The guy speaking in binary is just an example of how you can be creative and make the mission interesting if you have a little imagination. It's like Dr. Who in the 70's. The sets and the makeup were boffo, but because the writers were really creative they took what they had an made really compelling stories, even though they didn't have the advanced computer generated graphics we have today.

The flip side is, there are plenty of movies out there that RELY on the graphics to make the experience good but the plot is empty and boring. You can do a lot with a little creativity. This mission just shows that a lot of the sto writers 1) don't know Star Trek and 2) aren't very creative.

But creativity is a rare talent so I'm just happy we have the foundry. :p

For you? Probably not. A mission is all about opinion and my guess is that your taste and mine differ significantly.

Although I do have a 2 recorded log reports that you can actually play(as in use a console to activate the verbal log). You might enjoy that part. The rest, not likely. Not enough "use console" objectives. I prefer to write dialog.

I was referring to the basic idea of reading dialog that had the player and his BOs figure something out and then perform some complex action using "use object" objectives to advance the story.

Oh come on. Are you seriously telling me that the Romulan Arc where we find out how the Hobus Star went Nova and destroyed Romulus wasn't creative? I thought that was great. It mixed Protomatter (something we only heard about in Star Trek II) as well as Trilithium which caused a star to go Super Nova (See Star Trek VII) and the third component I can't remember. That was very creative and well done.

To-LordDave

As harsh as your review was for this mission, it's actually what I was hoping how people would review my own missions.

It may sting and some may feel insulted, but in the end, those who read and actually take the ideas could make even better missions. They may not agree with all the points but I'm sure some things would be very useful.

As for this mission, I'm going to give it a look once I get enough time to run through an entire mission.

No. I guess my view of creative and that of the mainstream differ greatly. There are so many ideas that have yet to be explored. I guess I expect a lot. There have been some interesting missions in the Foundry, written by people who have obviously been Star Trek fans for a long time and want to explore the material. That's what I was promised at the Star Trek convention with the STO sales pitch, it's not what we got.

I thought it was very creative.
But if there really are so many ideas to explore well then the foundary lets you to put your money where your mouth is and make a mission with these unexplored ideas.
If you need any help with the technical details, the forum will be happy to help.

I think examples of the 47 conspiracy showing up in STO missions shows that there are some Star Trek writing traditions being continued in the game without most people even realising it. It shows that they are into Trek meta-level, more than just common things like knowing how to respond to Tellarites in dialogue.

Some of the storylines they've introduced are extremely creative in tying together things from the TV series, like the whole Preservers thing in the Deferi series - they tied together the Preserver storyline from TOS, and the advanced first humanoids from TNG's "The Chase" and merged them together in a plausible way, which continued both unexplored plot lines from Trek and brought them to us as a modern audience.

It felt very Trek-like to me.

The weeklies are pretty good, but that is not what we got at first. I've said already the weeklies are good, when they are available.

The game fails to implement Star Trek principles at a very basic level, there is no meta level of Star Trek. First of all you can't set phasors to stun. What is meta about that? It's not even Star Trek 101. Plus you go around and kill everything. That's not Star Trek 101 or even 100. There is no meta anything. LOL!

First off, some phasers have stun. Look at a stun hand phaser some time.
Secondly, if all weapons had a stun setting then two things would occur.

1. The shields would never go down so your enemy would basically never die. (plus you can't one hit them or they could one hit you)
2. The bodies would stay. There is a reason why games remove dead NPCs...

Again, you want a simulator, which is fine. STO was never designed for that. It was designed to apeal not only to Star Trek fans but also to non-Star Trek fans. I'm sorry if they have to design missions that don't fit your ideal view all the time but like I said, if you don't like it show us you can do better.

They have the stunning in the Devidian weekly series. So now they have that ability, they've mentioned that they are redeveloping the first missions like the SS Azura and want to remaster every mission because they are moving to a new mission architecture. It's in the latest news.

I think his argument is that STO didn't launch awesome.
Plus that whole "set phasers to stun" was just dialog. It didn't make any difference to game mechanics that I saw.