free bump, i personaly enjoy seeing how creative people can be

This is an important enough line of thought to be worth quoting.

"Some players could potentially abuse it" is never a reason not to add a feature, if said abuse is something that's already not allowed by the terms of service agreement. There is a REPORT button in the game for a reason.

You can always type it into your character's biography

I don't like it, imagine the number of fake "B0rgzz1" we'll be swarmed with.

I think the reason you can't name your own species is simply to keep things less complicated server side or maybe it's to prevent you from being mistaken for one of the preset races.

To me, if I saw several characters that all looked the same but with different race labels.. that would break immersion.. or vice versa... three characters all labeled as the same race but with drastically different appearances would also be a bit of an immersion breaker..

The problem is.. a majority of people really just aren't that creative, it's not so much that the system would be abused but rather that the system would be poorly used...

Honestly the best bet is to just write your own biography, people that care enough about what race you are will be the same type of people to read what you have written..

Very good points, on the other hand however, seeing all these "Aliens" breaks immersion as well for every race is an Alien to one-another so it would only be fair to the "Aliens" that all races are dubbed as an "Alien" and make everyone write what race they chose in their biography.

I agree completely. I've made a Romulan and want the universe to know it

Is that him in your avatar? Nice Romulan and thanks for your input!

Or if you could "send" (or sell) your character creation to others, so members of the same fleet could have crews from the same place

Well, sure.

Custom alien creation now - most people seem to use it to just make humans with min-maxed skills, or really bad looking abominations with all the sliders put to the edges.

Doesn't mean the game should cater to the lowest common denominator. If some people will use it well, and some people will have fun using it poorly, what's the harm? If your immersion has survived all the Federation ships with disruptors, and people running around the space stations with their guns out, and seeing the USS I AM AWESOME go whizzing past in sector space, it can take seeing some alien race names that may not make sense with the character.