Sector Space Revamp & exploration

cavalerius

First off, I'd like to thank Cryptic for immediately introducing plans for a memorial for Leonard Nimoy ingame within 24 hrs of his passing. Very fast response that everyone is likely to be happy about. Look forward to seeing it in next few weeks.
Now for Sector Space. I am very excited to hear Cryptic is revamping sector space to be united (more or less), especially after hearing Q&A a few years ago that uniting sector space was going to be very unlikely. If you haven't flown in the new sector space yet, it's featuring on the tribble server, big patch though.

To be honest though, I was hoping sector space would be bigger, more vast etc, with the huge stars staying the same size rather than inflating when you approached and shrinking when you left(6:08), although it does kinda look cool. Of course this would make travel distance ridiculous. Which was why I was also hoping they'd also introduce a transwarp network for players to use to get around easier, rather than use a ships limited transwarp & slipstream capability.

Now to exploration. The sto polls last month came out with 5 options available to choose from, that being exploration, foundry, more episodes, pvp & fleet functionality. Exploration came on top by far.
With the new sector space, I can't see why you couldn't nail the first three in one go really.

In regards to exploration, I would not enjoy reintroduction of the exploration clusters. They were imfao damn horrible, just more grinding with R&D at the core. Reintroducing them simply with more isolated missions with R&D at their centre would leave it broken. Rather it needs to be a defining point, as it was with the TV series, in STO.

Perhaps you could add transwarp gates to unexplored sectors, like actual sectors. Rather than have isolated missions that leave you underwhelmed, there could be a mini storyline involved with the critical theme being exploration, so new life & new civilisations & whatnot. Foundry could be extended so as to include selected spotlight missions in these sectors, meaning a third of the star systems involves a unified or semi-unified exploration storyline, another third random but fun exploration, and the last systems dedicated to providing missions from foundry.

Suddenly, there you have it, that's the top three knocked off...
Thought I'd just randomly put my useless opinion up. Otherwise good work so far Cryptic.