Article:
Star Trek Online: Promotion At Last!

So, finally, I manage to to grind through enough missions to receive a promotion to Lieutenant Commander.

It took slightly longer than planned, as I originally (and mistakenly) thought that Lieutenant level 10 equated to the bump in rank, but in fact you have to work all the way to level 11, which becomes Lt. Cmdr level 1.

Given that's only 11 tiers through the total of 50 character levels that Cryptic has set up, I've clearly got a hell of a long way to go. Given that it's taken me 3 months of casual play to get this far, this means it's likely to take another 9 months to reach the top, final 10 tiers of the Admiral rank.

Some people on the forums have complained about reaching Admiral too quickly and having nothing left to do already. While I appreciate this presents a dilemma for Cryptic on how to keep these players interested, at the same time I can't help wondering how little of a life these people must have if they've burned through the content so quickly...

Anyway, back to my promotion. After an ethereal congratulatory announcement from Spock Prime, I'm invited back to Sol Station to receive my new comission from Admiral Quinn. I'm given a plaque to take to the Shipyard to receive a free ship, and I have the option of visiting the Stateroom for a little ceremony.

As an engineering specialist, it seemed sensible for me to select a cruiser for my next ship. I was a little disappointed to find that it only had one additional weapon slot, but the rear-facing torpedoes I can fit to this slot are a huge boost to my combat effectiveness. I also had mixed feelings about my additional console slot - the second engineering slot is the only one that allows a boff to use their higher abilities - i.e. even though my other boffs might be highly trained, it seems that they can't use their skills on the other consoles anyway.

I'd actually already heard that there was a promotion ceremony from the forums and from other players in chat, and I was looking forward to this little piece of immersion as much as the new ship. Sadly here I was greatly disappointed - you simply go up to the stage and click on an NPC and it's all done - there's no actual ceremony or fanfare or anything. It really feels like Cryptic wasted an opportunity there for making their players feel special.

Oh well. I guess now it's back to boldly going (through the same repeititive missions) until I reach my next promotion of Captain...