Mods in the Game

Well, looking back on my posts thus far, it seems like I am pretty hard on World of Warcraft (for a variety of reasons which I did my best to explain).

However, I just achieved the rank of Commander in STO (which included a new ship!) as well as upgrades on my weapon systems, my bridge crew's abilities, and my own abilities.

In other words, the already unwieldy amount of skills to keep track of during PvE gameplay has just increased drastically.

In STO, you can assign your skills to specific key combinations (the numbers 0-9, ctrl+0-9, and alt+0-9) and it really just becomes a game of memorization to remember which combinations are which skills or attacks, as well as what skills need to be used before specific attacks. It becomes extremely complicated. For example, in every space battle I fought before I got this new ship, my open gambit was the following key strokes:

ctrl+1: Directed Energy Modulation (which helps energy weapons to penetrate ship shields)
ctrl+4: Rotate Shield Frequencies (which helps reduce the damage taken to ones own ship)
6: Tachyon Beam (which depletes the opponent's shields)
5: High Yield (which increases the damage of the next torpedo attack)
1: Phaser Cannons (which is an attack)
2: Quantum Torpedo (which is an attack)

At various points throughout the battle, I would not only  need to reuse ctrl+1 and ctrl+4 as they came off of cooldown, but also use a variety of other skills (all of which are assigned similar key strokes).

This is, to a certain extent, simply how these games work: you either have to think about the button combinations or you hit them by reflex. However, one of the greatest innovations and benefits of World of Warcraft, in my opinion, is the ability for meta-game modification of the interfaces themselves as well as the construction of skills. In the case of the former, various mods have been programmed by gamers and can be integrated into ones own WoW interface that alter how one interacts with the information. When I played a Death Knight, for example, I downloaded a mod that altered how my HP and Runes (the equivalent to magical power for the class) were displayed so that it was more prominent and allowed me to better plan what skills I was using. I also downloaded one of many different skill bar mods that altered how one could organize skills and items for gameplay. In the case of the latter, it is possible to construct skill macros that will utilize certain skills and attacks in a preconfigured order. If the proper attack sequence, for example, required one to press "5" and then "2", one could simply construct a macro that would cast the spell associated with "5" and then automatically follow it with the skill associated with "2", thus decreasing the keystrokes necessary for the attack sequence.

I wish that STO had either of these functions. (Maybe it does, and I just haven't figured out how to use them yet; I have been trying to keep myself from using meta-game sources in order to preserve my own interactions with the game world)