Hello dear readers, it’s been too long … for it’s du Lac writing this months report!
In this edition …
What we’ve been up to …
Aside from an unprecedented amount of illness, we’ve been mostly working a lot behind the scenes on things. Jan/Feb saw us prepping and getting ready for the sixth annual Khitomer Conference. We covered a whole host of different panels including some stage and video ones we’ve archived on our Youtube Channel.
We’ve also been working closely with our partners in Pegasus Fleet on a few cross-fleet projects, one of which is now live. As Lancaster announced, Task Force Khitomer combines both Obsidian and Pegasus, as well as STO players from the Khitomer Conference into one combined fleet where everyone can share, contribute and immerse themselves in Star Trek Online. We’ll have other announcements coming soon on things we’re working on.
You’ll have also noticed a bit of an uptick in op-eds and other articles on the site such as Calliopes article on First Officers, or Ehestri’s Celebration of STEM in the Fleet. We’re encouraging players from across the fleet to share their views, opinions and feelings on what makes our community the place it is. Our social media platforms are incredibly popular and we receive lots of messages every week across facebook, twitter and instagram which boil down to “I came across this in my feed, sounds cool, how does it work?” so the more information we can get out there showing prospective players and writers how this crazy little place which has been going for 23 years in July (announcement in due course about OF Day 24) works, the better. If you have an idea you want to discuss, contact a member of the Comms team via Discord, or just start writing a news article via My IFS.
Rule Change
We’ve also made a minor change to rule 1 of the players section. It used to read:
A player may have a maximum of six player-controlled characters in Obsidian Fleet Members of the Fleet Council have an additional character allocation for their in-game persona to allow them to guest post on sims or play as their character as they see fit.
In order to allow players to more freely write on hubs such as Esquimalt Station and the Traveller’s Rest we’ve removed them from the character limits. So, the new rule reads:
A player may have a maximum of six player-controlled characters across player-operated games in Obsidian Fleet. Members of the Fleet Council have an additional character for their in-game persona to allow them to make guest appearance within games or play as their character as they see fit. Games designated as Fleet Hubs and temporary games set up for time-limited events do not count towards the character limit.
We’ve also made some other changes to help with this which’ll form part of another update, specifically around hubs, over the next few days.
Plans for (the rest of) 2024
So, lots of hints of things in the future above and a change in direction for content. What does all this look like in terms of a plan? Well, here’s what we’re thinking the next 8 months will look like.
- More podcasts and live streams. As Ehestri said in the Comms Update, we’ve got a lot of ideas for things to talk about. We’ve also got members livestreaming games like Stellaris’ excellent New Civilisations TC on Youtube regularly. We’re looking to do more. I’m waiting on Lancaster installing Helldivers 2 so me and Emu can take him bug-hunting … on stream.
- More writing competitions. We’ve been doing the Golden PADD, Golden Pumpkin writing competitions for some time – 7 years now. We want to do more.
- More Op-Eds and articles.
- As we head into 2399 in-game, we’ll be doing some work around our timeline and ensuring it slots into the events we now know happened in Picard Season 1 and before. We’ve already started reflecting some of it in our ship lineup, with ships like the Gagarin, Reliant and Excelsior-II classes all making an appearance and being based on an uplift programme through the loss of Utopia Planetia in the Synth Revolution.
- We’ll be incorporating more player-led developments such as The Qoird into the fleet timeline.
- We’ll be formally launching the Hubs for TF72 and TF47. TF’s 13 and 29’s are still in development but they’ll probably be launched around Obsidian Day based on current timelines.
- IFS3’s going to see some more updates. If I had version numbers, we’d be on 3.2 now. I’m looking to add some new, much requested functionality for games in 3.25 such as a better story management screen, and a section on the games page for links to the Fleet DB or external wikis. 3.3 will (hopefully) see the launch of achievements – it’s in testing now – and also a new Events management screen so we can run the aforementioned competitions.
- There’ll also be a new multi-game, multi-part story coming soon. Props to Skyward of the Hou Yi for throwing out a question here which spawned a whole 19 hours of ideation on Discord.
The various Directors will update you with their plans for the rest of the year in their reports.
And with that, I’m going to go listen to Taytay’s new double-album. See you all next time!