This may or may not be related....

Is there some rule that says all factions must be equal? I think the quickest way to get a Romulan Faction into the game is to make it accessible only after you reach level 31 on one of your characters. That way the Devs cut their content development needs in half. Plus, it relegates factions like the Romulans to their proper place in Star Trek lore: important, but not as much as the Federation (the heros of Star Trek) or the Klingons (the original bad guys).

They could do that to all future faction add-ons. You only have access once you reach level 31. And since all factions only really have three tiers of ships anyway, the Devs could make those be T3, T4, and T5 for faction play. So instead of the "Oh, s**t, we are out of officers, here's a ship" we have with the Federation where you start from the ground up, all other factions (sans Klinks) start at level 31 with Com-level skills, four computer generated BOffs, and a T3 fighter ("Here are you orders Centurion"). And then you go from there.

I think going that route would be best. It would cut the content creation requirements in half and would allow the factions to be deployed faster. Plus, they could always do it as an "expansion pack lite." You actually unlock the character slots for the new factions by paying, say, 100 emblems or paying $15 in the C-Store. But you must have at least one character be level 31 or higher before that option is available.

/mindless brainstorm....

Rule? No. General expectation? Yep. You think the response to the KDF is bad, just release a faction with even LESS content and see what happens.

A concrete example:

Expose and Exploit. GREAT mechanic.

But it really should be a Romulan thing.

With a different mechanic (Cover and Focus Fire? - steady damage boost for cooperating) for Feds. And a different mechanic (Glory and Honor? - bonus for taking on a target by yourself, the bigger and tougher the better) for Klingons. And there should be a synergy to combining the mechanics in STFs while making the same content feel different in single player, even though you're going to the same places and encountering the same scenarios, barring dialogue differences and some empire-specific options.

Rolling a new character should take you to the same places (saves on content development) while feeling unique each time.

I don't see it not happening if they plan to mass release factions... and the way Klingons are being developed says to me it's a high priority to develop a means of doing this.

I think we've misunderstood each other here. It sounded like you wanted to throw every species into the same faction, which is very much different than what we have seen in Trek, and makes absolutely no sense based on the history and opinion of the different species.

Really, no. No, no and no. Aside from the weirdness of comparing entire species to classes rather than factions (which sounds like majorly dumbing down the setting) this would simply result in an utter lack of consistency across the entire game.

We don't play some sort of independent mercenaries who can afford to change allegiance every now and then, we're officers of highly structured organizations who are bound to obey the orders given by command. If a Romulan attacks the Federation, that's an act of war. If there's a war, all Federation ships will be ordered to shoot all Romulan ships. It's as simple as that - and anything else would just make the game come off really unrealistic.

This is what I always felt was extremely idiotic about the Alliance/Horde thing in ******** as well: Two blocks that are hostile to each other, yet not really going to war, but not really making peace either, doing skirmish after skirmish and simultaneously working together elsewhere. Totally took the believability right out of the setting, at least in terms of politics. I really do not want to see this kind of stuff in STO.

I would agree in making Klingon Alliance characters have slightly different skill trees than the Feds instead of being 100% identical aside from a few racial traits, but turning "Klingon" into a class of its own sounds like a much too massive change. Even if we leave out the aforementioned teaming stuff, which I just cannot endorse out of preference for a more independent faction design and a consistent setting where we have either war or peace, not something in between that can be changed on the spot depending on the individual player.

I think we are misunderstanding eachother. I'm not suggesting we change allegience (although on the "mercenary" point, Trek captains have very broad discretionary powers I don't think get modeled in game as well as they could be; orders in Trek are basically "go here and use your best judgment; you know the principles you're to abide by").

I'm suggesting we have one world. Your organization (Starfleet, etc.) influences how you interact with that world. Some groups team openly (Cardassians and Feds, for instance; neither group "owns" the other groups but their values overlap in the game setting and Cardassia wants to join the Federation). Some groups don't (Klingons and Feds.)

In survival situations (such as TNG "Allegiances", many DS9 episodes) you have encounters where survival and escape and resistance against a mutual foe matters more than what organization you belong to. That is where I would make allegiance irrelevant and the formula for which I'd base cross-faction teaming.

Not in this point. I get what you mean, I just maintain it doesn't fit in a state of war. And if you stop the war and make all factions neutral to each other (which would be necessary for what you propose), you cannot just have it start anew (which would be necessary for PvP) the next day because the mission says so. This kind of back-and-forth quite simply takes the believability out of the setting and has an adverse effect on the immersion.

That's true - but it would quite simply suck if every mission would follow the same cliché of some exceptional incident to railroad the characters into grudging teamwork again and again and again. This would get old really fast, which is why such episodes ("Day of the Dove", "Waltz") only appear once per season of any series, if at all. Generally, this is quite simply not a concept on which you could base core mission design on, but rather something special like we already have with Omega Leonis.

Except I'm not proposing that.

I'm proposing classes, some of which are hostile to eachother. As in, cannot play together. Some can. The specifics vary by class.

There would just be survival situations where hostilities are irrelevant, like where five captains get kidnapped by a third party and must work together or all die.

I'm suggesting that a mission would be the situation in an area, completely faction agnostic for the most part.

Just because Klingons and feds have the same situation doesn't mean they can team or that it goes down the same way. But Feds and Cardassians can or Klingons and Cardassians can, conceivably. But the group composition must be compatible. The mission is faction agnostic but the player characters aren't.

In turn, I'm suggesting that STFs be created as the situation where faction doesn't matter.

But I am suggesting that ideally, no two factions would have the same skill trees or gameplay mechanics and that teaming builds on synergy between cross faction teaming between friendly factions (and there are generally rules about who you are and aren't hostile with).

There are people who can be friendly to both Feds and Klingons and can team with either. In general, the bulk of players could team with the bulk of players but maybe each would have two that they couldn't team with, creating a barrier to forming "the perfect group" outside of situations that demand "the perfect group" where war might be set aside for common survival.

Heres the problem: unless those "classes" have their own unique stories that make them who they are, then theres no point in having more than one(if their all doing the same thing). But as we can already see, its not possible for Cryptic to create a balanced amount of faction(or class) specific content, so even in your system the Fed class would have more Fed themed content than any other class.