So here I am still desperately trying to accumulate enough skill points for my Federation character to reach the rank of Lieutenant Commander. (Don't laugh - I only have enough time for 1 or 2 hours of gameplay a week.)

Admiral Quinn has always been my favourite source of missions, and so when he offered me the chance to visit the Pi Canis Sector Block to participate in 'Task Force Hippocrates' I jumped at the chance.

To begin with, things went fairly smoothly. The first few space-based patrols were no picnic, but my trusty ship with Mk II phasers and torpedoes managed just fine. The problems began when I had to go down to the surface of Xarantine to deal with some pesky Klingon raiders.

The combat was pretty tough, and on several occaisions my away team was badly outnumbered and reduced to smears on the rocky alien ground. I finally overcome the odds though to kill every Klingon in sight. Strangely though, the mission does not resolve.

Eventually I work out what is wrong. There are some more Klingons which I haven't killed yet. The only problem is that they have been spawned on a distant part of the map which I'm not allowed to walk onto. They are also just out of range, so I can't even aggro them to come closer.

Since there doesn't appear to be any way I can fix this problem, I decide to raise a ticket with Cryptic's GM team. I get a response within a couple of hours, which is nice, but the advice given is annoying to say the least.

Basically the only options I am given is to a) log out of the mission instance and try again later, or b) drop the mission entirely and go do something else. There's no discussion about the hour of my life I wasted getting this far through the mission arc, the buffs I used up fighting Klingons, or the skill points I would throw away by telling Admiral Quinn to go fish.