the forums will always have someone bitching that the game is in fact Ruined FOREVER, but then it's both Star Trek and an MMO, so that's just to be expected.
  • Artistic License Astronomy: You'll be hard pressed to find any area of space outside of Earth that isn't engulfed by millions of miles of stellar gasses, dusts, and nebulae painting the backdrop, and Asteroid Thicket is in full effect here.
  • Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: Who says you can't wear a Tux in the 25th Century? This also extends to anyone who wears the various older uniforms of Starfleet.
  • Badass Decay: Inverted with Species 8472, aka the Undine. Remember that cliched episode of Voyager in which the writers try to make them sympathetic by means of an infiltration school? Well, now we see the results of that. The reason the Klingon Empire turned on the Federation is revealed later to be that they're terrified of what the Undine agents will be capable of doing if they gain a full foothold...
  • Broken Base: Rifts have formed over whether it's a credible addition to the Star Trek universe, or simply a flash in the pan and not long for this world. Rifts have formed within the game as vocal Klingon players clamour for content, among other issues. Basically it's the same as any other MMO.
    • The Lockboxes and their related Shop Items, the Master Keys. It's basically a lottery, where you recieve random loot whenever you open a box, ranging from awesome rewards (Cardassian Galor or Ferengi Marauder Starships) to near useless Junk. Most people seem to consider it a blantant rip-off, while others scramble for the shops to purchase Master Keys by the crapload. Discussion over that matter can turn very heated in short time.
    • The first has, obviously, long since been proven untrue (the game's on five years and counting, pretty respectable for any MMO), the Klingon faction has gotten a complete overhaul and is now just as story-based and filled-out as the Federation (if not quite as wealthy in ships, but it's close), and the lockboxes are generally just sort of regarded as another part of the game. (It probably helps that those who don't like them can always just sell them on the Exchange and get energy credits for them, meaning that you can get something out of them without spending any zen.)
  • Complete Monster: A couple here and there:
    • Most minions of the Iconians are Brainwashed and Crazy, or at least implied to be. Colonel Hakeev of the Tal Shiar, Big Bad of the 'Cloaked Intentions' series, signed up with them of his own free will because he thought that exterminating and enslaving the 'lesser races' at his 'Dark Masters side sounded really, really awesome. Then he made a start on the Remans, and the rest was history.
    • The Breen, as a whole, are vicious, coldly pragmatic slavers. Even they, though, were rather put off by the lengths that Thot Trel was prepared to go to in order to find the Orellius Sector's millennia-old secrets. Performing highly risky and near-irreversible surgery on hundreds of Deferi in order to Mind Rape them into an infantile state of mind and harvest clues from their childhood memories was just the final straw.
      • The Breen apparently see themselves as a Proud Warrior Race, albeit obviously one with a rather harder edge than even the Klingons. Trel's abuses of innocent civilians directly rather than as part of actual combat apparently sickened even his own crew.
  • Crowning Moment of Awesome: See page.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Most of the music in the game is merely okay. And then you start fighting Romulans.
  • Demonic Spiders: Klingon Swordmasters almost always make a beeline straight for the player, outright disregarding the rest of the landing party, no matter how well they've been armed. This wouldn't be a problem, except for the fact that Swordmasters are dual disruptor pistol wielding, BFS carrying, seriously pissed off damage sponges capable of killing players in seconds at lower levels. Such as all of the Lieutenant grades. Note that every enemy you encounter has their own Badass Mook equivalent, but for the majority of the early game, the Swordmaster will be the bane of many a PCs existence.
    • Fast forward to the next step in the Sorting Algorithm of Evil and you'll meet the Reman captains, who can spawn telepathic clones of themselves and attack with shield-piercing psionic attacks. Even at low difficulty levels, many players have complained of wiping again and again against these guys.
    • The Borg. At maximum admiral level with the top tier weapons, shields and extras, and all the right skills, you can take out a single Borg cube. But it will drain the hell out of your shields and hold you in a tractor beam while doing it, all while burning through your hull and lobbing extremely devastating torpedoes at you. Expect to be at half hull strength by the time the battle is over. Plus you'd better be far away when it dies or the blast will finish you off. If you end up facing anything more than a single Cube (even a cube and a few probes, or a cube and a sphere), you will barely survive if you choose to run intead of fight. And if you blunder into a Borg fleet of two cubes or more, you'll become a rapidly expanding vapour in less time than it takes to order "Evasive! Emergency power to engines! RUN FOR IT!".
    • More literally, you meet huge spiders in some of the Romulan feature episodes, but these are less Demonic Spiders than pesky trash mobs.
    • Speaking of Romulans, Romulan Warbirds (D'deridex class) have the Viral Matrix ability, which launches a probe that disables your ship's systems (such as weapons or engines) for a few seconds. Along with a Tractor Beam (if you get close enough) and a few Heavy Plasma Torpedoes, they can be very annoying.
  • Canon Discontinuity: While Cryptic does have the option of incorporating any "soft canon" such as other games or novels as they see fit (see Sure Why Not below), they've also outright discarded certain soft canon events, such as the entirety of the Star Trek: Destiny novel trilogy and its immediate successors.
    • The Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch novels are a good example, as only some of them are in the bin. A character who was Killed Off for Real there (Janeway) is alive and well here. Having said that, another plot point introduced there (that Miral Paris is the Kuvah'magh, The Chosen One for the Klingon people) is also alive and well here.
  • Fandom Rivalry: Already suffering from this.
  • Fan Dumb: Good grief. Between people who desire eight-hour tutorials in Starfleet Academy and who do not shut up about how "superior and authentic" multiplayer bridge crews would be as a Trek experience (and always ignore the multitude of gameplay problems the concept brings up, never mind the fact that part of reason Perpetual got stuck for years was trying to make it work), people who say the game is ruined without their favorite (and obscure) alien race being playable, people who simultaneously say the game is too easy and too hard, and people overreacting to the game's admittedly numerous loading screens (sector space not being seamless from block to block is a little odd, but demanding that the transition from sector to normal space - never mind from space to a planetary surface - be totally seamless "like World of Warcraft" is a hair bit more unreasonable), it's a wonder Cryptic doesn't just throw their hands up and walk away from it all.
    • There was much raging and even threats of demanding refunds and leaving the game forever due to... wait for it... TOS Uniform skirts being delayed. That's right. Arguments included criticisms of Cryptic for not having the stuff ready in time, being unprofessional, etcetera. Then when the skirts came out, MORE complaining was had, as it was only a skirt, and not the actual TOS one-piece style uniform the females wore.
    • As of April 2010, the current high points of Fan Dumb on the board are that codes for the TOS style uniforms were released in a magazine. Cue fans threatening to leave the game because someone else might get one of their (non-exclusive) bonus items. And outrage over the formation of an "Advisory Council" which is a group of players who are intended to filter ideas from Trek fans outside the Forums for plot ideas.
    • People have even taken to trolling the forums. Thankfully, one of the moderators there is Q.
    • Following the announcement of a US-only contest to design the next ship to bear the name Enterprise, you can bet that elements of the fan dumb have already begun to accuse Cryptic of racism, because their country was not included. Never mind laws governing contests and prizes differ widely from country-to-country, and even state-to-state.
    • The most recent rage is over the Rhode Island ship added to the game. According to them, it SHOULD have been Tier 5 instead of Tier 2, is completely overpowered at it's Tier 2 with the extra console and bridge officer slot, and sets a dangerous precedent that other ships will follow, making the game 'pay-to-win' or 'pay-for-power'. Never mind that the other ships haven't been RELEASED yet, let alone have any known stats to compare to.
    • Probably the dumbest argument this troper has seen on the forums was a member complaining that Cryptic embezzled the player base's money to buy lunch for the people of an STO podcast who visited the studio instead of using it to create more game content. The stupid was so blatant, one of the devs closed the thread, utterly baffled.
    • The introduction of Tier 6 ships spawned a lot of this. A lot. A lot. So much. ... Ahem. Anyway, most Tier 6 ships are available only if you buy them with zen (except for the ones you can get in practically every seasonal event now), so it's understandable that might cause some consternation, but in the end most of them are only slight improvements over Tier 5 ships anyway, and it's possible to upgrade your Tier 5 to a Tier 5U with in-game items, essentially making it a Tier 6 with an even slighter difference in power levels. But the howling, outrage, and tantrums were still epic, including people shrieking about how they were obviously going to be kicked out of their fleets if they didn't have the best and most powerful ship available, meaning that charging for Tier 6 ships was literally extortion and they were going to call the cops! The cops, they say! (Neverminding the question, why would you want to play a game with people that are such jerks that they'd kick you out of the group for not having the very best stuff available?)
  • Game Breaker: Split-Beam Rifles have a secondary attack that allows you to split the energy beam and hit up to 5 separate targets at once. The attack itself does considerable damage (just slightly less than the sniper shot from a sniper rifle) and each beam proceeds to do full damage to each target, making it easy to take out multiple enemies faster instead of just focusing on one enemy at a time.
  • Goddamned Bats: Syphon Frigates. They're not especially tough and will die pretty fast to any kind of firepower, but they launch Power Syphons. Power Syphons start sucking out your warp core's power as soon as they get into range. And Syphon Frigates like to appear in squads of three, forcing you to pause, kill all their Power Syphons and then go back to killing them... except they like to stagger their syphon launching, and they can launch more!
    • The Targ Handlers. They're damage sponges, sure, but they also spawn endless rushes of Targs at regular intervals until you finally kill them. They like to appear with Swordmasters, too, so when you're trying to kill the Swordmaster you end up with annoying Targs running sideways at you to chip away your HP even more.
      • Any kind of fighter. They're small, annoying, and easy to kill. And Annoying. They sometimes show up when you're trying to concentrate your fire on a battleship. And they're annoying.
    • The goddamn motherfucking Devidians. Yes, those mind-sucking bastards from the TNG episode Time's Arrow. They managed to trap a ship and feast on the crew, and it falls to you to get in-phase with them and fight 'em. They use health-drain attacks exclusively (that is, they attack you and get health back at the same time) AND even their weakest mooks have an ability that allows them to temporarily become invincible. They don't hit very hard, and so they really aren't very dangerous especially if you have anyone with a health-restoring ability with you, but they take forever to kill even with focus firing. Thankfully, however, they only show up in a single mission.
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: During one of the Season 2 weekly missions, What Lies Beneath, you are tasked with exploring the extremely dark lower levels of a space station. This is bad enough, but then as you're walking down a hallway a creepy voice suddenly starts singing at you.

Bonnie-kin, Bonnie-kin, dressed all in red
Bonnie-kin, Bonnie-kin, soon you'll be dead!

    • Did we mention that this episode was originally released around Halloween? Or that it was one of the first times voiceovers were used in missions? It may still be the first kind you encounter one...
    • What Lies Beneath was complete High Octane Nightmare Fuel. All throughout the mission, the corridors are so dark you can barely see at all (the optional flashlight doesn't help much), you're assaulted by not-there-before groups of Devidians and these cat-sized spiders, and at the beginning, you and your away team find yourselves not at the level you expected, then next thing you know, the doors close behind you. And that's not mentioning talking to a person through an intercom, suddenly they scream in terror, silence, then finding out their body was killed SECONDS ago. And your scared tactical officer asks what could have possibly killed her in a locked room...? Sweet dreams
    • The Borg Warzones, especially when your rank is low. Sure, you might be able to blow up all the Borg facilities and the lower end ships defending them with a little help, but don't you dare think you're safe after that. At any moment, if you don't mind your surroundings, a cube or even a Tactical Cube can come looming out of the debris clouds, right behind you. This Troper was unlucky enough to have one appear behind and below his ship, and got snagged by all four tractor beams, completely stuck. And that's when the worst part begins: the boarding of the small, helpless vessel by dozens and dozens of Borg drones...
  • Magnificent Bastard: Franklin Drake. Especially once you reach the Captain levels. To say more would be spoilers.
    • Obisek, anti-villainous Dark Messiah of the Reman Resistance, is not quite as smooth an operator as Drake, but makes up for it with scads of charisma and balls of steel.
  • Memetic Mutation: CONGRATULATIONS LIEUTENANT.
    • OMG WHERE'S SULU?!
    • Immediately upon entering Earth Spacedock, there are now two NPC's having a conversation. One of them asks if the other has seen Sulu lately...
    • Every time people begin making Tribble related puns anywhere in the Sirius Sector block, put the drinks away. Not even Nikola Tesla could survive that much alcohol in his system.
    • There's a tradition on Risa during the Summer Event that if anyone mentions the Gorn, at least twenty minutes must be spent on Gorn/porn puns.
  • Narm: The Guardian of Forever's voice actor is downright painful.
    • The Guardian of Forever is definitely the worst in the game, but absolutely not the only one to induce this. Any voiced NPC that's not one of the actual characters from the various TV series is most likely going to speak in an awkward monotone that practically screams "I'm not an actual voice actor and have no idea why I'm sitting in front of this microphone." Of course, there are a few original characters that do have good voice acting (and a few veterans that are clearly phoning in their performances).
  • Scrappy Mechanic: Chain holds. They were annoying when science vessels could use them, but now the new weekly episode mobs all seem to use annoying hold skills. And they can, and often do, fire them over and over again. And they're annoying.
  • That One Level: Assimilated, in which you and your crew must work your way through a Borg cube absolutely crawling with huge numbers of drones, searching through hazards and occasional ambushes for a randomly-placed transporter... and then achieve a series of objectives in a room stuffed with a good fifty or sixty Borg. If you fight through it you will probably die. But even if you switch your bridge officers to passive, one ambush in the wrong place can lead to a Zerg Rush. Suffice it to say this mission drew a lot of screaming on the forums from people running it for the first time.
  • The Scrappy: The Miranda class ship in all of Star Trek in general gets no love. The only reason most players would ever use it is because you HAVE to when you start the game.
    • Of course, the damn thing can wind up sitting in your roster taking up a ship slot forever because you got attached to it. Which is why, if you're smart, you'll immediately switch to one of the purchasable Tier 1 ships the first chance you get.
  • The Unfavorite: The KDF in general. They have less than a quarter of the content of the Federation, an even smaller proportion of the game's famed character and ship customization, and a good chunk of the content they do have is copy/pasted from the Federation version to the point that it's not unheard of for the mission journal to list the objective "Hail Starfleet." They're also locked out of completing the accolades for the new Borg invasion because the Federation can access the Klingons' home sector but not vice versa, and tucked away in the free-to-play announcement was the minor note that fully half of the levels would be removed for KDF play in the future. Cryptic has also been remastering lower-level Federation missions with cinematics and voice acting while the KDF still has a whopping eight missions across thirty levels that aren't copy-pasted. Every once in a while Cryptic tosses KDF players a bone, but otherwise Klingon players are the game's resident Butt Monkeys.
    • This is no longer true, as with the addition of Michael Dorn to the voice cast, the Klingons were entirely revamped and are no longer just "the PVP faction", and haven't been in years. They have almost as many ships as the Federation, a full storyline, have just as many important NPCs in inter-faction storylines, and have actually gotten a lot of Character Development to provide a glimpse of what life is like in the Empire. Of course, Klingon players still bitch on the forums, because that's what MMO players and Star Trek fans do. And, of course, now they're in competition with Romulan faction players for who supposedly gets neglected more.
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