A Star Trek Online fanblog. I don’t really play STO anymore, but you’ll find my old screenshots here! I also talk a lot. 🌟 Please credit @RurinnFane in any reposts, thanks! 🌟 Trans rights!
I'm often really dedicated to the visual quality and authenticity of the memes I make, but like idk if I could ever make another human being care about that. I used the proper font and color picked the correct color and sized everything correctly and used the alignment tool to get the spacing right and redrew the nebula background and spent way too long messing with the drop shadow settings to mimic the original text. Skyrim media literacy 0 skill meme. If you care.
Your commitment to craftsmanship is appreciated. Years ago I spent way too long on this stupid meme to get the pull lines in the dark green and the fading of the lime color just right.
I rarely add to reblogs like this (or use this blog anymore) but I’d love to throw one related instance of my old Star Trek Online shenanigans in the pot
The fact that the golden Nagus Marauder is a free giveaway right now is so funny
Not only was it (from my perspective) Kael's way of saying "fuck you I'm out" (fair)
But also. There are some nerds who took that ship SO SERIOUSLY. My fiancé did a video on it when it was a limited giveaway ~8 years ago and some dude sent him a death threat over it. The nerds were NOT okay over the highly coveted *checks notes* gold plated Ferengi ship
...that doesn't even really play much of a role in the DPS meta from what I can tell
There are rumors that STO is going to move publishers again, this time to one that focuses on maintaining old games… it feels like SUCH a long shot, but I kinda hope it happens and that the new publisher takes it back to its roots i.e. focusing more on original stuff rather than celebrity cameos every ten seconds
I would start playing again if it ended up being more like OG STO and less. Well. Whatever the hell is going on over there right now
And I say this because it just seems like that would be more in-line with the priorities of a “game nursing home”
(That’s what SOB called it — Zef showed me his video on this subject last night and that’s how I’m aware of this. I laughed at “game nursing home” but it’s not inaccurate)
It’s unclear whether said publisher would want to focus on the same monetization scheme that, IMO, has changed the game for the worst. They will obviously want the game to be profitable enough to keep it running, but will they focus more on profits than making new content? New playable ships don’t count — I’m talking story, because that used to be a thing we got more than 2-3 times a year. And how much will they focus on bringing in new money players by hiring celebrities to reprise their roles? Or is that not going to be a priority, given that the game already has a wide userbase and rides on the firmly established fame of Star Trek?
It’s really unclear. There’s certainly going to be SOME shifts, if for no other reason than the fact that current devs are likely going to have to reapply for their current positions at the new publisher or move on to new projects. I just really want to hope that whatever changes occur are changes that support the longevity of the game and nudge it in a slightly different creative direction.
You don’t need to force stories around a bunch of canon Trek characters that got thrusted into the STO timeline by way of undeath/time travel/holograms/etc for the game to be loved and worth spending money on.
I honestly want the main characters to leave me alone. Sto is about your star trek captain. Not Beverly Crusher, Admiral Janeway, ect . i don't mind them appearing from time to time, but dear god am I ready for a mission without a celebrity.
On a similar note, chill with the galaxy ending threats. From 2409 to 2413 we have-the Iconian War, the Undine, the Hurq, and the Terran arc all ending with almost destroying one or more Alliance worlds. The current one appears to be a mulitversal collapse/threat with new 'super' borg
Well Hazel if you wanna complain so much what would you do next.
Clean up. Every Major power has been rocked in the last few years in-game. Lean into that!
So the first drop of episodes would be New Romulus. The new Romulan/Reman homeworld was over run by the Iconians like two years back. The Republic Navy started out using 2 century old T'liss bc they had nothing else and they been bleeding ships ever since. Your ship is sent to deal with pirates who have been targeting supply lines meant to help rebuild the home world and fleet. You fight alongside the Lleiset and several new RRN ships (which then can be sold to players) and remastered old ones. The arc (3-5 episodes) ends with you laying siege to the pirates starbase.
Arc 2 is the Dominion. They lost most of their fleet in the DS9 arc, and your sent to help them re-establish their borders. Features the USS Defiant (New Defiant A?) And Cardassians as well. The story focuses on the Dominion being forced to recon with their past actions now that they're vulnerable. Final battle sees the Dominion defend a former member from the 'true way' terrorist group alongside a Cardassian fleet. Introduced new dominion and cardassian ships Not bc they expect the former planet to rejoin, but bc they promised the planet protection, but bc that is a promise they can keep, and they refuse to break anymore.
Arc 3. Delta Quadrant. The Borg Cooperative wishes to join the Alliance. Help them search for a homeworld alongside the USS Voyager (B?). New playable Borg ship, but also new Federation Ships and remastered/T6 Dyson Destroyers.
Arc 4. The Klingon Empire. The empire may be unified again...but its not healed. Join a humanitarian effort to reestablish supply lines and trade routes within the empire alongsode the Bortasqu. Deals with the fallout of the Klingon civil war. Introduces T6 version of the t5 bird of prey.
Arc 5. The Federation. The players flagship returns to the Vega colony to retake it from the borg alongside the USS Enterprise.
Yes! All of this!! I would LOVE to see these stories. I'd be back in STO in a heartbeat. It's stories like that which sucked me into the game in the first place.
It's so frustrating that we have these galactic-scale crises that get sorta-kinda wrapped up in the final 10 minutes of a final mission, and we'll only be reminded of that crisis during the next crisis if we're lucky and/or pursue optional dialog. I was losing my MARBLES over how the Iconian War was wrecking New Romulus, and after that war ended, it's almost like........ nothing happened. I guess they have some burnt trees on the planet still? But with the way the impact of that war is simply ignored, it feels a little eerily like "there is no war in Ba Sing Se."
(Now I'm kind of wanting a story about New Romulan conspiracy theorists who insist that the Iconians were a Federation hoax or something)
Since the Iconian War, the galactic-scale crises have felt more and more rushed through, and I think part of why is that we rarely hear about the fallout beyond what our captain is involved in AND that resolutions always seem neat and tidy. The wars exist within their own vacuums. There are no real consequences. We as players have extremely limited narrative control over our captains, and as a result, we find ourselves playing as soldiers and rarely anything more. We're the Big Important People, we get to experience the ✨glory✨ of these wars while it's everyone else (the NPCs) suffering the consequences and cleaning up behind us.
Trying to sell a Lower Decks uniform box that's been rotting in my account bank for ages, so naturally I picked the most thematically appropriate sales price I could think of (while also taking the average price on the exchange into account)
Happy Star Trek Day! Here's my monster project from 2021 to celebrate 55 years of Star Trek... a screenshot of every hero ship that was available in Star Trek Online at that point in time, representing the various shows and movies in the franchise.
Two years ago, ZEFilms and I collaborated on a video celebrating 55 years of Star Trek. This video is still very near and dear to both of our hearts, so I want to share it with you all again ❤️🖖🏼
I wanted to give editing a shot on my new system (and I had to re-learn a lot of things in paint.net because I lost my old university Creative Cloud subscription)
Friendly reminder that fan-made content (fanart, fanfic, fanvids, etc) are:
extremely time consuming. Remember someone actually took time out of their life to create that, time they could’ve used to, idk, sleep, for example
entertainment you’re consuming for free. I can’t stress this enough: you’re enjoying someone else’s craft for free. You paid exactly zero money to look at/read/watch it.
S H A R E D with you, not made for you. This is the most important point: someone created that, put it online and you found it. No one forced you to consume that fanwork, you C H O S E to do it.
Whenever you feel like leaving a mean comment, anonymous hate or make a ~clever post about how ‘lol look at all of these overused tropes every fic writer crams into their fics’ remember you’re being a dick to someone who shared their work with you. You’re not being funny, you’re not being edgy, you’re not being brave for calling something out - you’re being a dick.
This is one factor that contributed to my burnout on ship art. I’d get random strangers crawling out of the woodwork on a semi-regular basis attempting to make it my problem that I made art of starships they hate.
I got attacked for posting the Kelvin timeline Enterprise on several occasions. I had to talk a guy down on Deviantart in the comments of my Janeway-class art because he hated Captain Janeway, which made him hate the ship and therefore my art. Obligatory Discovery hate, obligatory Discovery refit/floating nacelles hate… there was literally no getting out of it, even after I shifted towards making art of more ships that were commonly liked.
Fanartists aren’t your personal content farms. Take what you like and leave the rest alone, that’s what normal people do. Don’t harass an artist because a fictional starship they like makes you viscerally angry — I’d instead recommend a serious re-evaluation of your priorities and maybe (just maybe) touching some damned grass.
I feel like I'm ready to talk at greater length about my experiences with STO and how I've reached this point of burnout/alienation with it after all these years.
The biggest reason? It's not the same game I became obsessed with in 2014. That's actually normal and to be expected of most MMOs and people (you should check out this video about the phenomenon!), but let me explain what that means for me here. Quick disclaimer, you are allowed to disagree with me on this -- I'm discussing my subjective point of view, not any objective fact.
Putting this under a readmore because it's long - please click "keep reading" below :)
What captured my heart was STO's storytelling and how it was formatted to be super duper friendly to making OCs. I could make an OC that got inserted into the STO (and overall Trek) universe with pretty minimal effort on my part! It had enough callbacks to canon to be satisfying to me as a Trekkie, but it also had enough new stuff that it was exciting and fresh. My first two years in college were spent imagining up my OC's takes on different mission arcs more often than uh.. college. Long-time friends and followers will recall my obsession with the Dyson Sphere and the Iconian War.
But that's when things started to change, right after the Iconian War. The war itself felt like the great culmination of all the past mission arcs, like we built up to the conflict and it exploded into this terrible intergalactic event. Since then, no new missions have felt the same to me.
STO seemed to evolve further into a super segmented Star Trek theme park after that. We already had Voyager Land (the Delta Quadrant) before the war, and it played a relatively satisfying role in the war; however, it became especially clear with the Gamma Quadrant arc that we were getting a new expansion into Deep Space 9 Land after the short burst of original stuff like the Lukari and the Tzenkethi (I know that the Tzenkethi existed in canon before, but STO took them and ran with them).
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the priority has shifted towards incorporating as many cameos as possible to run the stories, not the other way around. I LOVE Tilly and Mary Wiseman, don't get me wrong, but the way they finagled a way to get Tilly to still be alive in the STO era (having her literal fascist Mirror Universe counterpart travel into the future) felt ingenuine as hell to me. The way I see it, it's less about the story and more about capitalizing on the #SillyForTilly craze to draw new players in. Same goes for all the other canon characters, but Tilly's has felt the most egregious to me personally.
Yes, it IS cool as hell that STO has these actors willing to come in to record cameo voiceovers. It IS cool as hell that we recently got to fight alongside both Tilly and Janeway at the SAME TIME! But it's important to remember that they're not "our" Tilly and Janeway; they're their Mirror counterparts, and one of them is only there as a result of temporal shenanigans. Temporal shenanigans totally happen in canon Trek and are part of the charm, but in the case of STO, they feel excessive to me.
The way I see it, STO is putting the cameos themselves over the characters over the stories. The cameos drive engagement, which drives the ruthless monetization that has also been strangling the life out of the game. It's Star Ship Online and hey omg look over there it's Tilly and Janeway and Wesley omg wow look aaaaaaaah!!!!1!!!
I understand that capitalism is gonna capitalism, the game will do what it feels it must do to survive, but it has lost all charm to me.
I came for the sense that I was being included in the universe (via my OCs, because let's face it, OCs are always self-inserts to varying degrees), now I feel like I'm watching an extremely, painfully slow interactive new Trek series that also feels like an advertisement for merch targeted at a super specific audience.
When it comes to the screenshot thing I got myself so entrenched in... I felt like I was an unpaid advertiser for the "new" game, especially when it came to lockbox and promo box ships that people will spend hundreds of dollars to obtain. 99% of the time my art of those ships came from the tribble test server or sniping screenshots of somebody else's ship, all because of the pressure to continually Create Content™. I felt emboldened to continue Creating Content™ when it became "ship art" and not just "rurinn's silly little pictures," and that's when I became Known On The Internet -- a goal of mine for a long time that turned out to be more thorns than rose petals.
We also have to acknowledge the behavior of the community at large when it comes to that monetization and how creators such as myself get caught in the crossfire. The hate I got over this recreation of a cutscene from A Measure of Morality -- not-so-subtly advertising a 300 USD ship bundle -- was unbelievable, and it still wasn't nearly as bad as the utterly soulless behavior that my partner faces to this day for his videos.
I could go on. For days, probably. Subjects such as the extreme monetization + the rampant unmoderated hate in chat that seeps into the adjacent social media communities come to mind. I felt like my soul had been siphoned away for a time because of it all -- the pain of outgrowing something I loved dearly, watching it change into something unrecognizable, and being berated and harassed by other players and community members drowning in their own toxicity and hate.
I am grateful for STO. I met so many friends because of it. It helped me through some unimaginably difficult times in my life. I met my partner through it and even collaborated with him to create some stunning art. I have been hurting over this for a long time, but I think I'm finally at a stage where I can accept what happened, move on, and heal.
Honestly this summarizes a lot of my experiences with Star Trek Online as well and why I moved away from the game.
It’s not the same, and the monetization is rancid.
I think you ended up seeing the writing on the wall a long time before I did... or I was in denial over it, I can't really remember. Still, it sucks. I'm sorry you went through this too :(
I feel like I'm ready to talk at greater length about my experiences with STO and how I've reached this point of burnout/alienation with it after all these years.
The biggest reason? It's not the same game I became obsessed with in 2014. That's actually normal and to be expected of most MMOs and people (you should check out this video about the phenomenon!), but let me explain what that means for me here. Quick disclaimer, you are allowed to disagree with me on this -- I'm discussing my subjective point of view, not any objective fact.
Putting this under a readmore because it's long - please click "keep reading" below :)
What captured my heart was STO's storytelling and how it was formatted to be super duper friendly to making OCs. I could make an OC that got inserted into the STO (and overall Trek) universe with pretty minimal effort on my part! It had enough callbacks to canon to be satisfying to me as a Trekkie, but it also had enough new stuff that it was exciting and fresh. My first two years in college were spent imagining up my OC's takes on different mission arcs more often than uh.. college. Long-time friends and followers will recall my obsession with the Dyson Sphere and the Iconian War.
But that's when things started to change, right after the Iconian War. The war itself felt like the great culmination of all the past mission arcs, like we built up to the conflict and it exploded into this terrible intergalactic event. Since then, no new missions have felt the same to me.
STO seemed to evolve further into a super segmented Star Trek theme park after that. We already had Voyager Land (the Delta Quadrant) before the war, and it played a relatively satisfying role in the war; however, it became especially clear with the Gamma Quadrant arc that we were getting a new expansion into Deep Space 9 Land after the short burst of original stuff like the Lukari and the Tzenkethi (I know that the Tzenkethi existed in canon before, but STO took them and ran with them).
It has become increasingly clear in recent years that the priority has shifted towards incorporating as many cameos as possible to run the stories, not the other way around. I LOVE Tilly and Mary Wiseman, don't get me wrong, but the way they finagled a way to get Tilly to still be alive in the STO era (having her literal fascist Mirror Universe counterpart travel into the future) felt ingenuine as hell to me. The way I see it, it's less about the story and more about capitalizing on the #SillyForTilly craze to draw new players in. Same goes for all the other canon characters, but Tilly's has felt the most egregious to me personally.
Yes, it IS cool as hell that STO has these actors willing to come in to record cameo voiceovers. It IS cool as hell that we recently got to fight alongside both Tilly and Janeway at the SAME TIME! But it's important to remember that they're not "our" Tilly and Janeway; they're their Mirror counterparts, and one of them is only there as a result of temporal shenanigans. Temporal shenanigans totally happen in canon Trek and are part of the charm, but in the case of STO, they feel excessive to me.
The way I see it, STO is putting the cameos themselves over the characters over the stories. The cameos drive engagement, which drives the ruthless monetization that has also been strangling the life out of the game. It's Star Ship Online and hey omg look over there it's Tilly and Janeway and Wesley omg wow look aaaaaaaah!!!!1!!!
I understand that capitalism is gonna capitalism, the game will do what it feels it must do to survive, but it has lost all charm to me.
I came for the sense that I was being included in the universe (via my OCs, because let's face it, OCs are always self-inserts to varying degrees), now I feel like I'm watching an extremely, painfully slow interactive new Trek series that also feels like an advertisement for merch targeted at a super specific audience.
When it comes to the screenshot thing I got myself so entrenched in... I felt like I was an unpaid advertiser for the "new" game, especially when it came to lockbox and promo box ships that people will spend hundreds of dollars to obtain. 99% of the time my art of those ships came from the tribble test server or sniping screenshots of somebody else's ship, all because of the pressure to continually Create Content™. I felt emboldened to continue Creating Content™ when it became "ship art" and not just "rurinn's silly little pictures," and that's when I became Known On The Internet -- a goal of mine for a long time that turned out to be more thorns than rose petals.
We also have to acknowledge the behavior of the community at large when it comes to that monetization and how creators such as myself get caught in the crossfire. The hate I got over this recreation of a cutscene from A Measure of Morality -- not-so-subtly advertising a 300 USD ship bundle -- was unbelievable, and it still wasn't nearly as bad as the utterly soulless behavior that my partner faces to this day for his videos.
I could go on. For days, probably. Subjects such as the extreme monetization + the rampant unmoderated hate in chat that seeps into the adjacent social media communities come to mind. I felt like my soul had been siphoned away for a time because of it all -- the pain of outgrowing something I loved dearly, watching it change into something unrecognizable, and being berated and harassed by other players and community members drowning in their own toxicity and hate.
I am grateful for STO. I met so many friends because of it. It helped me through some unimaginably difficult times in my life. I met my partner through it and even collaborated with him to create some stunning art. I have been hurting over this for a long time, but I think I'm finally at a stage where I can accept what happened, move on, and heal.
Hey folks, I (@rurinnfane) am kinda sorta back on tumblr!
I've kind of reached a breaking point with STO and ship art. I probably have a decent backlog of things I could post here, and I might do that eventually. But for now, I thought I'd at least point you to where there's slightly more action lmao.
It’s (roughly) my 8th anniversary playing STO! I’ve included all the anniversary pictures I remember making (and that I can find), but I don’t think I’ve celebrated each year with a new screenshot.
(In order, it’s my first day, then first, third, fifth, and eighth anniversaries)
This one is particularly special to me because of how serendipitous it feels. In that first screenshot, I was just a day away from my high school graduation ceremony. In the last one, taken today... it’s my latest alt, created a day away from my Master of Public Policy convocation!
I had no idea where I was going in life when I first started to play. I got a bachelor’s in political science, then an associate’s in paralegal studies, and now I’m here getting my master’s. I’ve had the fortune of working in a great internship that’s opened the doors to a lot of opportunities, including a great full-time job. I’ll start that job... after I get back from Canada, where I’ll be visiting my boyfriend... whom I first befriended because of STO.
Like??? What even. What the heck. I don’t know how this is my life now but I’m so grateful. I don’t fully credit STO for everything that I’ve experienced since 2014, but a lot of good things have happened as a result of joining the community. It’s really wild to look back on this and realize everything that’s happened, especially given my huge STO-related burnout right now.
