Erm, not always and definitely not for an MMO. A proper story can't possible be evident in the first hour - many of my favorite stories start out slow until there's suddenly a big twist or when things pick up. Witcher was one example.

Well ship movement is subject to a massive design flaw in the game (that should be easy to fix at least), whenever you're hailed and get the popup box your engines stop. I suspect it's to give you time to read the message and react to it but when it happens in the middle of a fight, it can be catastrophic (at least as far as a fake ship with fake people blowing up without any real penalty can be classed as a catastrophe)
One thing I'd definitely recommend trying to get is the evasive manoeuvres ability/power/spell, really handy for whipping around to put some torpedoes into someone's weak shields, kind of reminds me of the high energy turn from Starfleet Command

Okay I'll make a separate post for this because of the size:
I've been playing Star Trek Online since the day Open Beta started last week. I've probably clocked around 20 hours or so, so far so on a MMO level, I'm really still discovering everything but I've already noted quite a lot of things:
For starters, the game starts out REAL slow. In fact, the first few hours really were off putting and my initial comments were largely negative. It was buggy, I constantly got disconnected, the quests were dull, the "tutorial" was terrible (tutorials that are forced on you are always a no-no) and it didn't quite "click" with me. I felt it all seemed too ... unfriendly
But then things started to click. I discovered that dying during combat is perfectly normal and to be expected during heavy assaults. In terms of combat, this is more Team Fortress 2 than Eve because you often die and respawn seconds later without any penalty.
I also started to discover more interesting quests that gave me a Star Trek vibe: away missions, linked missions with a proper story attached, some cool planetary locations, etc.
On top of that, I started to understand the mechanics and, as a result, tactical options.
It's still far from perfect: the beta is only a quarter of the actual game, some vital features are still offline (like the Genesis system) but at least I'm having fun. Space combat is a real blast and I've developed some cool strategies that work surprisingly well.
If there was one big negative to the game, I'd say it's the auto instancing. I hate auto instancing - it's why I'll never buy Modern Warfare 2 (well because of that, and it being an overrated game). I want to choose who I play with and I can't. I'm thrown in with 3 random people to complete a quest and half the time, at least one leaves the moment they join. And guess what: no-one can join after that so you're stuck with 3 instead of 4. If one person then goes AFK or leaves, you're faced with a mission that is impossible to complete. The problem here is that no-one can fly in to help you out and the moment you leave, you got to start the entire mission all over again. They really need to fix this.
Other than that, I still need to play more to make up my mind. It can go either way. If they handle the different races well, it could be a brilliant PvP game.

They patched that days ago - you now get "Ops" in the lower right which you can click when you want. See, this is why you can't judge a game in an hour - they're hurrying to fix problems like this and you can submit your own bugs which is cool.

Err okay, I got the stop when hailed thing today, it was during regular space travel rather than in-system though so it might be considered okay there since its only a mild disruption rather than something that will get you killed
The instace thing IS annoying but the exapanded map has a button that lets you change your instance. Not had a chance to test it to see if I can just join whatever instance my team is in though and there SHOULD be a "create an instance for me &/or my team" option that you can enable

Sounds like I should get this game when my PC is upgraded and fight for the Klingon Empire and hunt for the secrets to the Genesis device.

Whats your current PC? My CPU is 200MHz too slow and my GPU is a generation too old than what the minimum requirements specify and I can still run it pretty well. Asteroid heavy systems give me single digit frame rates but other than that its pretty good

Actually, you can turn off the auto grouping in the social menu. You can set team type to closed and to auto reject invites for example. There are other options too, so you could certainly set it so that you only mission with people you want to mission with.
That also means you can solo when you want.
Combat can still be a pain though. Trying out soloing early, I found myself up against a Gorn battle ship. That thing is way too tough for me right now. I need shields with better regen to go with micro managing the shields.
It sucks that the enemy ships auto regen all their health when the last person in a instance dies too. I'd rather have some form of death penalty applied to my ship and the enemy retain it's current health status than for it to auto regen and my ship appear again with no penalty. It's like all the hard work before you died never happened =/.
But I admit, the game is growing on me. And I may wind up picking it up after all for a few months at least. We'll see. Still plenty of time to further think about whether I really want to fork out $59.99 and $14.99 per month.

Whats your ID? I think I have a spare set of MK2 shields lying around you can have.
Battleships are still pretty damn challenging for me but I can JUST manage to take them down solo. Combination of level 2 disruptor beam on the front, level 2 disruptor turret on the back and level 2 quantum torpedoes with the high yield ability can shred their shields pretty well and if I use the power preset that focuses on shields, I can live long enough to peck them to death

Apparently it's Arinko@bansama or sommat?

I got loads of stuff in my inventory because I had to do the same missions 3 or 4 times because they were glitched :P I got pretty kick ass weapons - compared to most players I encounter, I'm a bad ass killing machine who is always the last to die and the one to deal the most damage. For now at least ;)

Heh. I've played perhaps 5 or 6 missions so far and have had 1 loot drop in space =/ They really should increase the drop rate for space. Away teams, no problem. Lots of loot there, mostly strange food items mind.

Well but the thing is I played witcher non-stop for 5 hours when it was released, playing witcher was fun even from the very beginning. What I'm saying is I couldn't stand playing STO for 1hr so it is clear that STO isn't a game for people like me. But really to begin with I were never a Star Trek fan, this might be the reason.

Hi!
I've played it for about 20 hours now and have to disagree: So far the game, at least for me, is far from awesome. But then, i expected worse, and its not as bad as i thought it would be.
One thing that incredible, incredible, incredible keeps me from actually paying for this game:
Too. Much. Repetition.
Not whining about the normal "Fly there, kill that" - thats pretty much you do in all games (substitute 'fly' with 'walk', 'drive', ..). But its... fly there, press 2(!) buttons and try to align so both your phasers/disruptors/whatever hit at the same time, use the special powers of your officers to survive (1 more click / button). Rinse and repeat. Rinse and repeat. Oh, someone hails me! Pah, combat AGAIN. And 8 Warbirds VS me again. As it was the last 8 hours of gameplay. And will be the next 8 hours of gameplay.
Boring. Not complex enough. No economy. No crafting. Literally nothing to do then fly around, scan for things (one click after optical recognition) and blow up more ships. Mostly Warbirds -_-
Edit:
Ground missions are fun. If Eve Online had ground missions, ST:O would be so dead before it was born :P Unfortunately, i only had 3 ground-missions so far in all those hours, of which one sucked and the other two were really great. Excluding the tutorial ground missions, of course.

it appears that there are options to that you can set (both default to off) so that's possible to target off-screen enemies and keep moving when a dialog box appears >_>.

Shall add you tomorrow and see if we can be online at the same time