All of these are great ideas, and that is how I pictured the game to be when I first heard of it a while ago.

I personally would like a distress beacon button. If you are in combat either PvE or PvP and you are out gunned, you should be able to put out a distress beacon that will alert others near that sector that another fleet ship is in trouble and can assist and become a side mission for them.

To prevent it from being overused it should only be active if you are getting your aft handed to you by being outnumbered by a set ratio of say 10 to 1, or you have been destroyed a set number of times.

I think this would add to a more, one star fleet feeling than the its my ship and I am doing this alone.

Though I agree that KOTOR and Mass Effect are both great models, I don't expect quite that level of development on the part of Cryptic. I just think it would be nice if the missions weren't quite so linear and challenged you to actually read the dialogue being spewed out. I like many of the story concepts I've seen, but they need to be more fleshed out.

These are really great story ideas, but they are rather unrealistic.


1) This is an MMO not an RPG. Cryptic doesn't get paid for you to read stories. They get paid when you buy gimmicks (like, I dunno.. a Klingon skin)

2) This game is made by Cryptic. They can't even fix simple graphical bugs like starships warping out twice or incorrectly at mission end, or making space combat truly 3-dimensional but you want them to add more choices on away missions, and personality/emotion development for your character?

I don't expect them to add character development per say, but story development would be nice. Also, a greater degree of mystery when going into a mission scenario rather than sending me on the same mission over and over again with different environments and character names.

You're proud of your ideas, aren't you?!

Like something akin to how Fallout 3 is set up? I think it's an interesting idea, however I'm not certain how well this would work with the group content. For example, what happens if two people on the same team choose different answers that would cause them to have to do different things? I'm all for more dialogue. I'm not certain that the current way that missions are implemented and scaled for solo or teams would allow for the meaningful system.

You're dead on right! This is something that's been beaten to death throughout the Open Beta (and probably before). The early Lieutenant missions are terrible. The game still feels wooden and unnatural. A bit like a Vulcan telling a joke. The later missions are better, but that doesn't mean that the first 20 missions or so are not terrible. They really do need to revamp them, link them together better, and work on raising the bar on them.

As far as exploration, do the exploration missions. They aren't really that well done, but they are close to what you are suggesting. Once again, they also scale to the number of people in a team, so I'm not certain how well your idea could be implemented.

I like this idea, but they'd really need to get out of the box that they've put themselves in. I don't think there even necessarily has to be new mechanics to try to do all these things. They have enough mechanics in the game to implement different routes. For instance, they could base it on the class of the Captain. For instance, there could be a dungeon with 7 groups of Klingons. There's a way to bypass 2 of the fights, if you are a Science Officer, because you can access a console that activates an emergency fire suppression system that locks the Klingons in a force field containment room. Another group or groups might be avoidable by an Engineering Officer accessing Jeffries Tubes or service tunnels. Tactical Officers just have to blast their way through.

It'd be nice if their encounters were comprised of enemy patrols or in the process of doing something, rather than just groups of enemies standing around waiting to be killed. What makes sense: guarding a prisoner, placing a bomb, patroling a hallway, etc. What doesn't make sense: loitering.

Err, not for ships. You're violating Trek canon. The computers are doing the actual targetting, and the computer processing is at FTL speeds. Since all of the ships are traveling at slower than FTL speeds in combat, then it doesn't make sense for shots to be missing. Torpedoes do miss, however, and it's a limitation of the engine that they can't animate that.

I don't agree. No MMORPG requires players to completely restart from the beginning. They do intend to implement a "crew death" penalty in the future. The fact is, the only time I've died since the nerf patch in Open Beta three weeks ago was when I got in a fight with 5 frigates and 4 cruisers. You literally have to do something stupid to get killed now. I was soloing Fleet Action mobs last night by kiting them.

Yes to all except the forced departure.

No. See Star Trek canon and game balance for details.

No, mainly because later ship classes do that. The differences between a Centaur and a Miranda are too small to measure.

Thanks for suggesting ideas! It's important to keep new ideas out there, even if people don't agree with them.

That's what role-playing is for. There's going to be a group of role-players getting together on DS9 this Sunday, I think.

Thanks for the in depth feedback. I think that you make some nice points well worth considering. All of my suggestions are of course very in need of further development, but I'm glad the conversation is being had anyway. Hopefully it will stimulate some ideas that are even better than mine.

Decent suggestions. However, STO has enough issues without throwing a death penalty into it. Talk about jacking up the repetitive factor which is already high. Maybe 3 years from now when we have the content the OP suggests, but not any time soon for a death penalty. Other than that, good suggestions.

some really good ideas here, glad I read the OP.

One thing I think is needed is that many locations feel very empty and big, there should be more NPC's around the place, even if they have irelevent dialogue sessions where they just talk to you about lore it would be nice. and also useful for people less familiar with the history of star trek.