Star Trek

First of all ,if you cant live with a whole pile of solo players piloting their starships around go play something else.How you could even think that perpetual wouldnt head in this direction of allowing everyone to be captain is utterly absurd.

Perpetual is in the buisiness to make money ,not to make a few treknuts happy.They have to design to the broader gaming community,and i honestly totally agree with their direction,it will make them more money then some of what has been suggested here.Had this not been a MMORPG then i could see them being more chained to canon,but seeing as mmorpg's rely on people actually paying to play ,they must keep the greater customer base happy.

Dont worry their will be alot of diehard trek nuts that will play the game you want so you will have lots of oppurtunity to escape the real world and live in a make believe star trek one where you can become Chief Janitor

You'll be surprised, most here would hate the idea of being captain and dealing with a whining crew all day.
I am certainly not going for the post.  Its an instant 'Do you have any free stuff?' position from people.

Constant bombardment of that, umm, let other people find it out I say.

Well presumably Perpetual will try to make a large effort to make all the departments appealing to people of different tastes and hopefully make getting captain harder than jedi, captain is for people who want it, not for people who want tp pwn, this won't be an individual 1v1 combat game, and hopefully the fps system for ground combat will further compound this, so I am not too worried about being swamped with lots of captains.

Being an leader in an online game isnt so easy, ive been in orgs without an true leader, who lean on other orgs leaders for organizing PvE large scale raids, and PvP. And all crews in Canon ST got an chain of command, who also occcur in Mmorpg's, im playing EVE now, and we got an chain of command who had more or less made itself, some are leaders, in games as in real life, others arent. In ST, if commander isnt present, an other step in, same happen in f.exs EVE.

Flying an solo 1 pilot shuttle dont make all captains  

Thanks for the info TSO, lots of interesting bits.

20 years post Nemesis gives them space for them to create new content/technology for the game, and also keeps a somewhat empty space of 20 years should paramount want to create another series in that time, like Riker commanding the USS Titan. Now the problem is the ships in the current fleet will be aging at this point, the Sovereign, Akira, Defiant etc will be 20-30 years, the galaxy will be close to 40. 20 Years past the last point in time we saw star fleet and we will expect a ton of new ships with the old ships, question is will they provide them?

Uniform change is fine by me, as long as they look good. They mentioned before that you would be able to pick whichever era uniform for your crew iirc, I wonder if that is still in? if so, the new uniforms being made for the game shouldn't be an issue.

The galactic war makes me think of the ds9 war, not star wars(come on guys think star trek here). I wouldn't mind something like this for the end game content. In fact I welcome it, it would make the game interesting in another way other than exploring, it's something to look forward to, a good conflict makes a story more interesting. As long as they have a good balance of both types of content, I don't want to level up as an explorer and then suddenly have to switch to combat fighting full time. Now 20 years into the future, who's going to be the main enemy force?

Economy, still same arguments. I'll say this, if someone can point out a viable way this can work smoothly within Star Fleet, I say Star Fleet not the Federation because we'll be running around as Star Fleet officers, not civilians, then I'll welcome it. That means listing EXACTLY how you see it working. As it is right now, I don't see a player run economy like swg working well in the current vision of the game or the vision of star trek overall for that matter, I still see a bartering system working, otherwise I think it's something that should be added in the expansion with there are more empires/ trading races/trading professions become available.

Interface, I don't care if it's LCARS or not, as long as it's smooth and easy to use. Give me another FFXI interface and I'll chuck the game in the garbage, seriously. Too many game companies pay little to no attention to the interface these days, it's something we stare at and use the whole time we're playing, at least make it comfortable to use and look at.

Good information.  

I wish you had some pictures that would been nice too.  

i remembered now where i saw the name Glen Dahlgren first time, Death Gate!!  
An funny game, then. Must have been his first game, maybe.

I was at the presentation, too, and I, like Tal, had general admission seating, so had little hope of getting questions in early on.  Didn't get any in later, either, but I digress.  

In any case, in response to Tal specifically, I agree that some of the questions were foolish, and that guy with the reprimand idea might as well have been wearing a griefer t-shirt himself.  For reference, PE's diplomatic answer was that they had already considered a commendation system for crew members when they do good things, and then kinda dodged around the reprimand thing, which basically told me that they aren't even considering it.  

As to your question, which I also recall, the "everyone wanting to be captain" thing won't be a problem.  Trust me.  Everyone has their favorite departments from Trek, the ones they'd want to serve in if Starfleet actually existed, and the interests are widespread enought that only those who really really want to be a captain will actually do it.  There will be plenty who want to stick in engineering, or medical, or at the helm or tactical consoles.  The only way that the captain thing might become an issue is if PE gives the captain the capability to commandeer any of the ship's systems for their own use, which would be stupid.  Captains do not stand at the tactical console; they do not do planetary scans; and they do not risk their lives trying to prevent a warp core breach.  (Well, except in the most dire and specific of situations, but you get the idea)

I have been playing with a roleplaying group for years now, often in the Star Trek RPG by Decipher.  We recently started a new campaign, our first as Starfleet, actually, and when the GM asked who wanted to play what positions, we ended up with three people wanting to be engineers, one tactical, one medical, and one ops.  And when the GM said he would like one of us to play the captain, rather than him be an NPC, we looked at each other blankly and all said things like, "Well, I will if I have to...".  Furthermore, I find in my online experience that lots of people do not like to lead at all; they'd prefer to follow, for whatever reason.

But I am not naive.  There will be people who want to play captain out there.  More than likely, there will be some horribly sucky captains, too.  I actively lead a guild in Guild Wars, and try to play leader rather than just have that rank, and it's not easy.  Some of my members, as I said, are followers first.  But some people disagree with things sometimes.  It happens.  It's inevitable.  And some so-called "leaders" hate to be disagreed with.  That's the real danger: griefers becoming captains.

Lastly--and I don't want to sound too hostile--but were those guys you talked to afterwards a pair of kids, early teens, while you were walking through the casino?  If so, that would have been my brother and his friend.  In their defense, they weren't "calling Perpetual idiots," nor were they really supporting that guy's reprimand suggestion, because they are aware of what that could cause.  They are both current players of WoW, so they know there are griefers out there.  

In your defense, however, I have to admit that my brother does have this misconception--one which I have made efforts to dispell--that PE will allow players to take phasers and go on killing sprees on the bridge, which is what you probably heard him worrying about.

Thanks for the break down on the convention and Q&A Tal. It was informative and good to hear some of the stuff that went on there. It was great to see that PE did also post the concept art of the uniforms, ui parts, and the shockwave file as well. It really rounded out what you had posted.

Quote (UncleMo @ Aug. 14 2005, 7:44 am)

I'm glad I threw it in the trash 2 days after I bought it; couldn't even use arrow buttons to move around.

Wait, you threw away a $50 game because you couldn't use the arrow keys?

First, I thought that WASD was pretty standard nowadays. Using WASD allows you to keep one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse, if you're right-handed. I would be surprised if STO didn't use WASD for movement by default.

Second, pretty much every MMO, SWG included, allows you to customize your keyboard controls. You could have easily changed movement to use the arrow keys if you wanted to.


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