Mwa ha ha!

I literally laughed out loud on your response.

Based off what I've seen on Champions, the giant grey "!" could mean a couple things. Because it's grey, I'm leaning more towards option one. For option two in CO, it's usually a more dramatic shape and brightly colored.

1> This is a mission objective NPC. The player might not yet have fulfilled the necessary requirement to talk to it, such as eliminating all of the surrounding threats. The giant grey "!" might then turn white to indicate the NPC can be interacted with.

2> The NPC is about to unleash a massive attack on the player party, which would require a blocking action to reduce damage.

Anyone else have thoughts on this?

Cryptic should really have someone who speaks Russian translate it. Google translate (or any software translation) is obviously flawed. Otherwise we post this?

Very disappointed considering everything on the forums is supposed to be in English.

Well, the interview was for a Russian site, so it is only natural that they will put it in the Russian language. The interview is not on the STO site, and it's really impractical (and impolite) to tell the Russian group that they need to translate this into English. Finally, there are many speakers of the Russian language on these forums (there's even a thread dedicated to them) and this interview has already been nicely translated.

The points seem moot. YMMV.

Took me a minute to remember how to get Google to translate it for me, then I had to read each line twice to figure out what it meant, (already i feel like starship captain) but by the time i figured it out, good article. I'm suddenly enamored by the aspect of infecting enemy ships with tribbles....