Now I know this may not be the most popular idea but hear me out.

Why not have a Free Lock Faction, what this means is simply put you can just say "sorry boss I got a better offer across the street." in STO terms it means, both either the federation or kdf players can choose to resign from the factions they are in and take their ships with them, however it would force a decal on the ships they have that are faction based. this would have to be top level based.

this would also mean their Z-Store ships would stay on the previous faction, and they would need to remove all items from the Z-Store ships before they could begin crossing over, or they can dismiss the Z-Store ships they have.

anything not bought on the Z-Store can be transfered with them. so the Aniversary Oddys can go, any lockbox can go, as well as fleet ships and rank up reward/dil purchased ships.

and then once transfered over they would be able to buy romulan ships and reman ships.

this can be brought into lore by having it stand as emigration or Retirement. since all the ships obtained are the property of the admirals who obtained them it seems somewhat plausible.

it would also allow for people to start out as a romulan, but to quickly populate the romulan faction, the transfer could work.

but once this is done, the Admirals cannot turn back.


I had a bunch more things to add to this, to make it more apealing but my brain just stopped after 3 hours of writing this, between going back and forth with my baby niece and just plain housework it just stopped flowing.

Isn't that committing treason and would mean that your faction would try and kill you?

not all the time, If im not mistaken once you quit, they wouldnt give a damn.

or they would.

either way, I remember in DS9 when worf was introduced as a new cast member, he and sisko talked about his continuing service to starfleet, worf considered joining some alliance or something, it wasnt federation. and it seemed that anyone can join. sisko didnt care much or call it treason.

but if they do, then hell you have an incentive for PVP.

Worf was considering resigning from Starfleet and working for someone else who wasn't an enemy. Going to an enemy faction is something different. http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Stefan_DeSeve Taking a ship with you? Only if you really want to be hunted.

problem with your statment is the Romulans, least the ones we know of right now are not our enemies.

however if it turns to Sela then yea your statment becomes valid.

Well, D'tan's Unificationists aren't really "marching beneath the raptor's wings".

Taking a ship to a rival government would be theft of Federation property, and thus treason. It's the same thing as an American submarine captain taking his sub and joining the Russians or the Chinese -- you just don't do that!

There was an episode of TNG where a Romulan had stolen intel from the Romulan government to give to the Federation, in an effort to avert a crisis. He was still a Romulan patriot, to the point that he destroyed the ship he came on to prevent the Federation from getting their hands on Romulan technology... and he was still considered a traitor by the Romulan government, and certainly would never have had a place in Starfleet given his past affiliation.

Now, if Cryptic just made it a retrait/refaction token that took your character and allowed you to change the species, and gave you comparable ships to what you had before, that would be another thing. Just allow you to take all that progress you made on one character and completely rewrite that character's history, like a faction change in WoW.

Imagine how many Romulan ships named "Red October" we'd see captained by "S'ean Connerus."

A rather interesting idea, but I rather like my oddy, if you can promise me a scimitar ill do it