That's pretty much what they hinted at in that status update of theirs.

That would be nice. Although i got used to the loading screens, it would be nice if the instance changes wouldn't be so obvious.
Hmm.. i wonder if a gog-user fleet already exists? If so i would be glad to join. :-)

I haven't heard of one, but then the only gogger I know of in-game is Aliasalpha and I believe a fleet requires at least 5 people.

Well there's at least 5 people on here who have it. Time might be an issue unless we're prepared to stay up till 4am and I can't imagine we'd do that. Again...
Okay, anyone wanting to join a fleet, post your character@username handle and your available time in GMT
ID: Christine Howard@aliasalpha
GMT: 01:00-06:00 and 08:00-15:00
I can bring either a cruiser or an escort to the party and I might have a few weapons knocking around that I can give away

I'd be more than willing to join the fleet! My name: Naalia Lytton@red_avatar

Seems a 800 meg patch just got released. I guess this brings the beta in line with the version that will be released.
This is rather sad though: Added 2 NPCs talking about sulu being admiral quinn's office
Were people really having that much trouble in finding the NPC? U_U

*laughs* One of the most asked questions was "where is Sulu?". They even made a joke about it in their update!

I really cannot believe that people are so stupid they were incapable of seeing him when they went to leave that room. And these people are helping to beta test? No wonder games get dumbed down. It's not a case of a game being on a console, it's the abilities of the players themselves that are causing the dumbing down =/

Yeah it's ridiculous. Read this:
http://www.startrekonline.com/node/899
"Where’s Sulu?
The first week of Open Beta has been amazing!
We have seen more signups and players than we ever imagined we could. So very many people have shown interest in Star Trek Online and logged in to play that we've actually had to scramble to support everyone. Our core engineers are this very second working like crazed technology wielding madmen to improve performance and stability across the board. We're also adding a lot more hardware to accommodate our players.
p.s. Sulu is right behind you in Quinn’s office. Right there, behind the other desk."
Scanning

Due to popular demand, we’ve added in-game scanning FX.
On ship and on ground, pressing the scan button located near the mini-map will point you to the nearest object that you can interact with.
Looking for that last alien artifact on a bizarre and unfriendly alien world, but you just can’t seem to find it? Hit the scan button! Looking for a particularly hard to find spacial anomaly in a far-off star system? Hit the scan button! Looking for Sulu? ... Look out! He’s right behind you!"
Comedy gold :P

Perhaps they should just make the very last tutorial a "Find Sulu you blind bastard" mission. And then have huge red blnking arrows pointing to him.
I bet people still won't be able to find him.

As i said in the game chat the other day when someone asked, "Where's sulu" is fast becoming this years "the cake is a lie"

I'm not much of an MMO player - tried CoX twice and Neocron once.
Actually I think they can't find Sulu or whomever *because it doesn't show on the map*. Both the minimap and all other maps just plain suck.
So far I'm digging the space travel and combat. Not really sold on the planet missions though. The battles in Starbase 24 I liked. Fighting the Cruisers in the last mission I did was really hard because they were much tougher than the Orion cruisers. I am so thanfkful for no XP debt. Timing on the drain shields and power to shields is critical. I've found the Tac officer's PT spread is utterly useless until their shields are completely down. Which makes the power pretty useless imo. I did put most of my skill points into energy based weapons skill and the ship captain skill which has seemed to help.
The whole crew members thing is a nice touch as it seems like you're teamed even when soloing. Plus having those powers is *very helpful* in a firefight - in space or otherwise. Putting skill points in for your crew and for yourself in how you handle your crew makes it a more RPG-like experience than what I saw when playing other MMOs.
Also Bansama use the TAB key to select different opponents - just the same as CoX.
I'm Krindor@destroy.all.monsters and happy to play with anyone.
Cool thread.

Have you tried it since the patch today? The map is significantly better now. Can't say I've looked for sulu but there are 2 people in the beam in section who are talking about sulu's whereabouts
Frankly I find ground missions BETTER with only the AI or 1 human, good combination of intelligence and actual support. With the full or mostly human teams, everyone is used to their science/engineering officer healing/recharging you and never think of doing it for other people.
Perfomance seems substantially improved over prepatch, graphics look nicer, there's a nimoy voiceover for sectors and heaps of other little nice touches.
The explore delta volanis mission has gotten more annoying, the anomaly things that are either systems or objects are now mostly objects and only show up within about 2ly of your ship so its a long dull search pattern. Also it seems people can steal systems, quite how that works I don't know but they go inactive when someone else uses them. Maybe its set up for team work so you can sweep the system a lot more

There's more near the federation banks too talking about where is. The only problem I've found is in one of the nebula where the random systems don't appear to spawn enough. Which is probably the mission set you're talking about.
I was lucky though in that I had an ongoing mission in there, so at least I got to finish one of them. Yup, that Gorn ship is was having trouble with earlier is now in little pieces =)

Finally have it downloaded and i'm enjoying it so far.