To explore strange new worlds

Bronze was good enough to send me a 5-day free trial key for StarTrek Online. I've faniced the game since reading the reviews. But the idea of ship combat, and some of the bad ratings the ground combat recieved put me off buying it blindly.

Having now played it for a few days. (After finally managing to download the 8GB install file, and the 500MB of patches). I really like it.

It's already quite nicely polished, but it also has a lot of potential. The ship combat is difficult enough to keep it interesting, but simple enough not too make it too complicated.
The ground combat is basic, but only in the same way as WoW's is. You have an action bar with abilities that you can use, and they're on cooldown timers. You actually get to control your whole team, but it's mostly a case of positioning them tactically during fights. (i.e. "You lot go and stand over there, while I stand over here"). You get big bonuses for flanking your enemies, so once you've mastered the tactics it's pretty easy to handle even largish groups.

They've also added a few nice touches which WoW really should have too.
Firstly, you can see which of your freinds are online without logging in to the game, just by looking at the website. Secondly, on that same website, you can send and recieve your in-game mail.
So if you see someone online that you want to speak to, but don't want to log in, you can drop them a line... Nice touch.

The best thing about the StarTrek universe though, is that it's potentially limitless.
In WoW, you're pretty restricted by the lore-of-the-land. Look at the problems they had trying to tie Outland in to the main game,
In STO that doesn't apply. Firstly, there are any number of planets / zones out there in space, and StarTrek has always been about how things are different everywhere, while still being slightly familiar (can you tell that I was a fan of the shows?).
If Cryptic (the Devs) wanted to introduce a planet of gigantic pink-and-fluffy killer caterpillars, they don't need to explain much. 'Let's just beam down to this unchartered planet and have a look around... Oh Shit... It's full of gigantic pink-and-fluffy killer caterpillars!'. Last week I was fighting Klingons, yesterday it was the killer caterpillars, and today God himself has issues I'm going to have to deal with.

You can't argue with that sort of freedom.

If the devs actually considered something too over the top, they could always just make it a holodeck simulation, and that way they could get away with anything from a  1940's gangster shoot-out to a 2010 Gulf War scenario.

I'm guessing the devs aren't thinking along those lines right now, but they are doing something else that I've wanted to see in WoW for a while... More events.

And I don't mean 'brewfests' or 'Lunar festivals' I never really got in to the spirit of those anyway. But they have a calendar showing that every few weeks they'll be releasing a sort of mission-pack. Just to add that bit of randomness to the game.
What is currently a safe zone, could simply become the epicentre of a borg invasion, because the devs thought that would be the best place to put it.
Once the attack is repelled the enemies retreat and in a few weeks time, there's another incursion somewhere else, maybe by the same enemy, or maybe something completely different... Excellent idea.
Sort of like the pre-expansion events that Blizz do in WoW, but much more frequent.

Overall, STO has proven much better than I first expected. It's always going to be hard getting to grips with a new MMO, learning the combat systems, and pressing keys that used to do something, and now don't. But Cryptic are obviously well aware that most of their players will be familiar with WoW, and have kept things fairly familiar feeling, while also making them completely different at the same time.

No wonder it's currently the No1 PC hame in the UK charts. Hats off to Cryptic and Atari.

Unfortunately the UK apparently has an ISP issue at the moment, which is why I can't log in right now. But it's nothing to do with the Devs apparently, according to the headline they added not long after the problems started... For now, they've earned my faith, so I'm willing to believe them.