Hello, and welcome back to Joe and STO! I hope everyone reading this had a wonderful holiday season and is seeing their New Year start off strong.
Today, I want to look at the potential timing of STO’s 11th (!!!) Anniversary Event. With no word on anything yet (aside from hints in a podcast around the middle of last month), I figured I’d take a stab at guessing the approximate release date for this Event.
TWEET SERIES: Analyzing Past Events
I posted a thread about what we feel we can expect and when. You can view it here, or you can read the TL;DR below:
- The first mention of anything about the 10th Anniversary last year was January 15th, 13 days before what became the release date of the 10th Anniversary Event.
- The next mention was January 16th, previewing the then-new “To Hell With Honor” TFO.
- January 20th, 8 days before release, saw the free Anniversary ship’s stats released. This also started 6 days of Giveaways (if you count the Star Trek: Picard 2399 uniform).
- From there, we got information almost daily until January 28th, patch day for the 10th Anniversary.
I understand last year’s schedule was pre-COVID, meaning the developers (“devs”) were working at Cryptic Studios itself and in better communication with each other than work-from-home allows now. However, we’ve been under COVID work-at-home for nearly a year so I’d imagine the Anniversary release will be at more normal timing this year than if work-from-home started in, say, August or September.
Considering I’m looking at a more normal release window, I looked at STOWiki to check the release dates of each Anniversary Event from the 4th Anniversary through to last year (as 4th Anniversary started the practice of account-unlocked free Anniversary ships). Here’s what I gathered:
- The launch window seems to not vary by more than a week: January 23rd is the earliest, January 30th is the latest.
- If we assume “the final week of January” is the target, that gives us either January 26th or January 28th for the release of the 11th Anniversary Event.
- Most Anniversaries fell on a Thursday, but the past 3 have been on either Tuesdays or a Wednesday.
Considering all this, I’ll wager a guess that the 11th Anniversary will release somewhere between January 26th and January 28th, 2021.
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! The Event Before the Event
Now that we have our window, it would be nice to have a bit more evidence to suggest this is accurate…and we got it, possibly last night in a Tribble test server patch.
TimberWolf posted on his Discord channel that something on Tribble showed a Red Alert Event for January 12th through January 28th. The nosey person I am, I hopped on to see what he was talking about.
Sure enough, on a loading screen, we have soft confirmation: a Galactic Red Alert Event scheduled for January 12th through January 26th (at a glance, the “6” looks like the hook finishes a curve to make an “8”, so that’s a super easy mistake to make when glancing quickly at a fast-loading map transition loading screen).
Notice the end date, January 26th. Cryptic tends to have Events either not overlapping or not by much (+/- a couple hours or days). Also, “Galactic Red Alert” tends to be a “filler Event,” meant to keep players busy for about a week in the break between the larger 21- or 30-day Events.
(Although not exactly on topic, notice the rewards: 1 each of an Ultimate Tech Upgrade Token, Experimental Ship Upgrade Token, and Spec Point. The event runs twice as long [14 days vs. 7 days normally] and requires twice the “effort” [10 days vs. 5, but Borg and Tholian Red Alerts are super easy!], but that added Ship Upgrade Token is free! Remember, that Ship Upgrade is the relatively new “T6-X” token, taking your T5-U or T6 ship and adding a Universal console slot [can slot any type of Console in it], Device Slot, and Starship-specific Starship Trait slot).
FINALIZED-ISH GUESSES BELOW
Back on topic, what does that tell us about the 11th Anniversary Event if we also assume they’re on schedule for a normal release window?
With 92.573% surety (give or take a few tenths…or whole percentages, I don’t know, I made it up!), I’d reasonably guesstimate the following:
- First blog mentioning any Anniversary update information: January 11th – January 13th, so at least something will come this upcoming week.
- Free Anniversary Event Ship’s Stats: January 18th
- 11th Anniversary Event Start Date: January 26th
The other options I feel we have are January 28th (breaking with a 3-year tradition of starting on a not-Thursday day of the week) and February 2nd (also the latest Anniversary Events have started, going back to the 1st and 2nd Anniversaries). If that’s the case, add about 2-7 days to the above estimates and adjust for anything that may fall on a weekend (though weekend updates aren’t off-limits, they are unlikely).
SAVE THE DATE!…DATES? JUST KEEP AN EYE OUT.
That’s the best I can offer for a timeframe for when we’ll get the 11th Anniversary without more concrete information. There has been talk of putting a mission that should have released with House Shattered into the Anniversary Event (due to work-from-home issues delaying that episode), and there’s talk of even bigger things intended for release at the Anniversary, so we’ll see if they’ve been able to navigate work-from-home well enough to stick to a normal release schedule or if we’ll see delays.
These dates are also only for PC. Console will get House Shattered content first, then they’ll get the Anniversary, usually about 6 weeks after PC does.
As always, though, keep up with the official Star Trek Online webpage and/or Twitter account for official information. All I do is report what I see and think.
Until next time, have a great rest of the weekend and enjoy STO!
Joe and STO 