Also, NVIDIA SUCKS. Oh wait, let me fix your statement and mine…”ATI sucks for gaming” and “Nvidia sucks for video editing”. Remember when 2nd and third generation video cards for ATI did as well as the newest nVidia for video processing? What I need is to have both video cards easily accessible…

For now, I’ll suffer playing STO on our 42″ big screen with a new nvidia video card and i7 processor…(it’s slightly more annoying than you might think )

On the other hand, my game client crashes way more often than anyone else seems to, so… hmm.

DDO’s beta may have worked, but it was boring beyond belief Even with the occasional crash and bugged quest, I think STO is a million times more fun than DDO ever was.

I did go to the Kanjai system, like I said before. I know how to use the maps. We’ve discussed this already. It’s not JUST a typo, it’s a quest problem that’s generally plaguing the game (there’s tons and tons and tons of complaints about this).

DDO’s open beta was a million times better than this…It actually worked.

- Patrol the Celes system
– Go to the Celes system
- Patrol the Foobar system
– Go to the Foobar system
- Patrol the Kanjai system
– Go to the Mec system

The Mec system doesn’t exist, but the Kanjai system does and it’s the correct one, so you should have at least checked for that one too However, that does not excuse the problem – they really need to comb through everything for typos.

The Starbase 24 mission text refers to it as Starbase 13 several times, but the actual mission headers always call it Starbase 24.

I’ve completed several quests that other people say are completely glitched, so I don’t know what their problem is… and I have only once been confused about where to go for a mission. I think overall the mission texts are pretty clear, as long as you check the galaxy and area maps.

Here’s what I think the problem is: People are used to the minimap telling them which direction to go for each mission, and when it doesn’t, they don’t know what to do. STO’s minimap doesn’t have a compass or a mission direction arrow.

As for ATI cards, well, ATI cards simply suck. Cryptic may have updated STO’s graphics between the closed and open betas, and I happen to know for a fact that ATI’s defaults for a lot of graphics settings are simply wrong (if you compare their defaults with the defaults listed in the OpenGL spec, for example).

Basically, ATI’s drivers suck and it often takes some extra work to make things play nice with them. (They disabled anti-aliasing because it just plain didn’t work.)

I think the biggest reason there are so many graphical problems with STO is that they took their Champions Online engine and revamped the graphics to play nice with Star Trek (e.g. space mode vs ground mode), and they’re simply not done with the revamp yet.

DDO sucked, but for different reasons.

However, there are some SERIOUS issues in the Open Beta which may not reflect in the final version, but we’re really close to the final version so they need to be addressed.

The auto-grouping is great, unless you actually want to play missions in which case you might not be so lucky. The auto-grouping sometimes sends you to a mission and it’s already complete, because the people there have just finished the mission as you arrived. Um…?

And we’re not just talking bugs. During closed beta people with ATI video cards were able to play fine. For some reason now they’ve changed something and removed anti-aliasing for ATI and the cards are no longer working. Now, ATI may be an inferior card, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t support a large chunk of the market.

The missions are non-specific. I’ve READ the missions and it’s still unclear where a lot of things are. In fact, one mission tells you to go to the wrong place completely (which place doesn’t exist on the galaxy map which you tell people they should look at, which actually most people in the game keep saying ‘Check the galaxy map/sector list!’ but guess what…It’s NOT there). Even after you find out where the right place to go is, the quest is glitched and you can’t finish it. We’re talking one of the very first quests of the game once you’re out of the tutorial.

I love the game, the gameplay, the story. It’s interesting, unique, fun. I have all sorts of good things to say except for the quest system and the mini map that is near useless. I’m definitely not the only one. There’s hundreds and hundreds of complaints about the state of the Open Beta. DDO wasn’t even remotely this bad…

As for complaints, I actually watched peoples complaints and many of them were valid (similar to mine, the quests were unclear even when you read the quest dialogue…a good bit of that because of typoes). I assume a lot of the typoes are because they’ve changed names and places (Starbase 13 is Starbase 24, by the way). It’s just a touch ridiculous.