After many glorious space battles, I’ve finally made Lieutenant Commander with my very keen Vulcan Engineer. It took a while, as I haven’t been getting enough play time in game lately, and it did get a little grindy, but overall, I really enjoyed it.

The pace of the game is definitely not for those interested in extremely quick leveling. Although there is plenty to do, and the the experience for mission is quite generous at lower levels, you don’t get the experience until you’re done the mission, so it seems like a long time between XP gains.

Let me explain: In Star Trek Online, many of the missions have several parts to them, what you might call in another MMO a Quest Chain. These Missions take you all over a map, usually with some combat thrown in, and they take a while to finish. The upside to this is that they tend to be a lot of fun, especially if you take the time to read the Mission Text.  I haven’t hit a point where the mission all seem the same yet, which makes things flow along smoothly.

How did it get grindy then? Simply the amount of time that it took to get to the next Rank. I found that I was really struggling to get those last few quests in, but the promise of a new ship was a great carrot to drive me forward.

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