As a person who will readily admit that I enjoy a small amount of role playing to immerse myself into the Star Trek Universe, I am rather shocked with regard to the lack of creativity in Cryptic Studios social chat designs.
Therefore, Id like to offer up an idea I had the other night while fighting to save fellow Starfleet Captains from the Borg
something I wish I had, had in game to allow me to be a bit better informed.
The Idea:
I would like the option to right click on a ship and have another option in the dropdown to Hail that player either in sector space or on a mission. What Hail would do is:
First: Hail would play a small noise so that the player being Hailed knows another player is trying to correspond with them.
Second: Hail would have a bridge officer info box appear informing the Hailed player that Rank & player of the Starship name is on the Com. This message box would have an accept or ignore Hail Option.
Third: Upon accepting a hail, a private chat window will then initiate allowing direct communication between those two players. This option should include voice chat!
Fourth: The Hail chat box would be a tabbed section of the existing chat window area. It should not be in the way of the players view during combat or anything else. :cool:
Important footnotes: Players should be allowed to automatically block incoming hails at their own discretion.
Why would I ask for this feature?
A few reasons, but the main reason is for functional use during combat! Too often in fleet actions I come across other players doing their own thing with their particular squadron. And too often I try to communicate with them, but go un-noticed until too late for either them or myself. A perfect example is: last night I tried to save a ship from a Borg Tactical Cube, I sent a local message to the poor guy that I was on my way and to hold on just a few seconds more if he could. Well, unfortunately for him he used evasive maneuvers maneuvering further out of range, thus, resulting in his untimely death. See, I had Hazard Emitters III, Engineering Team II, and Transfer Shields I and Extend Shields I ready to be used
just had 2km to close in. Right after his death he messaged me back saying, sorry, didnt see your message.
So, this is when I came up with this idea, if being able to hail him, he would have heard the com noise and looked to see who was hailing him, he would have seen the message an then maybe, at least turned toward the aid that was already on its way.
Anyway, there are a lot of role playing reasons to add hailing into the game as well, but these are not so much functional reasons more-so than pure entertaining reasons.
0