What if the mission takes place in a system or sector that is not part of the Cryptic map? You know... that whole "explore strange new worlds" thing. Should authors make you travel to, for example, Zeta Andromedea then spend a few dialog pop-ups explaining why you made a pit stop at the border planet before traveling to the real destination? Or do all these authors have to write in a convoluted plot device to launch your ship into unknown space from known systems? I, for one, am becoming very suspicious of transwarp gates. I plan to petition the Federation to discontinue their use, along with holodecks, because of the imminent danger they pose to all Starfleet personnel.

Anyway, think of your unseen magic traveling as what happens between the teaser/opening credits and the first commercial.

Side note: As a player, I appreciate as little down time as possible during my gaming session. And I don't really find chugging through sector space and going through X number of load screens to be that critical to immersion.

Agreed. I find travel to be something of a drag, but if the mission sounds interesting (and the mission description isn't written with no punctuation!) I suck it up and drive to where I need to go.

Maybe Cryptic should consider adding a UGC daily "wrapper" mission for each sector block. That promotes playing more UGC and authoring content for more diverse starting locations since the daily will cause people to play more remote missions. Maybe incentivize distant UGC daily wrappers with an extra reward.

It seems like that would require a major overhaul of the UGC interface. What I mean is, how would you know which missions started in which sector without having to accept them first? It would take an awful amount of time to find the missions for the specific sector blocks you wanted.

All they'd have to do is check our first spawn point. Should be easy to set up a search based on only that. (Easy being a relative term since my programming expertise involves a self filling out Excel spreadsheet)

The system knows where the starting door hookup is. As overhauls go, being able to sort UGC by location would take some work but I wouldn't necessarily assume it's an impossibly massive task either and it may be necessary to keep travel as a part of the system.

I don't plan on doing it for my missions either. But I will admit to thinking twice about starting a mission out in the far end of Cardassian space versus closer to DS9/Sol.

I am not a fan of going from ESD directly to a map, but if your story needs that to happen you know people will get annoyed if they have to fly all the way to ESD then find they have to fly all the way out of some remote part of the galaxy.

What would be nice is if they could give us a proper version of the new sol system (with the updates ESD) that way people could at least create a sol space map to act as a nice transition and make it less jarring.

Thats the thing; they dont. People dont have to talk face to face in ST, so you can get your mission from a communication and then travel to the starting system. There is no reason a person would have to go to ESD just to accept the mission; at least according to the shows/movies.

This is the primary reason most of my missions are "relayed" to the player via a bridge officer. That way it's like the first officer came in and said, "Captain, we have some new orders." The only time I didn't do that was when I picked a random NPC and acted as if the Captain was receiving a secret sub-space communication.

Neither require any suspension of disbelief to work.