Premium Website: The Details Continue

by Chris Lobban, Chief Programmer

17th November 2008

If you haven't read the first two articles about the upcoming Premium Website, I would suggest you start with them. My first article discussed some of the basic facts about the new Premium Website, and the previous article talked about the pricing scheme. Plus, each introduced you to one of the new features that will be included. This time, we're going to examine another big feature, which I hope a lot of people will find extremely useful.

But first, I wanted to take a few moments to discuss another little bonus that will be included in the one-year subscription package. Every member that signs up for a full year at a time will receive their own yourhandle@trekcc.org email address. You'll have the option to use it as a private mailbox (separate from any other email accounts you might have), or use it as a redirect towards a different account. Either way, it will allow you to have a dedicated and easy-to-remember email address that you can use for all of your Star Trek needs.

Now, on to the feature. This is another one that falls into the category of "anything you can do, I can do better." As I've said many times before, we don't want the Premium Membership to be mandatory for players just to be able to use this site, but rather a bonus. So, any features people can use right now will still be available for free... the Premium versions will just be better. One popular current feature is the Deck Builder. At the time I write this article, we've got 428 decks inserted into the Deck Builder, 206 of which have been visibly published. The thing is, the Deck Builder as it exists right now is great for inputting your decks to share with the world, or for printing off decklists to submit at a tournament... but it's lacking a bit on the 'build' part. And that's where the new Premium Deck Builder comes into the picture.

The Premium Deck Builder will allow you to not just enter your deck into the system, but actually build and design it as you go. It comes with a wide variety of filters that you can apply to the cardlists as you build your deck, to make sure that you're finding exactly the right cards that you need. Are you looking for an Alpha Quadrant Planet mission requiring Biology that a Federation team can attempt? There are 14 of them; browse through and pick out the one that would fit best in your deck, then add it in with a single click. What about a Dual dilemma that can capture a personnel, and requires Security to overcome? That only brings up one candidate, Cardassian Processing, so with a single click you can add that into your dilemma deck. Did you just realize that your own deck is short on Security? Enter in a few quick parameters and you can see that the Romulans have a lot of Security to choose from. But only one has Cunning>6, so Koval can be quickly added to the deck.

All in all, the ability to quickly filter your cardlist based upon almost any characteristic you could imagine should make your next deck build go a lot faster, and smoother than ever. No longer do you need to flip through binders of cards to build your deck, then just use the software to write it down after the fact. No longer do you need to have three different websites open just to look up all the information that you need as you build a deck. Everything is now right at your fingertips, ready to go. Build away.