The Path to Free-to-Play: Welcome!

As many of you in the community noticed, we closed down the Star Trek Online public test shard, Tribble, last week. At the same time, we opened up a new public test shard named RedShirt. The reason for the change is that we are going to be using Tribble for giving our current subscribers early access to all the exciting changes coming in our free-to-play re-launch of the game.

The Tribble shard will re-open tomorrow (Thursday, Sept 29) as the newly repurposed F2P test shard, and it will operate exactly like our public test shards have operated in the past. If you have not yet used a public test shard for STO, you can go to our test sign-up page. Once you sign up, you'll see a new set of buttons in your launcher that gives you access to the two test shards.

One thing you'll notice that is different with Tribble is that we are not going to allow the transferring of characters from Holodeck to the shard at this time. This isn't a bug. It's intentional. We'll be opening up character transfer in two or three weeks, but until then we're looking to get your feedback on the updated tutorial and early portions of the game. So make sure you head to the STO forums and let us know what you think!

Check the Path to Free-to-Play index page regularly for more entries in our dev blog series. We'll be providing sneak peeks, overviews, and in-depth reports on many of the new features, improvements and changes to the game. We're really excited about what we have lined up for you and we're looking forward to showing it off to the community.

Engage!

Stephen D'Angelo
Executive Producer

Path to F2P Dev Blog Index