First, I don't have a lot of time on my hands to level as work and a 2 year old daughter occupy the majority of my time. How is the leveling on here? Also, how is the PvP as I am a PvP junky and could care less about PvE or story lines? Is it free-for-all or simply Klingons vs. Starfleet? Is it zoned, or are you able to fight anywhere? Is PvP only in space or can you have ground combat as well?

Lastly, are you able to start out as a klingon or do you have to get to a certain level before that race is available and re-roll?

bump, can anyone help me with my questions. Also, from the looks of it, you can't even get in the game to play due to queues, what's up with that too?

I haven't experienced PvP, so I can't give you advice on that. Also we do not know yet if the queues stay in after launch and how severe there are. To get an honest picture you should give the game a few weeks.

However, you might want to look into EVE Online as well. Not because it's better, but I think it's very casual friendly. In EVE, you learn the skills simply by spending time on the, even offline. That means, even if you can only play for 5 hours in a week, you can still advance skillwise. I liked that concept a lot.

Eve Online is not for the casual player at all man, Have you ever played it?

EVE also has the steepest learning curve of any MMO I've ever seen. It also has a completely player run economy which recently had a financial crisis because a player run bank was very shady. IMO it's not very casual friendly because to do or see any of the cool stuff, you do have to devote a lot of time to it. Simply going across the galaxy takes hours because it's all one giant server. Which is cool and all if you like EVE, but don't say it's casual.

STO is fairly casual on the other hand. It should take you 20ish hours to get to your Tier 2 ship, and that is about as far as I have ever gotten. So who knows after that. You can join fleet actions, you can do PvP, you can quest. All of them don't require much grouping as the server will auto join you to groups if you set it to that. The longest fleet action I have been in required about, 45 minutes of time.

Good stuff everyone. Are there plans to make pvp viable, or open up a free-for-all server in the future?

I don't see a separate server for PvP coming, based on the design so far.

As far as PvP being "viable", it's as viable as WoW's right now. You can level up on it and you get badges to buy gear from it. The only thing it doesn't have is a way to impact the rest of the world (like the Wintergrasp buff, for instance, or the campaign in WAR)

It would be nice to have contested areas that could change hands via PvP, perhaps we'll see that at some point.

PvP isn't free for all, but you can fight klingon against starfleet or klingon vs klingon. There are space and ground pvp scenarios. You have to get to lvl 6 (or complete a specific quest) to unlock the klingon race. A casual player like yourself (I'm in the same boat with 2 kids and my youngest being a 14 mo. old).

It's casual where it needs to be which is what I like. I can hop on for an hour or so and complete a few missions without having to back-trace what I did the last time I was on so I know what I'm supposed to do.

PvP is zoned and has a queue system to join pvp scenarios. I've found that PvP is a little shallow but tremendous fun. PvE missions sometimes feel like a grind (with some missions taking over half an hour to complete with around a dozen different parts to it). All in all, I've found STO to be a great mmo for casual players and great loads of fun. I'm not a fan of star trek movies and all but the game is fun.

Those longer missions are part of the episodes, they flow into one another, the shorter ones are the heres XP missions.

Cool, thanks for the replies everyone. Is the PvP only space battles or do actually train your char and can pvp on the ground as well?