I remember at release up until the time I quit playing 2 months later there was a official ship naming policy in place to prevent USS Enterprise (among others) variant names as well as non canon names such as USS Slong, etc.

In my return to the game this month I have been bombarded with what looks like hundreds of ships all packed around space dock or DS9 and its a dime a dozen the vulgar, offensive, comical, non canon, and USS Enterpris (without the 'e' seems popular) names as far as my draw distance can see.

I take it this rule was pretty much scrapped at some point? I want to join in with my own colorful names if that's the case.

I turned off ship names in Sector Space so that I can see something other than blue. I'm tempted to turn off the reticule as well (if I can find that setting). Unless they are friends, I don't care what the name of the ship is.

I did the same. Now, if I could turn off all the visable added features on other peoples ships so that they at least looked like Star Trek ships... sigh.

Not gone, just not well enforced. They never were, and it's not particularly worse now that the game's free, either. There were a lot of Enterperizzzes and Exitprises and enough ships called P'nus out there that they had to add the last one to the profanity filter a few weeks before the game went FTP.

I rather enjoy flying through sector space (especially near Earth) and seeing all the silly names. If there's anything actually offensive or copyright (Firefly references seem rather common), I just report them and move on.

Thats something else I noticed. All the 'blacklight' glowing ships and borg modified ships around me I wonder wtf happened in my time away in the game. CBS doesn't want Cryptic to have a avatar of 'Sisco' in the game but it's ok to completely disrupt the look and feel of Starfleet?

When I first logged in in the two years of being away I thought Starfleet had been assimilated and the Borg began renaming their captured ships 'Long Dong' to troll any remaining survivors.

Hey, leave my Tron graphics alone. I like my pimped out Excelsior.

There was a particularly delightful one (NOT), that won a Galor yesterday...

When the pop-up hit the chat, there was quite a moment of WTF? ... and gave us all a laugh.

(how stupid can one be?? ..... Just watch the pop-ups)

This might be the only positive aspect of the Galor Spam... weeding out the really inappropriate ones.

I mused at the time, that I wondered how long that player would get to keep that particular Galor.

<chuckle>

Report the inappropriate ones and be sure to cite the specific policy broken.

With the influx of new players, the GMs are busier than ever, but they can't fix what you don't report!

Its to be expected from the large influx of players. Its not that the rules don't exist anymore, but that it's harder to enforce. Not to mention a lot of the new players from the F2P launch are probably your average run-of-the-mill gamer, and just find those kind of names funny. I sometimes get a chuckle from the more interesting ways people try to name after a canon ship - without directly using it.

Just report them, and keep track of them I guess. I'd probably just go after offensive names myself.