Hi Captains,

We wanted to let you all in on a change that will be made to the Tribble and RedShirt test servers. On Monday, January 9th, we plan to take these test shards offline. RedShirt will remain offline, but Tribble will return later in the day. The Tribble database will be wiped and the shard will return in a complete clean state. This means that all characters, Foundry productions, and other player data will be removed from the Tribble test server, and will not be recoverable. If you currently have a Foundry mission on Tribble that you need to save work from, please do so before the weekend is over, as once this server comes down, we will be unable to recover any lost data.

Tribble will also return to being a normal test server. Over the past 3 months, Tribble has been an isolated environment with its own C-Store and purchases and this was done for Season 5 testing. Going forward, it will return to being tied to the Holodeck environment, having no C-Store, and honoring purchased unlocks made on Holodeck. In other words, it will be just like it was prior to the start of Season 5 testing.

Lastly, we would truly like to thank all of our dedicated players who spent countless hours testing the latest builds and providing feedback -- we could not have done it without you.

Thank you,

The Star Trek Online Team

Why do we need other test servers at all when you guys continue to use Holodeck as a test server?

Edit: I'd really love a straight forward answer to that. It's a question I'm sure a lot are interested in knowing the answer to.

More to the point, why wasn't redshirt taken down earlier? After all, Redshirt was only created for closed Beta testing, which "ended" nearly 2 years ago.

redshirt has been used an internal test server since beta by cryptic and likely will be returning to that purpse.

Sweet.... means that'll free up 10 Gigs on my computer

Show me a bug-free MMO, and I'll show you a pig with wings.

I didn't suggest it had to be bug free. However, we seemed to be plagued by way more bugs than the normal MMO and saying "way more" is understating it a lot.

Anyone who wants to get JC back after all this goading, drop on by our weekend pvp event!
2PM EST every Saturday and Sunday, organized via the chat channel "TFBB".

As far as I know, we're still on break with no events for this weekend. If there's demend, I'm fine with getting something going. Voting will return next week for next weeks events.

Just a reminder, the TFBB is a PvP event for anyone who doesn't take it seriously. We are not restricted by fleet, and everyone is welcome. 2PM ET Saturday's and Sunday's are when we roll. We use our own chat channel, which you can find the link to setup in my sig.

I would recommend doing a comparative analysis, because I disagree. Even WoW and TOR have huge numbers of bugs; the STO community may just seem to be more concentrated, so people tend to see more of it. "More posts" doesn't necessarily mean "more bugs", after all.

No MMO ever truly goes out of "beta", as the actual definition of the development state is defined as. Test servers exist for SPECIFIC testing purposes, but you will never find everything. An opt-in testing program means you'll only get people who want to do such things, and even then you'll get a lot of guys who only use it as some kind of "demo" for future content, and are not actually TESTING. As such, a testing server can make sure that the code is not catastrophically broken, but smaller things will never show up until everyone is playing in their myriad ways.