December Developer Q&A Thread!

ambassadorkael

First of all, an apology. I let this practice fall out of my priorities for a few months when things got busier. That shouldn't have happened, and I promise to continue to try and keep this up each month. Your December questions will be answered in January, and I'll send along your August questions then, as well.

We realize that our forum community is diverse and spread across the globe, and that not everyone has an opportunity to take part in directly communicating with the developers via livestream. In an effort to extend communications between the forum community and the STO development team, we present the “Ask the Devs” Q&A thread!

Until the end of December, questions will be collected in this thread and then presented to our Community Manager. Questions will then be selected and answered right here on the forums.

Have a question concerning Star Trek Online?

Maybe you’d like some tips and tricks with certain gameplay elements? Or questions related to how the game is developed?

Let us know here!

Please note: If your question did not get answered in a previous thread, you may post it again, but it's unlikely it was missed. There is a probable reason the developers can't answer it. You may also use this thread to ask follow up questions from the previous thread, but please make new threads if you want to discuss the answers in detail.

Quick note: A question of "when are we getting [X item I'd like]" or something that is a full on suggestion rather than a question is less likely to be answered, with the "when is [X item]" questions unlikely to be answered at all. Thanks!

talgeeze

Do you think you'll make Roadmaps again one day?

boz6inator850

With the revamp of the fleet system, I and a few others in my fleet have noticed that for at least one mission that we run regularly under the starbase missions (I believe it is support colonization efforts) that prisoners and colonists which could be used for said mission prior to revamp are no longer showing up in the list of eligible doffs for the mission. Is this by design i.e. they are no longer useable or just an oversight and will be available for donations in the future?

vetteguy904

non combat pet tab, combat pet tab, hangar pet tab, please

codr0

1. How does STO handle number rounding for item tooltips? Specifically, is a .5 value rounded up or down? Various testing I've done has made me question this, but the latter would be very atypical.
2. Are item stats (common quality) calculated as the following? <stat base value> + <stat base value> * <stat-specific multiplier> * <item mark (1-12)>? At least for marks 1 through 12. If that's not correct, can it be corrected for me? Feel free to throw in the quality calculation as a bonus!
3. If a base value above is used, is that value equivalent to a mark 0 item? Or is mark 1 perhaps considered a base?

nixie50

can all uniform options be either c store or Dil? I'd love to have the Dyson uniform, but it's not worth putting up with a fleet and the ego-politics involved to get it

kaiyalai

With apologies if this is an old/oft-repeated question, it seems there are differences in which commands are accessible on PC vs on Console, such as Carrier Commands like Intercept not being on PS4.

Do the Active Roster Duty Officers that have impacts based on these (such as a Flight Deck Officer providing an Accuracy bonus to Hanger Pets on execution of Intercept) have an altered effect to take this into account, or are the simply... not useful? If the latter is currently the case, is anything in the works to address this, or is it simply a matter of "that's a really good doff for Assignments for you, it's only good in Active use on PC"?

annemarie30

Remove team requirements on Defera, please. with power creep, 5 man teams are no longer required for the hard missions.

leemwatson

nixie50 wrote: »

can all uniform options be either c store or Dil? I'd love to have the Dyson uniform, but it's not worth putting up with a fleet and the ego-politics involved to get it

If you are wanting the Fed uniform, I'll gladly help you out. No politics or ego in my fleet, cause we're mostly dead nowadays , but I have all but 3 upgrades on the Colony left.

jaturnley

nixie50 wrote: »

can all uniform options be either c store or Dil? I'd love to have the Dyson uniform, but it's not worth putting up with a fleet and the ego-politics involved to get it

Find a fleet without it. I have been in the same fleet for several years now and have had zero interactions with anyone in it, which is exactly how I like it. I am willing to bet that you can get an invite to a dozen fleets exactly like mine within 5 minutes of asking around on the forums.

pottsey5g

• There was a bug in Independent Wingmate trait that I would like to request is turned into a feature. Until recently when we launch hangar bay 1 the first pet has the Independent Wingmate buff. When we lunch hangar bay 2 the first pet also has the Independent Wingmate buff. This bug revitalised Frigates and made them worth using along with bringing them up to the level of fighters. Please consider undoing the fix and turning this into a feature so that the first pet of both bays gets the buff as this is the type of change Carrier are desperate for. It revitalised Frigates from near useless to pretty good without causing any problems or overpowered ness in other types of pets like fighters. Have the devs thought about ways to fix or revitalised Frigates so they are worth taking?
  
  
• Have you considered allowing something like 4k or 8k Dilithium cost per day to add an extra set of Endeavours to a limit of once per day to allow players to complete a 2nd set for extra XP. This would have a number of benefits. Players who cannot log in every day but have longer play sessions on the days they do play could spend the same amount of time in game and earn Endavour XP. Newer players can catch up without feeling they are years behind while still taking a reasonable amount of time. It would give players more flexibility for example if I had a busy Tuesday I could skip Tuesday and do double Monday all the while draining a decent amount of Dilithium out of the game. The limit of once per day would mean for many players max rank would still take years.
  
  
• Endeavours represent options for every single playstyle and core build apart from Carriers. Have you considered if there is another expansion of Endeavours ranks to add in the missing Endeavours like Carrier pet Damage, Carrier pet HP, Carrier pet flight speed, over increasing current ranks of Endeavours. Personally, I don’t think we need more crit damage, beam damage ec.t from more ranks. But Carrier feel like they are losing out with no real options in Endeavours. Adding in new Endeavours feels like a better option and further expanding the ranks. Has there been any internal talk about what might happen in the further with Endeavours?
  

no09dysonsphere

Why did the breen cold omni get changed from counting as a nonstandard omni like the kinetic cutting beam to counting as an energy set omni? And would it be possible to change it back to counting as a nonstandard omni? Cold is not one of the six energy damage types like phaser or disruptor, so the breen cold omni doesn't get damage boosts like an energy omni.

warmasterxdk

Will we ever see the Hou Yi/Deimos customization option variants for the Section 31 Shiva/Nimrod ships? Its literally just adding a pair of top nacelles to the Shiva and removing the bottom pair of nacelles from the Nimrod.


Also, will we ever see the day when we can stack batteries and similar items higher than 20?

suri

What is the purpose of this thread? Is it to get answers from Devs? If so where are the answers, or am I missing something?

baddmoonrizin

suri#7105 wrote: »

What is the purpose of this thread? Is it to get answers from Devs? If so where are the answers, or am I missing something?

Yes, these are questions submitted to the devs. At the end of the month, the Community Manager will collect the questions and present answers at a later date.

annemarie30

jaturnley wrote: »

nixie50 wrote: »

can all uniform options be either c store or Dil? I'd love to have the Dyson uniform, but it's not worth putting up with a fleet and the ego-politics involved to get it

Find a fleet without it. I have been in the same fleet for several years now and have had zero interactions with anyone in it, which is exactly how I like it. I am willing to bet that you can get an invite to a dozen fleets exactly like mine within 5 minutes of asking around on the forums.

Her point is that she should not be forced to join a fleet to get something cosmetic. it's bad enough Meta gear are locked behind the fleet wall

ulmanchun

Kit bash outfits and removed categories like off duty and uniform. allow players to pull from all the possible choices. Put a warning that results will vary and there will be glitches. Also to be "inclusive" everyone can wear anything. like option to to unlock honor guard outfit for federation character and maco outfit for klingons under the omega reputation, i mean what is the point of a join task force if you can't use each others stuff.

suri

baddmoonrizin wrote: »

suri#7105 wrote: »

What is the purpose of this thread? Is it to get answers from Devs? If so where are the answers, or am I missing something?

Yes, these are questions submitted to the devs. At the end of the month, the Community Manager will collect the questions and present answers at a later date.

Thanks, I look forward to the answers.

mark

Are there any plans to reinstate the "dropped" missions like Spectres etc into the main story arc? Having them behind level 65 makes some of the story a bit strange in some areas?

For example... In "Lost Dominion" Capt Shon is in command of the U.S.S. Belfast - but by that time, you've probably played through missions that have him in command of the Enterprise F...

It would be nice to have them back in the main arc and in the proper order.

proteus

With regard to the idea put forward in another thread recently, is there any chance of fleet creation being opened up to individual accounts with multiple characters instead of requiring five different player accounts? Which might encourage more dilithium to be spent building the holdings.

If not, it would be interesting to hear the reasons why.

alcaatraz

Don't normally post here so I'll be curious to see where this ends up.


As a long time mechanical learning and inspector of the games systems, I've come to a few questions on the methodology and implementation of ideas. Without a general order:

1. Generally over the games lifetime we've seen very drastic, very large changes to items rather than a few minute changes to items and powers; Most times teams will go through small gradual changes to find an equilibrium point. Is there a specific reason why the sandbox is changed in these drastic ways. As well does the systems team get time for retrospection on these changes to see if they were value added or not?
2. While not everyone is a number cruncher or chaser, items and powers added to the game should still be useful and sought after, and therefore seen as value added items to the sandbox. We were treated to a stream where Jeremy walked through the ship stats but the design decisions behind the ships traits and consoles and other associated items are still a mystery. Basically when talking about the totality of items and powers and adding to it, is there often a discussion about how new items added into the sandbox affect and interaction other items already within the games sandbox?
3. There was a comment made on a stream by Jesse that was paraphrased as "if you give people exactly the stats/powers that they want, they have no reason to change it/break their set bonus for a new item." Sets should offer a tradeoff of value, hence the reason for slotting the specific pieces of gear and thereby displacing others. However, by not adding new exciting gear that is itself more useful than existing mission gear, there is very little incentive to want to use these new items. This seems contrary to the point of adding new things, which you would want players to use. Is there an opportunity for Jesse to maybe clarify their position on this?
4. There's lots of discrepancies in what I can assume to be the library calls for various traits and interactions. A good example of this is Control-Based Effects. For example, the T6 Equinox Pilot Scout Ships trait "Synthetic Good Fortune" only triggers off specifically Pilot and Science profession control powers, but there are control powers from other specializations. We have temporal and intel powers that apply "Control Amplification" debuffs from the skill tree on targets and also trigger off other bridge officer control based effects like the personal trait "Unconventional Systems". Is there any plans to reconcile these various 'librarys' of references in the future?

That's 4 pretty wordy questions so I'll leave it there. Well wishes to everyone!

evilmark444

There is a command in-game that allows you to extend the camera zoom further than the scroll wheel allows (/camdist), however the camera distance resets just a few seconds after use. Is this working as intended? If it is working as intended, would the devs consider increasing the max zoom to make it a little easier to fly massive ships like the Universe Class and Cnidarian Defender?

Here's a thread where this was discussed back in September (been waiting for a new forum Q&A to ask about it):

https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/comment/13727302

baucoin

evilmark444 wrote: »

There is a command in-game that allows you to extend the camera zoom further than the scroll wheel allows (/camdist), however the camera distance resets just a few seconds after use. Is this working as intended? If it is working as intended, would the devs consider increasing the max zoom to make it a little easier to fly massive ships like the Universe Class and Cnidarian Defender?

Here's a thread where this was discussed back in September (been waiting for a new forum Q&A to ask about it):

https://www.arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline#/discussion/comment/13727302

This is a big issue on consoles as well seeing as we only have 3 preset camera distance settings. Those big ships fill up most of the screen even when zoomed out the max.

protoneous

Any chance of extending the space tray's level of functionality to ground trays? For example.. a fourth visible row and/or more than one tray for ground. With elite captain training, among other things, the 3 ground tray visible rows really doesn't seem to offer enough room.

annemarie30

Option to not have the U.S.S. /AT or any other prefix on ships, or a customizable prefix, to allow HMS, HMCS HMAS FGS and other prefixes. USS HMS Thunderchild is aggravating to say the least