I blame the longish pvp queues for the lame Fed pvp performance. They just don’t get experience if they suddenly get beamed into an arena after doing pve mission after pve mission. They just use their pve setup and BOOM – shields down, 4 torpedoes right into the gap and they did not even realize what hit them. This was my first Rear Admiral PvP experience. My Escort just got trounced within seconds and my team had trouble killing a single Klingon.

The Klingon ships are not that much better. I think the Bird of Prey might be the most versatile ship design ingame, but it should be noted that a Federation Assault Cruiser can fend off two T5 BoPs easily. They can take a full team minutes to kill and a wise Klingon just focuses on another ship or goes away, cloaks and just accepts that he cannot outlast a cruiser in his Raptor or Bird of Prey. The Klingon Negh’Var Battlecruiser might pack some more offensive punch, but all in all it cannot compare to an Assault or Star Cruiser, really.

But if you gather 2-3 buddes and fill up with randoms and things start going south for Klingons, they just cloak and drag the match to eternity. :P Some better cloak detection would be nice, science vessel scans don’t cut it atm.

The ship combat might be fast and furious in PvE, but to be successful in PvP you need to know the mechanics and ship loadouts. At a certain point you can even recognize which class the player commanding the other ship is playing, because you recognize the skill symbols and so on.
I almost exclusively pvp with my Klingon: I did not have the time to wait for the PvP Queue for the daily honor quest on my Fed! And it is damn more fun than to have this 80% chance to play with a bunch of first timers after a longish wait.

The raidisode is a problem. PUGs dissolve too easily. It takes time to get to the final room, then many have to learn the whole new “jump over glowing goo” and press three buttons at the same time stuff. People die and fail and lose faith or just don’t have time anymore. I wonder what they would do if there would be a death penalty.
At least I got several marks of valor from killing the Tactical Cube in the space battle sequence as it was still giving marks… ^^ I hope raidisode II is a bit more manageable with a PUG and has more space combat. :)

I rarely see anyone I know online anymore. The game is probably till going strong and attracts lots of people, but it does not seem to keep players.

I suggest you just click the “sign up for Tribble” button, it will create automatically a test server subfolder and you can switch between Holodeck (Live) and Tribble (Test) while logging in. You can even contact people playing on the other server. Plus it is nice to see that there is really some good new stuff coming to keep people entertained. Some PvE content for Klingons for example. I dunno, but somehow I fear this will make Fed queues even longer…^^