STO: More Jelly Drama

The return of the Defense of Pahvo featured event has brought back the hot button topic that is The Jelly Drama.

All my jellies will be renamed “Peanut Butter” from now on. Twerking animation not included (or linked, mercifully).

Jelly refers to the Cnidarian Defender, a playable starship based on the cosmozoan Star Jellies from TNG’s first season episode, Encounter At Farpoint. The controversy isn’t about how terrible an episode it was–and it was–but because the ship has a mode that makes AFK’ing event missions so easy.

In Jelly Mode, the starshippy version morphs into a literal space jellyfish and emits a huge pink field that heals allies and damages enemies (and eyeballs) with plenty of swirling and lightning effects. The “ship” can barely move in that mode, and its weapons are inactive, but it can still use abilities like Gravity Well.

In game content like the mission Peril Over Pahvo, part of the event running right now, constant waves of enemies attack fixed points. People with the Defender can park themselves at those fixed points and walk away from the computer.

AFK players during grueling event grinds isn’t new. Unlike normal AFK players, a Jelly Mode player is actually contributing by passively obliterating enemies. So people hate on Jelly players, but Jelly players feel like they are doing their part. I’ve always had mixed feelings about using Jelly Mode, but here’s what I told a Reddit poster wondering why all the jelly hate in the current event and how to see both sides:

As a sometime-jelly player, I will say there are three things that bother me and that I try to mitigate for other players when jellying: AFK jellies feel like cheating, robbing other players of kills for endeavors, and visual spam.

For “AFK cheating”, I try to be an active jelly—throwing down gravity wells and dishing out buffs/heals. Do most players even notice? Probably not. But I try. And that should also show up in server logs and help refute reports.

For blocking other players’ progress, like getting dreadnought kills for endeavors in Peril, I try to position myself in a way where people can clearly avoid me or have time to burn down targets before they reach my aura. AND I stifle my natural if invalid feeling that they are kill stealing from ME which I have to admit I feel even as a jelly!

The visual spam thing is my biggest pet peeve with jellying–and much of the game as it is now with out-of-control space magic FX. Again, positioning so players have options to be outside the aura helps, but this really has to be solved across the entire game by Dekka to stop so much gnashing of teeth.

Of course the fundamental problem is the long grinds the game forces on us for TFO themed events. Of course people are going to try to minimize the repetitive loops the rewards force them into. I get that, I feel it too, but at least I try to minimize my impact on other players when trying to reclaim my time from The Grind.

Are Elite:Dangerous ship interiors worth doing?

Fleet Carrier Camenecium visiting a precarious three-body barycenter.
Is her interior a ship interior or a station interior?

The long-awaited “space legs” feature has been announced for the next major update to Elite:Dangerous: Odyssey. Commanders will get to walk around stations and planets, shoot and be shot by things, and … practice xeno-botany with a hand-held probe-ulator. The community has been up in arms since that announcement also said that ship interiors would not be included in the first release.

Frontier can learn something from Cryptic here. Star Trek Online stopped doing elaborate interiors because they were expensive/resource-intensive to make and added very little gameplay. They only do bridges now if they use them in missions.

With dozens of ships to backfill and assuming they would all have unique interiors beyond existing cockpits, Frontier could better spend their time and money crafting social areas (fleet carriers?) or actual gameplay. Except for VR players, who I’d guess are a minority, who’s going to walk around their ships just to walk around their ships more than a handful of times? No gameplay would be a terrible waste.

Worse would be punitive gameplay like interiors meaning you have to repel boarding parties or it takes longer to get in and out of your ship without any gameplay added. Interiors should not be a tax I pay to play the parts of the game I like.

The best bet for making interiors worthwhile would be including optional beneficial gameplay like mini games inside to provide long-lasting buffs or find/fix damage without an AFMU or repair limpet. Still doesn’t seem worth the cost as a goal at launch.

The one interior I’d love to see at launch is my fleet carrier’s. I want to be on a super-star-destroyer-style bridge when she jumps. It’s really a station in its own right, can have many of the same features like shipyards and stellar cartographics, and could be a mobile social zone.

Bridge (starship) | Wookieepedia | Fandom

See Also

Star Trek Online: Best Space Wars simulator ever?

The upcoming season of Star Trek Online features an instance with a black hole, and Cryptic dev “trekhead” couldn’t resist turning it into a PVP map. Yes, boys and girls, STO just became a giant Spacewar!/Space Wars simulator with a huge graphical update!

That early vector-graphics arcade game ate more than a handful of my quarters in the distant past, but it’s not the only blast from that past with Season 12. Remember the Breen Rezreth Dreadnaught Cruiser? It wasn’t just the game’s Rock Lobster; it always reminded me of the Cygnus from the Disney flick The Black Hole. See for yourself:

I haven’t touched PVP in years even though I have many fond memories. In STO’s first year, PVP was how Klingons leveled: there was great PVP to be had at every tier all the time. Since then, balance went out the window for a bunch of reasons, and it’s just too much grind to be competitive with the min/maxers and pre-mades. Regardless, I’ve already dusted off my Rock Lobster and renamed her Cygnus. I’ll definitely queue up for this PVP map a few times before hitting the hyperspace warp-out button back to PVE.

Here’s the big unanswered question for me: Is the black hole map going to be a Foundry asset?

UPDATE: R.R.W. Cygnus with Reman Prototype Shield