Its actually common sense. Each ship only has one captain, therefore your first officer cannot be a "playable captain" and still be a member of your crew.
No. Only one character can be 'playable' at the same time.
And the only reason you would want a character playeable is on a mission.
So on that little interface that allows you to select your BO's for ground mission, at the top where it has your character, instead of having it static, allow it to be a dropdown between you and your First officer.
Then, when you show up on the planet, you are now the first officer.
In 2 of the last series of featured episodes(3 if you count The Vault), we were forcibly separated from our BOs by mission design/story. Do you like this? Do you want to see this more often in future episodes?
I've ended up having to 'solo' a few missions (*coughfirecavescough*) anyway. Its nice not to have to micromanage your away team every now and then.
the whole idea was to promote your FO to a captain and then they become a playable toon from the toon selection screen at login.
however, after reading your post again, i think they could just substitute your FO in place of you when on ground missions. not hard to do that really, skills would be associated with the FO, and they have the imagery tech to put him/her in place of your captain on ground missions...could work. (if this is what you mean)
Of course.
But instead of seeing him on the login screen and wondering "What ship is he captain of again??" you can use him on ground missions instead of lugging your admirals all over the place.
No. Only one character can be 'playable' at the same time.
And the only reason you would want a character playeable is on a mission.
So on that little interface that allows you to select your BO's for ground mission, at the top where it has your character, instead of having it static, allow it to be a dropdown between you and your First officer.
Then, when you show up on the planet, you are now the first officer.
Your confused, so let me clarify something: I understand what you are suggesting. However, you need to read my last post again. Each ship can only have one captain, so your first officer cannot be a "playable captain" and still be a member of your crew since you are the captain.
That said, I'm not saying your idea is bad, I'm just explaining to you why it isnt what the Devs said. If you want to make a thread suggesting your idea and how you want it to work, I'll support that. I'm just trying to help you understand that your idea is not what they have previously said.
Of course.
But instead of seeing him on the login screen and wondering "What ship is he captain of again??" you can use him on ground missions instead of lugging your admirals all over the place.
i could go for this...
however, note that this is not what has been talked about by cryptic. they are talking about converting your FO to a CPT, and then have that toon a selectable toon to play as a CPT...
edit: i see nagus has done an effective job of describing the current idea floating around regarding the issue. and i agree, i like your idea, and maybe you could start a new thread with the idea...
Your confused, so let me clarify something: I understand what you are suggesting. However, you need to read my last post again. Each ship can only have one captain, so your first officer cannot be a "playable captain" and still be a member of your crew since you are the captain.
That said, I'm not saying your idea is bad, I'm just explaining to you why it isnt what the Devs said. If you want to make a thread suggesting your idea and how you want it to work, I'll support that. I'm just trying to help you understand that your idea is not what they have previously said.
Unless one of us can show something that the devs have said other than "Make your first officer a playable captain" we are all making assumptions.
But, in my option, your assumption seems seems hard to fathom, not fun, and difficult to implement.
My assumption seems easy(except for the database server space) and fun.
So, i am also going to assume that you must know something more than i do because how you saw the words "Make your first officer a playable captain" and how I saw them where way off the ends of the spectrum
and no, i don't want to start a new thread on this unless someone can show me this wasn't the idea that cryptic had in mind to the "First officer to playable captain".
And this subject is done for me. Sorry for derailing.
Unless one of us can show something that the devs have said other than "Make your first officer a playable captain" we are all making assumptions.
But, in my option, your assumption seems seems hard to fathom, not fun, and difficult to implement.
My assumption seems easy(except for the database server space) and fun.
So, i am also going to assume that you must know something more than i do because how you saw the words "Make your first officer a playable captain" and how I saw them where way off the ends of the spectrum
You keep ignoring the main thing I am saying, which is common sense: your first officer cannot be captain of the same ship as you. Therefore, he cannot be a "playable captain" and be a member of your crew. That in itself proves that is not what the Devs were talking about. Feell free to keep denying the obvious all you want, it wont make a difference. But if you actually want the Devs to consider your idea, your going to have to post a thread about it, because that is not what they are currently considering/planning on doing.
Let's hope not. I understand it at Cutting the Cord, but it seems like a very very cheap and lame way to up the difficulty and avoid pathing problems at the same time.
It could have been a sneaky way to deal with pathing issues in some cases. Neutral in the matter.
---
I don't think they're trying to be sneaky, although I agree that's why they did it. Considering how involved it let's the devs make the map I don't really mind. Hopefully they improve the horrible npc pathing issues with the ground combat update.
I think The.Grand.Nagus take on it is correct, but I really like your take, Staran. You should post the idea in a seperate thread and maybe bring it up in the next Ask Cryptic?
I don't mind "going solo" occassionally. In the last mission I particularly liked the fact that you beamed in more crew members. For a war-type scenario, this made a lot of sense to me.
I hope we'll get the tech in the Foundry to do "solo" type missions. If i want to make a "Vacation on Risa" type "adventure", I don't want to have my Bridge Officers (in uniform even!) with me.
My general advice to Cryptic: A healthy mix is healthy.
You keep ignoring the main thing I am saying, which is common sense: your first officer cannot be captain of the same ship as you. Therefore, he cannot be a "playable captain" and be a member of your crew. That in itself proves that is not what the Devs were talking about. Feell free to keep denying the obvious all you want, it wont make a difference. But if you actually want the Devs to consider your idea, your going to have to post a thread about it, because that is not what they are currently considering/planning on doing.
I hope they implement his idea since just swapping out your cpt for your former first officer seems like a gimmick that everyone will try once and then never touch again. The only difference between that and creating a new toon is you wouldn't have to lvl it, or maybe you would if you can take it past commander. At least with the new duty officer system they proposed, it sounds like they're giving us a new set of game mechanics to play with and hopefully new content to accommodate it.
You keep ignoring the main thing I am saying, which is common sense: your first officer cannot be captain of the same ship as you. Therefore, he cannot be a "playable captain" and be a member of your crew. That in itself proves that is not what the Devs were talking about. Feell free to keep denying the obvious all you want, it wont make a difference. But if you actually want the Devs to consider your idea, your going to have to post a thread about it, because that is not what they are currently considering/planning on doing.
Not necessarily. It could mean that we can promote our FOs to the rank of Captain and then play as them on missions. Remember the Enterprise A had 3 people holding the rank of Captain on it (Kirk, Spock and Scotty). The ship has only 1 captain, but there were still 3 captains on board.
Still, I do think your interpretation of the dev's statement is the correct one.
I understood in the Colosseum Episode, but in the last one it made no sense, especially since we called down random npc's for support anyway.
I built my team of Boff's to use when I am on the ground, to make ground missions less sucky than they already are. Being without my team makes ground even more miserable.
So no, I would not like to be forced into ground combat without 80% of my ground skills, namely my boffs.
i liked it as a change of pace but i dont want to it to become the norm. every know and then is fine, or just having two members is also good now and then but for the most part i like having a little team with me.
I didn't like it in "Cutting the Cord" episode because we were having to call in support anyway.
"Calling in Support" should request your standard away team (the one selected in your Assignments window). Beam those in, and back out when the enemies are down. If this isn't possible, then make them all red-shirts who end up dying before the last enemy does. Anything else just feels wrong.
I'm not really a fan of this. I like my BOs and spend a considerable percentage of my logged in time making sure they have the right skills and equipment (not to mention appearance). Having them out of action once in a while is okay - I actually liked it in Cutting the Cord, although I thought I'd run into them planetside somewhere - but this isn't a trend I'd want to see becoming very widespread.
It was an ok idea for the Coliseum but 2 weeks in a row made it feel contrived.
Plus, when doing it with a group of "real live people" it changed the feel of the story. The first time through you get this great little nugget of info as to why you are there alone. Then when you run it on a team you're there with 4 other people completely contradicting the story. It makes no sense to prevent your BOs from being able to beam down yet you can beam down 4 other players.
I think the concept of doing something independent is really cool (huge fan of Metal Gear Solid series). However, the devs have been screaming at us to be playing these missions with tac/sci/engi players (EVERY FE with class based objectives) and creating missions where the story line has you there by yourself just doesn't work if you really want folks running these on a team.
If the mission is about being stranded on a planet by yourself, why are there 4 other players helping me escape? If I could manage to beam them down, why could my BOs not beam down? As Captain, how is it my BOs didn't beam down with me but instead I beamed down with a bunch of nobodies and their beach head equipment? It just doesn't make sense.
I don't believe the whole "no BOFFs for you!" mechanic was implemented because it's an interesting way of changing up a mission, but because the devs are desperate to get more people teaming up to do missions and eliminating the support characters is just another way of achieving that goal. You want a healer in the mission... you need to spam "LF1M SCI MUST HAZ SCI MEDICZ" in chat the way it's supposed to be done in a MMO... forget the story nobody reads dialog boxes anyway as they sprint from objective to objective.
I enjoyed the past series for the storyline and the sense of "Trek" they invoke, yet Cloaked Intentions came off as a contrived attempt at herding people into teams that completely overshadowed the story. I hope the next series is more like the first two rather than continuing in this direction.
No. Only one character can be 'playable' at the same time.
And the only reason you would want a character playeable is on a mission.
So on that little interface that allows you to select your BO's for ground mission, at the top where it has your character, instead of having it static, allow it to be a dropdown between you and your First officer.
Then, when you show up on the planet, you are now the first officer.
You appear to have fundamentally mis-understood the programmer's meaning of the word "convert". Conversions are almost always a one way ticket (it's not like converting from inches to centimeters where it goes both ways without loss of information). Once your First officer is converted to a playable captain they can't be converted back.
What you want is the ability to "select" from among a pool of playable charters at the time you beam down to a ground map. This functionality requires the existence of more than one playable character per character (note the self reference there, that's the sticky point as resolving it requires restructuring the database and game engine to make the two different concepts of "character" contextually consistent), which it appears Cryptic has no plans to do in the foreseeable future (I know it's a shame I'd love to see the capability to).
On the other hand converting your bridge officer to a playable character with their own ship and character slot on the select character page (and no remaining ties to the original character) would be a comparatively trivial bit of programming that adds a new character based on the old officer then upon successful completion of that task deletes the old officer. Note that there aren't any pesky definition or self reference issues in that plan. The "holdup" is likely due to resolving issues related to the unspecified information that needs to be added to make a viable character out of a bridge officer (like giving them a ship, and their own bridge officers).
In a possibly futile attempt to discuss the original topic...
I'm not terribly enthusiastic about this myself. When I run around with someone else, which is a lot, it doesn't change up anything, and when I do run around alone it's usually my only opportunity to play around with most of my BOffs.
no. i didn't misunderstand the word convert. I just took what the devs say in a different fashion.
Each admiral(or character) takes up a character slot. When you log in, you are him. If you want to play your first officer, you can when you change to 'ground mode' in the dialogue box. The First officer could be in the team, leading the team, or not in the team at all. But there is one captain, or team leader "you". Whomevers abilities you choose (Admiral or Captain) is up to you.
In space, it is my ship, i really don't want my First officer flying it since it is my responsibility. The difference between him and I flying the thing wouldn't be worth the change anyways.
You are still leading a team one at a time on the ground. The main character, the admiral, just gives you responsibilty to the ground team.
The conversion would still be one way. Each Admiral will have the ability to have one first officer. You can still play him as a BO on the ground, but you have the option to have him lead the team.
The way that all you decided, seems dificult to imagine.
1) I have two admirals. They both converted the Breen to FO. Now I log in and see 4 characters I can play. Which FO is for what ship and where is that ship?
2) You log in to the game as a FO. What is your admiral doing as you are flying around the galaxy? Taking a long bath?
3) All the stuff you bought from the C-Store for your admiral can't be used
4) Bank slots can't be used.
5) Who are you talking as in fleet/zone chat?
6) You are doing infected as an admiral and decide the FO powers would be better for ground and you need to log out to change to FO?
7) Your admiral halfway finishes a mission or does a feature episode and wants his FO to continue, does the FO have to do them over again?
8) Your FO goes to the tailer and changes the admiral, and himself. When the admiral logs in with a complete extreme makeover, he's cool?
9) What pool of BO points, EC, emblems is being used and why?
My way avoids all that confusion with multiple accounts in exchange for matrixed database entries (since the answer to all those questions is "the admiral").
I am not making a new thread about this or anything because
a) i can't imagine that this isn't what Cryptic was thinking,
b) nobody has shown me that this is what cryptic was thinking
c) I think you guys are assuming
d) I don't want cryptic to make this because i would like content rather than features at the moment
The only reason why I am responding again is because when I said "Sorry, I must have misunderstood" there has been a number of people saying that I was wrong.
Solo feels a bit squishy without the benefit of friendly NPCs. 4 BOs is a bit chaotic and you can AFK your way through some fights. It also forces interior kits to be too big..
I'd really prefer it if we had 2 BOs and the occasional "guest star" who is out of our direct control of some kind. As a corrolary to this, I'd like it if we had checkpoints where we could swap out our two BOs for different BOs.
In 2 of the last series of featured episodes(3 if you count The Vault), we were forcibly separated from our BOs by mission design/story. Do you like this? Do you want to see this more often in future episodes?
Was there some Ground Action in The Vault??
I just ran that this AM, and as I recall, I did the whole thing in the Shuttle I got from SB-39.
Did I miss something???
The Ship discription said there was limited Crew, 3 total I think, available to use anyway.
In 2 of the last series of featured episodes(3 if you count The Vault), we were forcibly separated from our BOs by mission design/story. Do you like this? Do you want to see this more often in future episodes?
Hell yes. I liked being deprived of my crew and the "reasons" they came up with for us being seperated from them. It would be cool in future missions to have to rescue some of your away team who are held captive or perhaps injured and trapped somewhere or something.
Hell yes. I liked being deprived of my crew and the "reasons" they came up with for us being seperated from them. It would be cool in future missions to have to rescue some of your away team who are held captive or perhaps injured and trapped somewhere or something.
I think this is the kind of thing that will be the true next step, if the size of our away team can change IN THE COURSE of the mission. There are logistical issues with that and teaming, maybe. (Although I'd love to see team encounters with 5 players who get full away teams and kinda wish that's what raiding was in this game.)
I don't mind the occasional solo mission, but I'd rather not have the 'beam-ins' like in Cutting the Cord when I do, mainly because they're completely uncontrollable. There are a lot of AI issues with NPCs still in the game. At least with my BOffs I can give orders and, if worse comes to worse, die and respawn. WIth those beam-ins, they were free to chase enemies over buildings and there was nothing I could do about it.
So, solo's fine, as long as its really solo. Otherwise, let me have my BOffs.
Comments
No. Only one character can be 'playable' at the same time.
And the only reason you would want a character playeable is on a mission.
So on that little interface that allows you to select your BO's for ground mission, at the top where it has your character, instead of having it static, allow it to be a dropdown between you and your First officer.
Then, when you show up on the planet, you are now the first officer.
I've ended up having to 'solo' a few missions (*coughfirecavescough*) anyway. Its nice not to have to micromanage your away team every now and then.
Of course.
But instead of seeing him on the login screen and wondering "What ship is he captain of again??" you can use him on ground missions instead of lugging your admirals all over the place.
Your confused, so let me clarify something: I understand what you are suggesting. However, you need to read my last post again. Each ship can only have one captain, so your first officer cannot be a "playable captain" and still be a member of your crew since you are the captain.
That said, I'm not saying your idea is bad, I'm just explaining to you why it isnt what the Devs said. If you want to make a thread suggesting your idea and how you want it to work, I'll support that. I'm just trying to help you understand that your idea is not what they have previously said.
i could go for this...
however, note that this is not what has been talked about by cryptic. they are talking about converting your FO to a CPT, and then have that toon a selectable toon to play as a CPT...
edit: i see nagus has done an effective job of describing the current idea floating around regarding the issue. and i agree, i like your idea, and maybe you could start a new thread with the idea...
Unless one of us can show something that the devs have said other than "Make your first officer a playable captain" we are all making assumptions.
But, in my option, your assumption seems seems hard to fathom, not fun, and difficult to implement.
My assumption seems easy(except for the database server space) and fun.
So, i am also going to assume that you must know something more than i do because how you saw the words "Make your first officer a playable captain" and how I saw them where way off the ends of the spectrum
And this subject is done for me. Sorry for derailing.
You keep ignoring the main thing I am saying, which is common sense: your first officer cannot be captain of the same ship as you. Therefore, he cannot be a "playable captain" and be a member of your crew. That in itself proves that is not what the Devs were talking about. Feell free to keep denying the obvious all you want, it wont make a difference. But if you actually want the Devs to consider your idea, your going to have to post a thread about it, because that is not what they are currently considering/planning on doing.
I don't think they're trying to be sneaky, although I agree that's why they did it. Considering how involved it let's the devs make the map I don't really mind. Hopefully they improve the horrible npc pathing issues with the ground combat update.
I don't mind "going solo" occassionally. In the last mission I particularly liked the fact that you beamed in more crew members. For a war-type scenario, this made a lot of sense to me.
I hope we'll get the tech in the Foundry to do "solo" type missions. If i want to make a "Vacation on Risa" type "adventure", I don't want to have my Bridge Officers (in uniform even!) with me.
My general advice to Cryptic: A healthy mix is healthy.
I hope they implement his idea since just swapping out your cpt for your former first officer seems like a gimmick that everyone will try once and then never touch again. The only difference between that and creating a new toon is you wouldn't have to lvl it, or maybe you would if you can take it past commander. At least with the new duty officer system they proposed, it sounds like they're giving us a new set of game mechanics to play with and hopefully new content to accommodate it.
Not necessarily. It could mean that we can promote our FOs to the rank of Captain and then play as them on missions. Remember the Enterprise A had 3 people holding the rank of Captain on it (Kirk, Spock and Scotty). The ship has only 1 captain, but there were still 3 captains on board.
Still, I do think your interpretation of the dev's statement is the correct one.
I understood in the Colosseum Episode, but in the last one it made no sense, especially since we called down random npc's for support anyway.
I built my team of Boff's to use when I am on the ground, to make ground missions less sucky than they already are. Being without my team makes ground even more miserable.
So no, I would not like to be forced into ground combat without 80% of my ground skills, namely my boffs.
I didn't like it in "Cutting the Cord" episode because we were having to call in support anyway.
"Calling in Support" should request your standard away team (the one selected in your Assignments window). Beam those in, and back out when the enemies are down. If this isn't possible, then make them all red-shirts who end up dying before the last enemy does. Anything else just feels wrong.
In my opinion new series should to be soft versions of STF.
Plus, when doing it with a group of "real live people" it changed the feel of the story. The first time through you get this great little nugget of info as to why you are there alone. Then when you run it on a team you're there with 4 other people completely contradicting the story. It makes no sense to prevent your BOs from being able to beam down yet you can beam down 4 other players.
I think the concept of doing something independent is really cool (huge fan of Metal Gear Solid series). However, the devs have been screaming at us to be playing these missions with tac/sci/engi players (EVERY FE with class based objectives) and creating missions where the story line has you there by yourself just doesn't work if you really want folks running these on a team.
If the mission is about being stranded on a planet by yourself, why are there 4 other players helping me escape? If I could manage to beam them down, why could my BOs not beam down? As Captain, how is it my BOs didn't beam down with me but instead I beamed down with a bunch of nobodies and their beach head equipment? It just doesn't make sense.
I don't believe the whole "no BOFFs for you!" mechanic was implemented because it's an interesting way of changing up a mission, but because the devs are desperate to get more people teaming up to do missions and eliminating the support characters is just another way of achieving that goal. You want a healer in the mission... you need to spam "LF1M SCI MUST HAZ SCI MEDICZ" in chat the way it's supposed to be done in a MMO... forget the story nobody reads dialog boxes anyway as they sprint from objective to objective.
I enjoyed the past series for the storyline and the sense of "Trek" they invoke, yet Cloaked Intentions came off as a contrived attempt at herding people into teams that completely overshadowed the story. I hope the next series is more like the first two rather than continuing in this direction.
You appear to have fundamentally mis-understood the programmer's meaning of the word "convert". Conversions are almost always a one way ticket (it's not like converting from inches to centimeters where it goes both ways without loss of information). Once your First officer is converted to a playable captain they can't be converted back.
What you want is the ability to "select" from among a pool of playable charters at the time you beam down to a ground map. This functionality requires the existence of more than one playable character per character (note the self reference there, that's the sticky point as resolving it requires restructuring the database and game engine to make the two different concepts of "character" contextually consistent), which it appears Cryptic has no plans to do in the foreseeable future (I know it's a shame I'd love to see the capability to).
On the other hand converting your bridge officer to a playable character with their own ship and character slot on the select character page (and no remaining ties to the original character) would be a comparatively trivial bit of programming that adds a new character based on the old officer then upon successful completion of that task deletes the old officer. Note that there aren't any pesky definition or self reference issues in that plan. The "holdup" is likely due to resolving issues related to the unspecified information that needs to be added to make a viable character out of a bridge officer (like giving them a ship, and their own bridge officers).
I'm not terribly enthusiastic about this myself. When I run around with someone else, which is a lot, it doesn't change up anything, and when I do run around alone it's usually my only opportunity to play around with most of my BOffs.
Each admiral(or character) takes up a character slot. When you log in, you are him. If you want to play your first officer, you can when you change to 'ground mode' in the dialogue box. The First officer could be in the team, leading the team, or not in the team at all. But there is one captain, or team leader "you". Whomevers abilities you choose (Admiral or Captain) is up to you.
In space, it is my ship, i really don't want my First officer flying it since it is my responsibility. The difference between him and I flying the thing wouldn't be worth the change anyways.
You are still leading a team one at a time on the ground. The main character, the admiral, just gives you responsibilty to the ground team.
The conversion would still be one way. Each Admiral will have the ability to have one first officer. You can still play him as a BO on the ground, but you have the option to have him lead the team.
The way that all you decided, seems dificult to imagine.
1) I have two admirals. They both converted the Breen to FO. Now I log in and see 4 characters I can play. Which FO is for what ship and where is that ship?
2) You log in to the game as a FO. What is your admiral doing as you are flying around the galaxy? Taking a long bath?
3) All the stuff you bought from the C-Store for your admiral can't be used
4) Bank slots can't be used.
5) Who are you talking as in fleet/zone chat?
6) You are doing infected as an admiral and decide the FO powers would be better for ground and you need to log out to change to FO?
7) Your admiral halfway finishes a mission or does a feature episode and wants his FO to continue, does the FO have to do them over again?
8) Your FO goes to the tailer and changes the admiral, and himself. When the admiral logs in with a complete extreme makeover, he's cool?
9) What pool of BO points, EC, emblems is being used and why?
My way avoids all that confusion with multiple accounts in exchange for matrixed database entries (since the answer to all those questions is "the admiral").
I am not making a new thread about this or anything because
a) i can't imagine that this isn't what Cryptic was thinking,
b) nobody has shown me that this is what cryptic was thinking
c) I think you guys are assuming
d) I don't want cryptic to make this because i would like content rather than features at the moment
The only reason why I am responding again is because when I said "Sorry, I must have misunderstood" there has been a number of people saying that I was wrong.
Solo feels a bit squishy without the benefit of friendly NPCs. 4 BOs is a bit chaotic and you can AFK your way through some fights. It also forces interior kits to be too big..
I'd really prefer it if we had 2 BOs and the occasional "guest star" who is out of our direct control of some kind. As a corrolary to this, I'd like it if we had checkpoints where we could swap out our two BOs for different BOs.
Was there some Ground Action in The Vault??
I just ran that this AM, and as I recall, I did the whole thing in the Shuttle I got from SB-39.
Did I miss something???
The Ship discription said there was limited Crew, 3 total I think, available to use anyway.
The 'if you count the Vault' part was the metaphorical separation of having extremely limited BO powers, presumably.
Hell yes. I liked being deprived of my crew and the "reasons" they came up with for us being seperated from them. It would be cool in future missions to have to rescue some of your away team who are held captive or perhaps injured and trapped somewhere or something.
I think this is the kind of thing that will be the true next step, if the size of our away team can change IN THE COURSE of the mission. There are logistical issues with that and teaming, maybe. (Although I'd love to see team encounters with 5 players who get full away teams and kinda wish that's what raiding was in this game.)
So, solo's fine, as long as its really solo. Otherwise, let me have my BOffs.
I never said there was.