Still don't have a firm date I can give you guys, unfortunately. Development here on the internals of the system is quickly getting resolved, however, and we really appreciate your patience, especially given that things have taken longer than we originally anticipated.

Cool beans thanks for the update. I've been away from STO and the forums for a while and probably will not play very regularly until this system of the Department head system is in, it'll give me a little more to do.

Agreed ^^

I'm excited to hear things are progressing quickly though.

Even if you can't give us a Firm date what about a soft week? :p

Also, I know you've been saying this delay has allowed you guys to add more stuff to the system. Mind quantifying roughly what we're getting thanks to the delay that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise? I think that might help people with this delay

"So we get a 1000 assignments originally but now we get 1600." Something like this...

I too would like to hear more about the KDF DOff System. Heretic you've been doing a great job keeping us posted. And when I dont see you on the forums as much I know your either working hard on this DOff System or taking some well deserved time off. You are appreciated

I would like to suggest that you do consider making the First Officer slot a new BOFF appropriate character level rank universal ship slot (i.e. Commander for Captain and above level characters) with the new DOFF passives any Duty Officer can absorb. I have no idea what the new active power(s) are supposed to be , so I don't know if they would still be appropriate if the First Officer is also a new universal BOFF slot.

Allowing the First Officer to be a new universal BOFF slot for a ship would add alot more flexibility to the current BOFF ship system, and largely eliminate the need to put out more variants of ships with specific BOFF slot arrangements to fill in missing or requested gaps.

with the difficulty settings set to higher levels any thought to having the doffs "get hurt/ and or die" if you loss crew when a space combat? It would add some realism to the crew pool loss for us.

There's a temporary hold on new screenshots until the madness associated with the first wave of Season 4 getting out the door subsides. I will see what I can do after that, though. In the meantime, be assured that the KDF side of it is perfectly abreast of the Federation development. Might want to start stockpiling commodities, though...


Super-hard question.

Um, probably the biggest difference is we're going to get in a lot more different kinds of mechanics for inputs, requirements and rewards. We have had a lot more opportunity to experiment with things like bridge officers for rewards, the possibility of direct buffs, Colonial dependency chains...things like that. The number, of course, will also be higher, probably by about 30% or so, but as someone mentioned a while back, because many of the assignments are systemic in their final implementation (for example, "Experimental Deflector", "Experimental Science Console", "Experimental Ground Armor"), a straight tally is a little deceptive.

Also, because I will be doing some work on ships for a couple of weeks after the first iteration of the duty officer system is put to bed, I am learning a lot more about that side of things, and that is opening up some better duty officer active roster mechanics among other synergistic elements of gameplay.


This has been brought up as a long term possibility, possibly incorporating a larger revamp of the combat crew meter mechanic on your ship. I think there is some potential in this.

Good info, you guys are the bee's Knees