Last fall, in what seems like the heels of  the "Victory is Life" expansion some new content dropped on STO, titled "Age of Discovery" which seems to be content for the game that runs concurrent with the show that started yesterday evening, and perhaps with the on-going IDW series on Star Trek Discovery.  With this new content you start off as a cadet in the Discovery era of Star Trek (10 years before TOS).  This particular mini-expansion doesn't have the usual hallmarks of expansions, such as temporal beacons, completing missions for account-wide rewards and so on.  It also seems like the content for this expansion will be released periodically over 2019 in conjunction with the show; and perhaps when the show concludes in the spring we'll come back to the Victory is Life story-arc.

With this expansion, one thing that went away was the availability of "Red Alerts" which were relatively easy queues for multiple players to join on a common goal.  These queues had a 30 minute cooldown, which means that once you concluded a game you needed to wait 30 minutes before you started another one.  And, there as an accolade associated with it: Kill an insane amount of borg, earn medal (Defender of the Quadrant).  The problem was that each Red Alert only got you 4-8 borg...so getting to 2000 took forever.  Now, before they retired the Red Alerts they got rid of of the cool down period, so I was able to grind through the remaining 200 kills to earn the accolade



Defender of the Quadrant