Being a programmer and novice game designer, I think I can estimate how easy some of these things are. IE, auto-holstering weapons may indeed be harder to do than adding a fog to exploration clusters. Some of them are a bit long-winded to clarify what I mean and how it might be done.
Anyway, here's my list: (Bug fixes not included)
Short term: (Should just be variable changes, small tweaks to code, or adding documentation)
1. Change exploration sectors to be filled with 'fog' so you can't see more than 1 LY. Make ships really have to get lost in it and search around. Make it feel like you're exploring a dense nebula cluster. Don't need to alter map visibility or anything, just a nice dense fog effect and more limited visibility.
2. Auto-Holster weapons in non combat areas. Or, while not at 'red alert'.
3. Come up with some way to add more autofire weapon banks in space without allowing exploits for AFK combat. (make autofire not work if you're idle for more than 2 min?)
4. MUCH more detail on ship/skill stats. Tell us every variable that affects the ship and any BO powers. (Turn speed, shield recharge rate, for instance?)
5. Be able to fly up or down +-90º. Those vertical missions where you have to fly down a planet's ring are really, really annoying when I CAN'T fly down.
6. Make ship crew meaningful. Or explain what the heck it does. It seems to be pointless right now. It says it alters ship hull repair rates, but I've yet to see a tactically significant difference.
7. Make ship space flight a bit more graceful. Seems awful jerky to me. It's not just turn radius, it's how quickly they accelerate into and out of turns.
Mid Term: (Probably new code, missions or art assets)
1. Add the ability to preview ships in the Ship Configuration editor (IE, the costume changing thing to modify the look of your ship) up in spacedocks' consoles for each ship tier's info. Let us see what these ships look like and all the options for customizing their looks, BEFORE we buy the ship.
2. More ship part options, with a little more variety to the parts, ability to choose optional mission modules, 2 or 4 nacelles, etc.
3. More fleet actions and bracketing existing ones so higher levels can do them again for a greater challenge. Let Admirals face off against an Admiral difficulty Crystalline Entity.
4. Have ships line up when they go to warp, so they're not going to crash into a planet, at the least. Members in a group should all warp out in the same direction. Just a 'feel' thing.
5. Fix canon ship models to more accurately reflect the shows. (IE, the defiant's nacelles and nose don't 'droop' quite enough compared to DS9 footage. The nose part is too high on the saucer. Gives it a less aggressive feel. The Galaxy's pylons don't blend into the body, and instead stick to the bottom of the secondary hull. The lower portion of the secondary hull falls vertically down, which is too extreme. The spine on the dorsal side of the secondary hull is too pronounced, windows not wrapping over the edges on the top and bottom of the saucer edge, etc.) Small things, but noticeable by quite a few people, and make the ships just not quite right. They need a good fine tooth comb against a lot of the footage from the series, especially the movies. Nice high res shots there.
6. Add MUCH more filtering and search capabilities to the Exchange, include searching for specific powers on bridge officers, sorting by price, etc.
Long Term: (New or redone game mechanics)
1. Revamp Sector Space. This may be more of a challenge, but make all geographically contiguous areas one huge sector. Add a warp sequence to move from the Federation/Romulan/Klingon area to the Cardassian and Borg areas, for example. Put the systems much further apart, but increase ship speed. Make it feel huge and empty. Increase travel time a little (maybe double), but make the distances much, much further (so you have to speed the ships up). This will make it feel like you're really traveling at warp and going a long way. Make it darker, less bright stuff. This makes it feel bigger, and the ship smaller. System icons thinner and less pronounced (the orbit rings don't need to be as thick as my warm nacelles). Move the exploration clusters to big gaseous areas inside space that you fly and zone into. Add random planets all over that have the exploration engine tied to them for random missions, and make them often have nothing interesting to report after someone does a mission there (to prevent farming). Big thing here is to make space feel EMPTY. Around Sol and stuff there should be lots of ship traffic, but systems far enough apart that once you leave the vicinity, the odds of seeing another ship should be pretty low until you approach another system.
2. Come up with fun mechanics for non-combat missions. EvE's sensor probe mechanism is a good example of a fun geeky way to probe things. Deploy probes with a scanning radius, and using triangulation by overlapping probe's scan radii, find anomalies. Stuff like that. Kind of like mini-games, I guess.
3. Make science ships (or better yet, any ship with science modules) actually have some neat non-combat abilities. I love how they're different than normal ships as it is. But increased scanning/anomaly finding ability would be fun. Or give them other interesting non-combat related abilities.
Mid--Streamline skills, powers, and training. Make your tooltips useful. Right now, they are not. I have skills, and I can observe what they do in many cases, but I have no clue what the difference is, for example, between deflector emissions and deflector sensors.
Long--Redesign missions to, in general, de-emphasize combat. Especially ground missions. I'm sorry, but STO is fundamentally bad at any content that isn't point and shoot. Your game claims to be Trek but is 90% combat. Ridiculous. Redesign old content, especially exploration missions, to emphasize exploration and diplomacy. When designing new content, de-emphasize combat. In all cases, design with an eye on allowing for different solutions for each problem. A captain should usually have more than one option for solving a problem, be it combat, negotiation or espionage (Kill it, woo it, or bypass it).
Avoid blinding me when my camera ends up "behind" or "within" an object with a light source.
An example would be smacking into a "glowy" planet, and then end up blinded while attempting to turn around. It's bad enough that my turn rate is somewhere between "lackadasical snail" and "three-legged turtle" without being unable to see while I hope that I'm now facing away from the big glowy thing.
Set AFK timeout to 30 minutes.
Yes, I know the server's overloaded, but why punish us for that? Some of us wouldn't mind a little role-playing, or chatting, or even just bouncing back and forth between the sparse documentation and the game without... Lovely. I timed out while writing this post.
Hire a good technical writer. Me, perhaps.
The docs are useless. Sparse, not well focused for the audience, and lacking depth. Thanks to the docs, I'm resigned to having to roll my main character over, AFTER I reach Admiral, because of a pitiful lack of information from which to base my initial choices. Forum posts are not documentation. Some localization/globalization cycles might be useful, too.
Mid-term requests
Store additional UI settings.
An example would be how many toolbars I had displayed when I exited the game.
Increase the size of the minimap.
Either increase the viewport size, or allow the viewport size to be adjustable (within reasonable limitations.) I've a large, widescreen monitor and the thing looks like a postage stamp stuck to the upper right corner.
Improve window resizing.
When I can clock a full redraw in minutes, it's too slow. Rapid mouse movement means, every once in a great while, I accidentally snag a window border - and lose as I wait half a minute or more for the screen to refresh. At the very least, allow us to lock the window in standard fullscreen sizes.
Long-term requests
Separate the Science Officer from medical functions and add a Medical Officer.
I swear, if Spock tries to bandage me one more time...
Allow non-Starfleet Federation classes, or even neutral classes, and attendant support mechanisms.
I'm not here to be Kirk, Picard, Janeway, or Archer. I'm here to be Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Or, if I'm lucky and work at it, the Grand Nagus. Star Trek, for me, wasn't just about the "pew pew" - I shouldn't be bored barely a week or so into the game, but I am indeed feeling some "fighter fatigue."
Provide a development path that emphasizes exploration or even colonization.
I'm not here to shoot everything that doesn't look like me. I'd like to sell them something instead. Or go mine deuterium and get bullied by the Klingons for it. Or have a place to park my trading ship other than a Starfleet spacedock (apparently uninterested in commerce.)
PvP queue system upgraded, separate the different engagements. Easier to access.
General PvP improvements, fix the broken score tallying. Add objectives/markers to the map in PvP battles.
PvE mission variety. One can only kill 5 foozles so many times before they start to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
PvE Ground Combat. Add a button to call all of your BO's currently on the ground to you ( teleport ). They get stuck far, far too often.
More clarity on all skills. Often almost impossible to actually find out what a skill does, especially for someone who isn't a regular fanatic of Star Trek.
Auto fire button for all weapons, to free up space on the 1-10 keys for skills.
Add toggle off/on for auto targeting a friendly that's being targeted by your enemy when you use a skill that can benefit them. ( Or if there is one, set it off by default. I looked. I can't find it if there is. )
Separate tabs on the BO skills trainer for each BO type.
Add a timer to PvP matches to keep them going quickly, rather than dragging on for 45+ minutes.
Mid Term:
PvP Ground combat overhaul. Melee weapons are useless, due to excessive rubberbanding and client-server issues.
Remove and/or consolidate skills. There are far, far, far too many skills currently. I'm at Commander 1 and I have 3 bars full of just space skills, half of which have very similar effects and icons which are identical. Often by the time I get everything running I'm already dead.
Make PvP less lopsided, often one side will win by a landslide where the other team scores 0 kills. Ground combat PvP firearms do too much damage.
Long Term:
More Fleet battles ( fix the fleet battle score system first )
Less tedium for general PvE combat. Less hp/shields for NPC's all around ( both ground and space ). Increase NPC damage considerably.
Make the Klingon side not an afterthought. More costumes, Signs in the starting area. It's fine if PvP remains their main source of exp, as long as the balance issues are fixed, and they gain more from matches to level at a comparable rate to a fed grinding patrols.
Yes, I cheated a bit and put a bunch of short term goals. But these are things I feel need to be taken care of if the game is to have any chance of survival.
I have no real idea of time involved in these. And I'd like everything now, because I'm a whiney consumer. I'll let you drop them in the appropriate buckets.
- In game tooltip descriptions that are meaningful (It took me an hour and a 3rd party source to figure out what equipment I wanted to put in my ship to boost a specific ability)
- General server fluidity (short term only in that I'd like it sooner than later. I realize this is ongoing and heavy load task). Rubber banding is probably one of the biggest issues to my suspension of disbelief.
- Corrected ship scale relationships, both player and NPC ships.
<Rant>
No escort should be bigger than ANY cruiser. There's plenty of documentation on these sizes. I can't for the life of me figure out why the ships are scaled as they are now. Size relationships is a huge part of the visual appeal of the ST mythos imo. Fix this, it's huge, most everyone I've talked to about this has agreed and are at a similar loss of explaination
</Rant>
Make sure that everything works as intended *before* adding anything new. Squash all the bugs, improve server performance, and give everyone all the stuff that they have paid for. I haven't had much trouble with these issues personally, but it's not hard to understand why people get worked up about them.
Mid-Term:
a) Institute a difficulty slider so the wars over game difficulty can abate. Include at least one setting *below* normal. Institute diminishing returns on award increases so people don't have to play on the hardest difficulty to get useful rewards.
b) Fully flesh out the Klingon faction.
Long Term:
Fully flesh out a playable Romulan faction please!
First of all I have to say I love the game! Nice to finally see a game live up to the hype!! We wont mention Star Wars Galaxys and how much of a disappointment that was! Think you have done a great job, and I don't mind the C-Store. Think its a great idea, BUT I think it should leave out items that were available on the original presale, or presale expansion items. Having Lenard Nemoy, and the NEW Spock in the game is just Classy!!!!!
3 short term.
- C-store, what about being able to purchase additional weapon slots for level one ships? At least make them upgradable to mid level ships(Commander) that way a pc can stick with a ship they enjoy playing and not have to pick a new ship that looks a little weard!
-C-store, what about being able to purchase historical ships like the Enterprize from the series "Enterprize", and the Enterprize from the "Star Trek" movie.
-can I at least sit in the captons chair on my bridge??
3 mid term
- More interactions on my ship, hallways, ten forward, maybe drink romulan ale and watch myself stumble around till it wears off.
- Random encounters, so I drank some romulan ale and a klingon bird of prey decloaks and is now attacking my ship.
- Start up movie/trailer with the option to watch it or not.
3 long term
- I want to visit Star Fleet Acadomy, and maybe do some site seeing, and a couple of missions on home planets.
- Love the original series missions, but some took place on board ship. More content, and original missions on planets and onboard ships. These can be set for instanced zones, so if people don't want to do them, they don't have to.
- instanced missions from the movies played out much like the city on the edge of forever.
Once again, I just have to say I loved the game. These are in no way complaints. These are just suggestions!
Thanks!!
Short-Term:
Fix for the Female Klingon armor clipping....
Some other kinds of life on mission planets..... (really, plants and humanoids? that's it?)
beam out and leave sector buttons more useful so we can get rid of the popup messages requesting us to do the same.
Mid-Term:
Klingon PvE starting at ensign...
more PvP maps... i want a starbase that klingons have infiltrated where they set up bombs and the feds have to stop them. i like objectives. (dunno if these are in higher level areas, but i've not seen any yet. at least for ground pvp)
Three ways to beat some missions. One for science, engineers, and tactical. or specific missions for that vessel type.
Long-Term:
Restructured Systems Map - Go from Sector -> system -> planet/POI gives you more for exploration and more room for missions.
Romulan Faction. They've already got space and some planets
Pardon that I barge in here with a large post, lists and examples... I know this was supposed to go a lot more smoothly, but... here we go.
Short Term;
Three hot items here;
Additional common item vendors to normalize market prices for crafters
One of the big problems crafters face is that a great deal of the gear we are able to upgrade is drop-only. That means a few people can establish a monopoly on the prices, and the alternative is the prospect of farming for several hours, perhaps even consecutive days depending on how much time we have and are willing to devote to the task... to get just one -common- item.
It would take almost no time at all to plug in a few more vendors around the Sol and Memory Alpha systems, and would allow our crafters to take a collective sigh of relief.
It would serve to establish a much more normalized market, which I believe would be beneficial for all players.
Clear definitions of common terms used in item and skill descriptions to better facilitate our understanding of our ship systems.
A serious problem for new users (which most of us are) is that we don't understand what various common terms mean, or what stat buffs and abilities are actually doing for us. We assume they're a good thing, or a bad thing, but we don't really know what's going on.
It would take a fairly comprehensive patch to fix this, perhaps even several smaller patches over the course of a few weeks, but laying out more clear and understandable terms in the game would benefit all players and very likely some of the staff too.
After all, it's kind of hard to tell the difference between "a bug" and "works as intended" when we have no idea what things are supposed to be.
A more clearly defined set of parameters in Memory Alpha, have the NPCs explain to the players how to unlock the next tier of crafters, and give some indication of when the next level crafter has been unlocked.
I would call this a minor annoyance, but really, I would certainly hope this isn't "works as intended" because we basically have to look up external sources of information to find out the basic operation of the facilities.
It could be fixed in one minor dialogue patch, and really really should.
Mid-Term
Market list organization
Allow us to sort the market by price, quality, and sort based on bracket qualities such as [CAP] [CRTH]
It's not easy scrolling through 100 items per page trying to find a good price and the stats we want. Help us out. I know that's not the kind of thing that gets put in over a week-end, but it's worth doing.
Add to the kinds of things we can craft, and the quality.
You've already taken the steps to say "You can't craft X tier until you make [Quantity] Y tier" why not put in some other crafters on the same lines with access to higher quality goods for the various tiers?
Craft greens into blues, blues into purples, and give us a very real incentive to continue to make use of the facilities in Memory Alpha. An expansion of content that won't take six months to release.
It's more content, and it helps normalize the economy. Which is something often neglected that games in this stage of their life could really really use.
Long Term
More ship customization options, ship types, hybrid types, and parts.
Customizable private quarters, with trophies of various accomplishments, furnishings, all that good stuff.
Optional In-ship missions - non combat content that illustrates a bit of day-to-day living on a ship.
I'm not going to presume to know what the devs are planning for future content. I'm not going to push it, because I know the community has been churning out ideas that are better than what I have. I haven't reached "end game" yet, so I'll leave that for those who have.
These ideas are a bit smaller, the first one is just additional content to allow us more than a couple ways of playing the game, and a good excuse to give us some new ship models, because I -love- going through all the various parts to put together an interesting look.
The second gives us something to do while we're not saving the galaxy... shaving tribbles... whatever the heck we decide to do for a few hours a day... gives us something to screen and show off, to share with each other, or keep to ourselves. Our own little slice of paradise.
The third gives us perhaps a daily quest to go fix this or that, talk to this person, address concerns of that person, restock some supplies and what-not. Not dramatic stuff, but a nice little diversion and a chance to meet some non-essential crew that will probably die the next time we go on an away mission.
So yes, I end this on a humorous note, but I feel my suggestions are valid all the same. Hopefully at least a couple of them will end up being put into play.
Short term:
- Do something to help the Cruiser turn rates; at least the T4 if not all of them. Aside from this I have zero complains about anything relating to ship mechanics.
- Clarify some of the skills tooltips. Right now in the character sheet you have a huge list of skills and it's not readily apparent what they do some of the time. Same goes for item tooltips, especially for deflector dish-slot ship items.
- Better facilitate doing group content by putting premade teams into instances that will get all the members of the team in there at once, creating a new instance if necessary. Right now trying to do Fleet Actions or DSEs with actual fleet members breaks down into a poor game of "telephone" while you all try to scramble to the same instance before it fills up. Even better; let us queue for Fleet Actions remotely. There's little reason we should have to fly out to each individual fleet action while we can queue for pvp via a (clunky) menu.
- Sort stores better. Have individual tabs for different classes of items (weapons, armor, shields, etc.) or ship components (shields, engines, consoles broken down by duty station type, etc.) or bridge officers (science, tactical, engineering), and bridge officer trainers (one tab for ground skills, one for space) instead of having everything dumped into a single game-chugging list.
- Mark station maps. There's no reason why station sections aren't marked and their NPCs clearly labeled along with their jobs. Even City of Heroes did this while it was still under Cryptic's watch.
- Improve Aid the Planet exploration sub-mission rewards. If we have to leave the sector and go out of our way to find and then purchase otherwise useless commodities for the flimsiest of excuses, then we need to be better compensated for it. 100 skill points per 1000 credits' worth of commodities at the very least.
- Fix my joined Trill's space traits.
- Federation vs. Federation pvp matches. Call them "war games" like KvK are "house matches." There are plenty of in-canon examples to support this. You don't even need to make new arenas to do this.
- Remove the Master Loot loot option from PvE. I can't think of many legit uses for it in STO as opposed to a game with more ubiquitous bind-on-pickup loot items, like WoW, and even the legit uses for it (have a speedy escort master looter so the group isn't held up by a slow-turning cruiser) are pretty flimsy. Right now I've only seen it used by people who want to vacuum up everything for themselves until someone finally notices what it's set to.
- Short/Md term: Fix the weirdness with tileset lighting. The "Memory Alpha" style tileset frequently seen in Exploration sub-missions is blinding, and many maps (especially the brown cave tileset) have buggy lighting that makes some rooms inexplicably dark until you get halfway into them.
Medium term:
- Do something about how much of a performance hog the game's UI is, especially on the ground. Hitting Shift-F12 to disable the UI jumps my framerate from 49 to 90. That's ridiculous and completely unacceptable.
- Put in the last ten levels worth of content and then either uncap player skill gain again or give us a (very) generous skill cap and easily-available unlimited amounts of respecs for either energy credits or a modest amount of Starfleet/KDF merits.
- Give Klingons something PvE. Anything. Doesn't matter what it is. A targ petting zoo is an improvement at this point.
- Once the KDF has its PvE content, let them be played on a new account from the get-go. As it stands, there will never be parity in the populations of Klingon and Fed players. Any new factions' players should be supported without unlocks as well.
- Medium/Long term: Do something with Memory Alpha. I'm not sure what and frankly I don't care. It's currently a bit of an embarassment and the rewards aren't even much to write home about. Find a reasonable Memory Alpha suggestion thread and run with that.
Long term:
- Content, content, content. Leveling content, max-level content, solo content, group content, multi-group content. The more variety there is on the way to and at level 50, the better. More variety to explorations. More pvp scenarios. Just more.
- If you're going to put in more playable factions as you say to be planning, you need more character slots. Three is near-draconian, even with an uncapped skill system. The bare minimum we should have with the game as it stands now is six. Not two with an additional unlock. Champions currently has the same lack of replayability as STO, and it has what, eight?
- Territory control. I've seen it mentioned around the forums a bit, where the neutral zone areas could be swayed in the favor of one faction or another through the use of diplomacy (providing large amounts of special commodities - possibly earned through the various Resource Control pvp matches? - in a faction-wide joint effort) or providing security against pirates that are aided by an enemy faction. As incentive to get people to participate, maybe have a "raid" zone or something unlock for the faction that is more in favor; kind of like what you get for controlling Lake Wintergrasp in WoW or the old Darkness Falls system in Dark Age of Camelot.
- Ship interiors. If you're not going to put wandering NPCs on there anytime soon, then reduce the bridge sizes by at least 50% for each bridge. Some of them are downright cavernous. Let us also go to the Captain's ready room, crew lounge, and main engineering at the least. Better yet, let us design our own versions of said areas with a tool similar to CoH's supegroup base designer.
I am really enjoying this game and how well the developers have treated the universe of Star Trek.
What I feel is clearly lacking is episodes on-board your own ship. I've been playing since release day and from what I've experienced the only on-board episode is the tutorial.
I would really enjoy taking on boarding parties on bridge and investigating my crew members in the engine room and spar against my bridge officers in the rec room and host first contact meetings in my ten forward.
- I cannot stress this enough...Give us the Ability to Respec our Skills.
- Fix Major UI issues such as Mouse cursor disappearing, Also the infamous Rubberbanding across the universe. The UI really needs a Facelift, Its way too traditional and quite honestly boring to look at, Skills should be color coordinated to represent which Division they belong too etc etc.
- Class Balancing/ PvP Balancing nuff said.
Mid-term
- Exploration needs to be completely revamped, It is far too linear and not random enough. Whatever happened to the idea we are supposed to find new life and interact with them? There should never be objectives when exploring, Kinda defeats the purpose don't it?
- New End game content/Fleet Actions/ PvP Maps (New Objectives as well) Ground combat needs to be reworked so it feels less clunky and more smooth.
- Ability to customize interiors of your ship *not the current system that is in place*, Access to entire ship sections, Access ships computers and controls so that it really does feel like its your ship and not some random NPC. And oh yes Star Bases soon please!
- Patrol Missions need to be reworked so they don't have the same grind to them. Go in and kill so many and warp out... Far too redundant and needs more flavor to keep me interested.
Long-term
- Access to All Planets and Systems, and I do mean all of them.
- I cannot Stress Exploration, It needs to be done right and not the current system in place. Not only should I be able to find new life, I should be able to experience the Genesis system to its fullest, Like finding spacial anomaly's such as comets and nebula's and then categorizing them.
- Sectors that Allow Open PvP, Ability to invade other Factions territory and the ability to defend it.
- A constantly evolving changing world...Storyline content, New missions should be every few weeks so we never can get bored with the game.
Stop mobs camping spawn points in deep space combat
Fix the UI so it saves my presets such as expanded quick launch trays (1,2 and 3 showing)
When I want to change instance - let me know what instance I am already in
Supply a good manual for the game - I want to know what you devs know about how things work (not the technicals obviously)
Fix the 'aid the planet' missions so they are worth the extra effort - people are just skipping then at the moment
Medium
'Fleet or group invite' be able to invite people enmasse to join instances be it someone's bridge or whatever.
Implement a real crafting system which will in turn breathe new life into an economy which is otherwise going to stagnate fairly quickly
Let's have some pretty ship models please and some fixes to the one's that are already present.
The game in terms of mission scripting and, to some extent, variation gets better from lvl 11 - you need to hook people much sooner than this. It's almost like the early content was rushed more than the later content...
Additions to the starship including worthwhile and meaningfuly interactive areas. Such as missions on the view screen, set course from the bridge, customisation and purchasable items for the bridge, in-ship missions, chairs etc that you can it on without emoting, interactive crew who will offer helpful advice.
Additional fucntionality for sensors (both ground and space) - background information on location, nearest klingon life sign etc etc
Inventory renamed 'hold' (I dont carry supplies and onomolies around in my pocket) and made relevant to the class of ship - ie a bonus for large cruisers and a 'penalty' for escours or some such
Long
Diplomacy and exploration done right. Much more indepth, branching decision driven storylines etc - you guys have underestimated the audience's thirst for this sort of thing quite dramatically. I know you wanted the game to be fun, and you've achieved that, but to many of us solving missions with out minds rather than with our guns IS fun - bold because it is the single most important thing to me on this list.
Let's see starfleet acadamy and Starfleet Command please (along with Klingon equivilents) - let us not only see them but let them have real meaning and purpose as locations. Ineractive NPCs, training programmes, further ship mods, BOs recruited fresh for the acadamy, give Admirals an office at starfleet command.
Planetary hubs - massive interactive cities as you would expect to find in all MMORPGs
Starbases for Fleets, bought and maintained by fleets themselves - cost of purchase should be astronomical as should 'monthly maintenance' so that obsoilete starbases are quickly removed.
The Klingon experience must be as complete an experience as Federation players have.
- Ship interiors. If you're not going to put wandering NPCs on there anytime soon, then reduce the bridge sizes by at least 50% for each bridge. Some of them are downright cavernous. Let us also go to the Captain's ready room, crew lounge, and main engineering at the least. Better yet, let us design our own versions of said areas with a tool similar to CoH's supegroup base designer.
Good post Sir! Would just say though, that the bridge needs to remain fairly large for those of us who want to host fleet meetings on them. I was at one such yesterday and we had to crm 30+ people in there and there will be significantly greater numbers than that wanting to join in.
Short term:
Finish the building we've moved in to. The roof is still leaking and you completely forgot the basement - a typical American oversight. I can only assume that you're doing this anyways and the only dev department that will not have their hands full right now is probably Art. Then again, there's always some design that can be improved...
Mid term:
Begin extending this game beyond the arcade action shooter it feels like right now. Watch a couple of seasons of any Star Trek show and see that many awesome things can happen to you which do not include killing dozens of enemies.
Throw some toys at the Roleplayers. They can be your most loyal fans if you give them something to work with, they require very little maintenance both content and support wise and they'll stay longer then those pro-gamers who'll just look up the fastest way to exploit their way through the game just to move on to the next big thing, with a short stop on your forums to let everyone know the game sucks and they're moving on. (Yes, I am biased.)
An example for RP content: Add a captains ready-room and a lounge to the bridge instances. Only a minor upgrade to already existing content compared to the long term improvements I'll address next.
Long term
Fluff, fluff and more fluff. Yes, more endgame stuff and raids and new levels are important, but I must beg again that you do not forget the RP aspect. They'll make up their own content if you only give them the proper tools. One of those tools is of course:
Player housing: Luckily, we already have our house: It's the ship, and we already love it. But more functionality would be awesome. Add a cargo hold, where we can drop off those samples and commodities from our full inventories. Add a holodeck, where we can experience our favorite episodes again (You know, those that you will have added, the ones where we could decide if we want to talk of go trigger happy. We want to see what happens if you shoot everyone.) Add main engineering, where we can realign the dilithium matrix to add 0.02% to our top-speed...
I'm sure there's a lot more, but this post is already getting too long. Thank you for reading all of this, or at least for skipping everything but this last paragraph...
fix auto-teaming; currently (since open beta) it only works in the first one or two sector blocks
fix client crashes on systems with ATI gfx cards (on high video settings); fix the Direct3d bug; those bugs keep me from enjoying all the available eye-candy.
give me an option to keep the chat window open and on top during loading screens.
give player better clues on where to find their mission target; chat would be so much more pleasant if it wasn't filled with "where is foobar system?"
on a related note, add a Sulu-style help for the blinking trashcan needed in "Scientific Mandate" on Memory Alpha (NPC 1: "Would you please put this sample in Romaine's trashcan?" - NPC 2: "It's right over there. *point* Why don't you do it yourself?")
fix the training issues with the engineering BO skill "Aceton Field", it cripples a high percentage of eng BOs.
don't let every ship explode; I can see that the explosion gives a nice visual feedback for the player, but if the enemy ship was drifting and had some "damaged beyond repair" visuals, and couldn't be targetted anymore, that could give players a clue, too. Picard (the one from the show, not the one from the movies) would even try to save the enemy crew.
Transwarp to Memory Alpha and DS9 (and perhaps other spots I haven't discovered yet), so my friends don't have to wait so much for me to cross the quadrant. I wouldn't mind a shared cool-down.
fix the NPC pointing into an empty tent/shack structure on the planet with the miners on strike -- or at least put a lootable container in that tent. I fell for that. Twice.
fix the string "Pollyalloy" in all items, or redesign the items to look like they were made of parrot feathers
mid term
more music; I'm aware that I can control WinAmp from within the game, but an album playing in the background is not nearly as immersive as a soundtrack that picks an appropriate theme when a space battle begins. So give us more themes and add iconic audio moments - like playing the DS9 title theme (or a theme based on it) when approaching DS9.
navigation from the bridge, at least in sector space.
missions on ship
stuff to do at social spots; for example, a working Dabo wheel (and, of course, dabo girls) in Quark's -- though I'd prefer to play Tongo... "Confront!"
long term
wildlife
add depth to crafting; I can see a lot of reasons why we can't get SWG-style crafting (I guess that turned into a balancing nightmare), and I'm in the boat with the upgrading concept ("a replicator can produce any kind of weapon, so what do we need a weaponsmith for?"), but give us something to experiment with, like a way to replace one of the resources (anomalies) needed for an upgrade with a higher tier anomaly to get different results and a little variety for the final product. If you don't want that impact on the economy or low level balance, make the results bind on pickup. Some high-end resources could be hard to get by and/or bind on pickup, too. And I would like to craft in the engineering dept. of my ship instead of having to travel to Memory Alpha.
customizable personal housing (ie. the ship) and fleet housing (ie. starbases) - with stuff to do! Give players a chance to set up a space casino, or a crafting hub, or whatever tickles their ropeplay fancy.
diplomacy, perhaps as an alternative to combat in select missions. I don't care for branching story arcs, instead give me a mission reward depending on the solution I chose -- if I went the way of the warrior, I can pick from a selection of weapons or shields, if I talked my way out of the situation, I get to pick resources, a decorative head dress or a "trophy" to put on my ship.
- Fix Server stability/Capacity (Laggy at US peak times in the UK 10/02/2010)
- Fix Reported Mission bugs
- Fix Graphical Glitches (Ground Held animation, object interaction)
- Add Sort Options to Exchange
- Improved Help Tool Tips for Skills, Items etc.
- Stop music player from vanishing on session change.
Mid-term requests
-Add Ship Refit Option As in, take your Constitution class cruiser and promote Bridge Officer stations, possible attach console points (not upgrade weapons slots, not required)
- Add a few more ship skins to the classes.
- Planet Wildlife it's a bit bare at the moment.
- Mission Variety.
- Klingon Racial Ships (Gorn fly their own racial ships etc)
Long-term requests
- Continuous Content expansion
- Community/Developer interaction and input.
- Stop the lag
- Allow me to use my custom costumes on my boffs
- Native joystick support
- More Klingon content
- Fix the remaining bugs from the launch
Medium-term:
- Proper z-axis for ship combat
- Give boffs personal problems/goals/missions of their own that you can help them out with
- More non-combat PVE content for all factions
- Improve AI quality for friends and foes
- Create more room (and more to explore) on the Sector Space map
Long-term:
- Completely re-design exploration and diplomatic missions to feel like proper Star Trek
- Allow players to design the interiors of their ships and invite people on board to look around
- Set up holodecks/holosuites and empower players to create their own programs (i.e. their own content)
- Playable Romulans
- Playable Dominion
Short-term:
1. Currently, when looking at the map, other players close to a NPC often block the NPC, and if there are enough players, you cannot see the NPC at all. NPC's should be shown on the map regardless of how many players are around.
2. In game place to keep notes. I have a poor short-term memory.
3. Add auto-fire to ground combat.
Mid-term:
1. Improve store interaction. I'd like to see a way to sort and search through store inventory. For example, show me only Mk IV items, or all bridge officers with a particular skill.
2. A way to save and apply a uniform you create to all of your bridge officers.
3. "Official" uniform designs. By clicking one button, you can have (as an example) the TNG or TOS uniform (shirt, badge, pants, shoes, colours) applied to your character or bridge officers.
Long-term:
1. Dominion as a playable faction.
2. Missions that happen aboard your own ship.
3. A way to lock features during character creation, and randomize the rest. For example, I like this hairstyle, but randomize everything else.
- TOS Uniform Miniskirt. Really there isn't any acceptable reason this is not in the game. It was hawked as a marketing item, and it's at least part of the reason why I fell for pre-ordering the Digital Delux edition from Steam. It should be in the game one week ago, if not sooner.
-Turn rate on Cruisers. There is not a single issue that concerned players are more united behind, not even full autofire on all weapons. I can see why Federation Cruisers might be slower turning than other types of ships, but the magnitude is ridiculous. 8 should be the absolute minimum, and 9 or 10 preferable. You know what you have to do, Cryptic, get to work.
-Skill descriptions. Again, what is going on here? Every single skill and ability should be absolutely explicit in every bonus it gives. At the moment it is generalised, ambiguous and "some examples include" just doesn't cut it. As an addendum to this the ability to retrain skills is a must. It just boggles the mind that this kinda stuff isn't there from when code was first being laid out!
Mid-Term
-Filters for the Exchange. I hate to couch it in these terms, but there is a benchmark out there (WoW), and if you don't meet it from launch, you cannot expect people to stick around with your game. The Exchange is just a mess at the moment, and there's - once again - no good reason it should be.
-How about an end-game? I'm not far off Admiral and there's plenty of people already there. Something worthwhile to do at this stage isn't just preferable it's a damned requirement for launching! If this isn't in place with some relative haste, and it isn't satisfying expect to haemorrhage players like nothing else.
-On a related note, how about a reason to group up? At the moment I can find none, and in most cases it's advantageous for me to go solo (I don't have to share anomaly scans or loot drops), or else I'm an individual flying around with a group of other individuals.
Long Term
-This game needs to shift its focus away from pure combat. Don't get me wrong, I like the combat but that is not the be-all and end-all of Star Trek. The missions you have that pay lip service to non-combat gameplay are a complete joke. Really I'd be embarrassed if it was me who came up with the multitude of "run here press F, run here press F, run back press F" missions and think that it constitutes a game. I'm short on suggestions but you need to develop a way to make exploration fun, varied, and important. I would also suggest something to improve scanning as well, perhaps some kind of minigame or skill and equipment development involved. If Memory Alpha is your answer for crafting, just drop the idea altogether. It seems like it's only there for the sake of satisfying some unwritten trope of MMOs that you must have a crafting system, which isn't a good reason on its own it doesn't fit well with the Star Trek idiom.
Just remembered another on that is probably at least mid-term: It would be nice to be able to save only the Uniform costume information to move to other characters/BOs (i.e. leave the head and body options alone, just put them into your chosen uniform). And ideally it would be nice to set up a "uniform" for the ship that any non-named crew would wear.
Ok... I did NOT read through 27 pages of suggestions, so I hope a repeat of issues already addressed will be taken as "Heck, there are a lot of people who want this!" :eek:
Short-term requests
PLEASE let us apply special uniforms to our Bridge Officers!
Incorporate a "Distress Call" acceptance/denial choice before being pulled into a random space encounter (or something to that effect)
Mid-term requests
Figure out some way to get rid of the gold spammers! This is going to crush the in game economy!
YES...Please add some sort of "punishment" for defeat. Not only will it add more adrenaline to the combat in the game, it will change the tactics used by most players and provide for more "thought out" battles.
Long-term requests
YES... Fleet owned Starbases, with a system of player run defense and the ability of enemy fleets to attack and possibly destroy if not properly maintained
Short Term
I list this as short term because I feel its paramount to the game: You need to be able to Captain a ship from the bridge. Bridge Commander did a fair job of this considering when it came out, it shouldn't be too hard to do especially while traveling.
Mid Term
There needs to be some things you can do while on the bridge in addition to travel. Interacting with my officers would be nice. Maybe some mini-games.
There should be other places on my ship I can visit...and there should be activities there.
Long Term
It may be hard to do in the Star Trek genre, but the currency and ranking system kinda stinks, You get leveled out way too fast with way too little benefit. The currency and merits are down right confusing!
Planets are awful big places, why are the places we can go so small. WoW had huge cities, but the ground based places I have visited in STO lack any activity are feel so small.
Fix PvP queue system (no games starting at T5 even though 60 people are queued)
Add fleet actions for Admirals
Fix certain bugs like Science Team III and carrier bays
Medium-term:
End game content <- important
Add more PvP objective based content
Death Penalty
Long-term:
Open world PvP (with rewards / penalties)
More end game content!
Fix contribution count not relying solely on damage or hull healed
short term
-fix the issue where if I'm in a mission, and I use the sniper shot, I get stuck, having one or two laser sights pointing in the ground, with a repeated draw weapon motion, and have to abort the mission to get unstuck
-remove badges of exploration as a requirement for ANYTHING. There are too few as a reward for missions, and to get new consoles, we need to get too many of them, making it take too long to get new consoles for ships. Just use energy credits. Use badges for achievements.
-allow us to drop missions after accepting by accident. I've done 'defend sirius block' twice, once by accident, and I don't want to do it a third time.
mid-term
-open up more uniform choices for all players, including formerly exclusive content
-get rid of global cooldown and the incredibly long cooldown for hypos and batteries
-organize the inventory and have similar items automatically combine to save space. I have a number of tribbles that take up unnecessary space and the 14 tribbles could combine instead of taking up 14 slots of inventory. Also, tab the interface so that while in the ship, I don't see ground-only items. On the ground, I don't need to see consoles, weapons, and ship batteries. The salvage/artifacts should also show up in a different category as well.
-change the 'receiving a hail' screen from a simple pop-up to a view of my bridge, and me sitting in the captain's chair, and the person on the viewscreen. More Trek-like and more in-universe than having a simple pop-up.
long-term
-add new ships to the Federation and Klingon factions: Galaxy class from All-Good-Things, Excelsior, Enterprise-B Excelsior variant, Niagara class, New Orleans class, Yeager class, Ambassador class, etc. Also, heavy cruisers should have 3 fore, 2 aft weapons, not 2-2; battle cruisers should be 4-3; tactical escort should be 4-3, and fleet escorts should be 5-3. The Galaxy class deserves more weaponry than you give it currently.
-add more ranks. We should start the game as enlisted or as ensign currently, but then go to Lieutenant JG, then Lieutenant, Lt. Cdr, Cdr., Captain, Commodore/Vice Admiral, then Admiral. If a person is leading a task force, name them Fleet Captain in the game for the duration of a task force.
-implement badges/medals for achievements in the game, like City of Heroes. Use them for exploration, investigation, tactical missions, etc. Who wouldn't want the Pike Medal of Valor for completing a series of missions or a task force mission?
-on-ship missions, time travel missions, and mirror universe missions - the ship hits a mine and we have to repair the ship before we have a core breach, things like that. Many episodes of Star Trek were bottle shows; also, seeing an evil duplicate of my own ship would be nice, especially for infiltration missions. I would like to be able to walk down to sickbay and talk to my Chief Medical Officer about xyz, and that starts off a mission on-ship. Or talk to the engineer about the dilithium chamber needing an overhaul, leading us to a mission-specific starbase instance (they have these in City of Heroes all the time), which has instance-specific characters to interact with to complete the mission. Perhaps a washed-up starfleet officer in my instance has a part, but I need to help him/her get 3 or 4 things taken care of at base. Time travel back to the original series era, or to modern-day earth for some reason or another. just some ideas.
-ability to more greatly customize the bridges and interiors of our ships. I'd really like to specify for my Constitution Class ship a Star Trek 6-style bridge, but perhaps different chairs, railing, captain's chair, etc. For a Galaxy class, I like the Generations-style bridge. But someone might like the season 1 bridge with the season 3 captain's chair, or the season 6 carpeting colors. Trek fans do pay attention to these things, and would like this kind of customization.
-The starter bridge looks like an off-sides rounded rectangle, not a real Star Trek bridge. I'd like to see a fully rounded bridge like the original series bridge or movie bridge, with customization options for console positions, console style (buttons, full touch, or mixed touch/buttons), chair style/color, railing style/color, helm/nav console, viewscreen, flooring, and center area flooring (it changed each movie). The Constitution-class ship should have an original series bridge, and the movie-style Constitution class should have a movie style bridge, which you can customize to a preset for ST:TMP, ST 2, ST 4, ST 5, and ST 6, or mix and match. For the Galaxy class, we start with the TNG bridge, but with options for Season 1, Season 2, All Good Things, Generations, and all the different carpets from the seasons, captain's chairs, etc.
-allow me to assign crew to positions we see on the series: Chief Medical Officer, Chief Engineer, Chief Tactical Officer, First Officer, Assistant Chief for those positions, nurse, counselor, helm, navigator, chief operations manager, etc. I would like to be able to assign a CMO, and on an away team, take 2 security officers, my doctor, and a nurse on the away team. Some other away team, perhaps my Chief engineer, counselor, First officer, and two security personnel. Then the option to promote/transfer crew to other ships I own, so that my CMO on my Miranda goes over to my new Galaxy class ship, and I can then assign a new bridge officer to my old Miranda. Then, when I play my Miranda class ship, I have one officer, and on my Galaxy, another. You can keep the same 3, 4, 5, 6 'bridge officer' space options you currently have, just use those as the 'chiefs' of their respective departments - engineer, science officer, and tactical, and the second of each is the assistant chief.
Short:
- i know the Admiral level quest stuff is comming, but short term i need some high end stuff to keep going. Must have more quests, more exploration and better rewards. Solo High end encounters would be great for those of us who like to fly solo some times. (not to say purple drops but high end fights that present challenges to an admiral)
- need to be able to buy more then one item at a time. 160 Provisions double clicking then hitting ok for a single profision made me want to sprint into the street at rush hour.
Mid:
- Must have more reasons to play. Three admirals are nice on my accoucnt but i really want to love to log into this game.
Long:
- I want to take that turbo lift on my bridge to other decks. It would be really nice to have a little storage space on my ship. Realistically (in a make believe sort of way) these ships are Huge. If there is Long term storage that you have to access your bridge to get to (so its not right in your cargo) it would allow some of us to stay out in space longer (you can scale it to rank with the rest). I want to see my Warp core and walk around different parts of the ship. Flying it is cool but Star Trek happend inside the ship a whole bunch. A small combat room with drones we can test our ground skills against would be wonderful. Running Quests on our own holodecks would be sick. -You do this i will play for life.
- I want reasons to keep playing, not just Daily quests. Those were neat but there was only so much you could do. Some tailored quests for solo and group encounters on our own holodecks or through out the sectors would be great. Just because Sirius sector block was the starting zone doesn' t mean we cant run quests there and elsewhere.
-Maybe some better crafting that lets us build kits/ weapons/ and other stuff to our design. instead of just buying stuff at the store. Being able to add skills to our kits or design how our weapons fire, normal vs exposed traits and so on.
- Make some of the episodes longer, I was able to blow through some of these quests in under 15 minutes (stopping to collect everything in the area) i have always loved epic type chain quests, it gave me something to log in for. Honestly i would love to see worlds you can beam down to and find 10 or so quests all over the place, even if you have to transport between locations.
PLEASE let us apply special uniforms to our Bridge Officers!
You know that you can do that already?
Short Term:
1. When joining an area, make it a priority to join the group with team- or fleet-members inside.
2. Make it possible to zoom in on the galaxy-map to sectors you are not currently located in.
3. Possibility to trade/exchange officers with other players.
Mid-Term:
1. More ranks. Definitely more ranks. There are a lot of different Admiral-Grades and different Lieutenant-Grades present in StarTrek - why not in the game?
2. Deep Space Encounters should not be counted per instance, but per group or individual. There are too many people just switching instances to take the reward, without firing a single shot. Or even more simple: Lock already started instances for additional players.
3. PvP: Include a simple list to show who's playing on what side. I played a lot of rounds where Fed-Players just quit, because they though there were no Klingons playing, not realizing they were cloaked or out of sensor range.
Long-Term:
1. More PvE for Klingons.
2. New playable fractions like Romulans, Cardassians, Free Borg, etc.
3. There should be a ladder or similar system to only allow a limited number of people access to higher ranks at a time. They can keep their ship and stuff, but for the pure "titles" only e.g. the upper 20 top-scoring players per week should be e.g. an Admiral of the Fleet, maybe 100 the next lower rank, 500 the next lower rank until the "normal" Admiral and maybe even Captain. Maybe even limit the or at least some ranks to members of fleets. It makes no sense to fly with 10.000 admirals after 6 months.
Let's not forget that Admirals rarely get out into space at all, ESPECIALLY in StarTrek. Remember, that Kirk willingly accepted being degraded to Captain to be able to keep his command.
Wishlist: - It would be great if it was possible to design own batches for your ship, show them in your bio, or replace the UFP/Fleet-Logo or even on your uniform
- Access to more areas of the ship like engineering, etc maybe even the holodeck?
Wouldn't it be great if you could spawn a number of enemies on the holodeck? Could also be good for some intense and very different missions. It sure was in the StarTrek Series.
- More options to change the appearance of the ship would be great.
- Please add some classic shipdesigns, like the Nebula-Class, Oberth-Class, Excelsior-Class, Light Destroyers like the Saladin-Class (or USS Kelvin), maybe even carriers (The USS Akira, for example, was designed as a carrier originally, hence the twin-secondary hull).
- A readyroom with trophies or personal things on display (like that original Sniper-Phaser-Rifle from my first mission)
-Fix steering the ship in space so it is more agile and maneuverability. so its lees like steering the Titanic in space.
-Better beacons on map to see where we need to go I feel even more lost when i open my map or look at my mini map.
- Make Quest Givers Unique Pat a ? over there head or something. I cant tell one NPC from another and they all look like the person that just gave the quest.
Medium term:
-Make the space stations less foreign i fell less at home on the space station then i do on some random planet
- Make vendors feel more like vendors and not like some dude standing there that has a super long list of things to buy that i can barely scroll though to see the items that when moused over take up the entire screen.
Comments
Anyway, here's my list: (Bug fixes not included)
Short term: (Should just be variable changes, small tweaks to code, or adding documentation)
1. Change exploration sectors to be filled with 'fog' so you can't see more than 1 LY. Make ships really have to get lost in it and search around. Make it feel like you're exploring a dense nebula cluster. Don't need to alter map visibility or anything, just a nice dense fog effect and more limited visibility.
2. Auto-Holster weapons in non combat areas. Or, while not at 'red alert'.
3. Come up with some way to add more autofire weapon banks in space without allowing exploits for AFK combat. (make autofire not work if you're idle for more than 2 min?)
4. MUCH more detail on ship/skill stats. Tell us every variable that affects the ship and any BO powers. (Turn speed, shield recharge rate, for instance?)
5. Be able to fly up or down +-90º. Those vertical missions where you have to fly down a planet's ring are really, really annoying when I CAN'T fly down.
6. Make ship crew meaningful. Or explain what the heck it does. It seems to be pointless right now. It says it alters ship hull repair rates, but I've yet to see a tactically significant difference.
7. Make ship space flight a bit more graceful. Seems awful jerky to me. It's not just turn radius, it's how quickly they accelerate into and out of turns.
Mid Term: (Probably new code, missions or art assets)
1. Add the ability to preview ships in the Ship Configuration editor (IE, the costume changing thing to modify the look of your ship) up in spacedocks' consoles for each ship tier's info. Let us see what these ships look like and all the options for customizing their looks, BEFORE we buy the ship.
2. More ship part options, with a little more variety to the parts, ability to choose optional mission modules, 2 or 4 nacelles, etc.
3. More fleet actions and bracketing existing ones so higher levels can do them again for a greater challenge. Let Admirals face off against an Admiral difficulty Crystalline Entity.
4. Have ships line up when they go to warp, so they're not going to crash into a planet, at the least. Members in a group should all warp out in the same direction. Just a 'feel' thing.
5. Fix canon ship models to more accurately reflect the shows. (IE, the defiant's nacelles and nose don't 'droop' quite enough compared to DS9 footage. The nose part is too high on the saucer. Gives it a less aggressive feel. The Galaxy's pylons don't blend into the body, and instead stick to the bottom of the secondary hull. The lower portion of the secondary hull falls vertically down, which is too extreme. The spine on the dorsal side of the secondary hull is too pronounced, windows not wrapping over the edges on the top and bottom of the saucer edge, etc.) Small things, but noticeable by quite a few people, and make the ships just not quite right. They need a good fine tooth comb against a lot of the footage from the series, especially the movies. Nice high res shots there.
6. Add MUCH more filtering and search capabilities to the Exchange, include searching for specific powers on bridge officers, sorting by price, etc.
Long Term: (New or redone game mechanics)
1. Revamp Sector Space. This may be more of a challenge, but make all geographically contiguous areas one huge sector. Add a warp sequence to move from the Federation/Romulan/Klingon area to the Cardassian and Borg areas, for example. Put the systems much further apart, but increase ship speed. Make it feel huge and empty. Increase travel time a little (maybe double), but make the distances much, much further (so you have to speed the ships up). This will make it feel like you're really traveling at warp and going a long way. Make it darker, less bright stuff. This makes it feel bigger, and the ship smaller. System icons thinner and less pronounced (the orbit rings don't need to be as thick as my warm nacelles). Move the exploration clusters to big gaseous areas inside space that you fly and zone into. Add random planets all over that have the exploration engine tied to them for random missions, and make them often have nothing interesting to report after someone does a mission there (to prevent farming). Big thing here is to make space feel EMPTY. Around Sol and stuff there should be lots of ship traffic, but systems far enough apart that once you leave the vicinity, the odds of seeing another ship should be pretty low until you approach another system.
2. Come up with fun mechanics for non-combat missions. EvE's sensor probe mechanism is a good example of a fun geeky way to probe things. Deploy probes with a scanning radius, and using triangulation by overlapping probe's scan radii, find anomalies. Stuff like that. Kind of like mini-games, I guess.
3. Make science ships (or better yet, any ship with science modules) actually have some neat non-combat abilities. I love how they're different than normal ships as it is. But increased scanning/anomaly finding ability would be fun. Or give them other interesting non-combat related abilities.
Mid--Streamline skills, powers, and training. Make your tooltips useful. Right now, they are not. I have skills, and I can observe what they do in many cases, but I have no clue what the difference is, for example, between deflector emissions and deflector sensors.
Long--Redesign missions to, in general, de-emphasize combat. Especially ground missions. I'm sorry, but STO is fundamentally bad at any content that isn't point and shoot. Your game claims to be Trek but is 90% combat. Ridiculous. Redesign old content, especially exploration missions, to emphasize exploration and diplomacy. When designing new content, de-emphasize combat. In all cases, design with an eye on allowing for different solutions for each problem. A captain should usually have more than one option for solving a problem, be it combat, negotiation or espionage (Kill it, woo it, or bypass it).
Avoid blinding me when my camera ends up "behind" or "within" an object with a light source.
An example would be smacking into a "glowy" planet, and then end up blinded while attempting to turn around. It's bad enough that my turn rate is somewhere between "lackadasical snail" and "three-legged turtle" without being unable to see while I hope that I'm now facing away from the big glowy thing.
Set AFK timeout to 30 minutes.
Yes, I know the server's overloaded, but why punish us for that? Some of us wouldn't mind a little role-playing, or chatting, or even just bouncing back and forth between the sparse documentation and the game without... Lovely. I timed out while writing this post.
Hire a good technical writer. Me, perhaps.
The docs are useless. Sparse, not well focused for the audience, and lacking depth. Thanks to the docs, I'm resigned to having to roll my main character over, AFTER I reach Admiral, because of a pitiful lack of information from which to base my initial choices. Forum posts are not documentation. Some localization/globalization cycles might be useful, too.
Mid-term requests
Store additional UI settings.
An example would be how many toolbars I had displayed when I exited the game.
Increase the size of the minimap.
Either increase the viewport size, or allow the viewport size to be adjustable (within reasonable limitations.) I've a large, widescreen monitor and the thing looks like a postage stamp stuck to the upper right corner.
Improve window resizing.
When I can clock a full redraw in minutes, it's too slow. Rapid mouse movement means, every once in a great while, I accidentally snag a window border - and lose as I wait half a minute or more for the screen to refresh. At the very least, allow us to lock the window in standard fullscreen sizes.
Long-term requests
Separate the Science Officer from medical functions and add a Medical Officer.
I swear, if Spock tries to bandage me one more time...
Allow non-Starfleet Federation classes, or even neutral classes, and attendant support mechanisms.
I'm not here to be Kirk, Picard, Janeway, or Archer. I'm here to be Harcourt Fenton Mudd. Or, if I'm lucky and work at it, the Grand Nagus. Star Trek, for me, wasn't just about the "pew pew" - I shouldn't be bored barely a week or so into the game, but I am indeed feeling some "fighter fatigue."
Provide a development path that emphasizes exploration or even colonization.
I'm not here to shoot everything that doesn't look like me. I'd like to sell them something instead. Or go mine deuterium and get bullied by the Klingons for it. Or have a place to park my trading ship other than a Starfleet spacedock (apparently uninterested in commerce.)
Short Term
Medium Term
Long Term
PvP queue system upgraded, separate the different engagements. Easier to access.
General PvP improvements, fix the broken score tallying. Add objectives/markers to the map in PvP battles.
PvE mission variety. One can only kill 5 foozles so many times before they start to feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
PvE Ground Combat. Add a button to call all of your BO's currently on the ground to you ( teleport ). They get stuck far, far too often.
More clarity on all skills. Often almost impossible to actually find out what a skill does, especially for someone who isn't a regular fanatic of Star Trek.
Auto fire button for all weapons, to free up space on the 1-10 keys for skills.
Add toggle off/on for auto targeting a friendly that's being targeted by your enemy when you use a skill that can benefit them. ( Or if there is one, set it off by default. I looked. I can't find it if there is. )
Separate tabs on the BO skills trainer for each BO type.
Add a timer to PvP matches to keep them going quickly, rather than dragging on for 45+ minutes.
Mid Term:
PvP Ground combat overhaul. Melee weapons are useless, due to excessive rubberbanding and client-server issues.
Remove and/or consolidate skills. There are far, far, far too many skills currently. I'm at Commander 1 and I have 3 bars full of just space skills, half of which have very similar effects and icons which are identical. Often by the time I get everything running I'm already dead.
Make PvP less lopsided, often one side will win by a landslide where the other team scores 0 kills. Ground combat PvP firearms do too much damage.
Long Term:
More Fleet battles ( fix the fleet battle score system first )
Less tedium for general PvE combat. Less hp/shields for NPC's all around ( both ground and space ). Increase NPC damage considerably.
Make the Klingon side not an afterthought. More costumes, Signs in the starting area. It's fine if PvP remains their main source of exp, as long as the balance issues are fixed, and they gain more from matches to level at a comparable rate to a fed grinding patrols.
Yes, I cheated a bit and put a bunch of short term goals. But these are things I feel need to be taken care of if the game is to have any chance of survival.
- In game tooltip descriptions that are meaningful (It took me an hour and a 3rd party source to figure out what equipment I wanted to put in my ship to boost a specific ability)
- General server fluidity (short term only in that I'd like it sooner than later. I realize this is ongoing and heavy load task). Rubber banding is probably one of the biggest issues to my suspension of disbelief.
- Corrected ship scale relationships, both player and NPC ships.
<Rant>
No escort should be bigger than ANY cruiser. There's plenty of documentation on these sizes. I can't for the life of me figure out why the ships are scaled as they are now. Size relationships is a huge part of the visual appeal of the ST mythos imo. Fix this, it's huge, most everyone I've talked to about this has agreed and are at a similar loss of explaination
</Rant>
Make sure that everything works as intended *before* adding anything new. Squash all the bugs, improve server performance, and give everyone all the stuff that they have paid for. I haven't had much trouble with these issues personally, but it's not hard to understand why people get worked up about them.
Mid-Term:
a) Institute a difficulty slider so the wars over game difficulty can abate. Include at least one setting *below* normal. Institute diminishing returns on award increases so people don't have to play on the hardest difficulty to get useful rewards.
b) Fully flesh out the Klingon faction.
Long Term:
Fully flesh out a playable Romulan faction please!
3 short term.
- C-store, what about being able to purchase additional weapon slots for level one ships? At least make them upgradable to mid level ships(Commander) that way a pc can stick with a ship they enjoy playing and not have to pick a new ship that looks a little weard!
-C-store, what about being able to purchase historical ships like the Enterprize from the series "Enterprize", and the Enterprize from the "Star Trek" movie.
-can I at least sit in the captons chair on my bridge??
3 mid term
- More interactions on my ship, hallways, ten forward, maybe drink romulan ale and watch myself stumble around till it wears off.
- Random encounters, so I drank some romulan ale and a klingon bird of prey decloaks and is now attacking my ship.
- Start up movie/trailer with the option to watch it or not.
3 long term
- I want to visit Star Fleet Acadomy, and maybe do some site seeing, and a couple of missions on home planets.
- Love the original series missions, but some took place on board ship. More content, and original missions on planets and onboard ships. These can be set for instanced zones, so if people don't want to do them, they don't have to.
- instanced missions from the movies played out much like the city on the edge of forever.
Once again, I just have to say I loved the game. These are in no way complaints. These are just suggestions!
Thanks!!
Fix for the Female Klingon armor clipping....
Some other kinds of life on mission planets..... (really, plants and humanoids? that's it?)
beam out and leave sector buttons more useful so we can get rid of the popup messages requesting us to do the same.
Mid-Term:
Klingon PvE starting at ensign...
more PvP maps... i want a starbase that klingons have infiltrated where they set up bombs and the feds have to stop them. i like objectives. (dunno if these are in higher level areas, but i've not seen any yet. at least for ground pvp)
Three ways to beat some missions. One for science, engineers, and tactical. or specific missions for that vessel type.
Long-Term:
Restructured Systems Map - Go from Sector -> system -> planet/POI gives you more for exploration and more room for missions.
Romulan Faction. They've already got space and some planets
Short Term;
Three hot items here;
- Additional common item vendors to normalize market prices for crafters
One of the big problems crafters face is that a great deal of the gear we are able to upgrade is drop-only. That means a few people can establish a monopoly on the prices, and the alternative is the prospect of farming for several hours, perhaps even consecutive days depending on how much time we have and are willing to devote to the task... to get just one -common- item.It would take almost no time at all to plug in a few more vendors around the Sol and Memory Alpha systems, and would allow our crafters to take a collective sigh of relief.
It would serve to establish a much more normalized market, which I believe would be beneficial for all players.
A serious problem for new users (which most of us are) is that we don't understand what various common terms mean, or what stat buffs and abilities are actually doing for us. We assume they're a good thing, or a bad thing, but we don't really know what's going on.
It would take a fairly comprehensive patch to fix this, perhaps even several smaller patches over the course of a few weeks, but laying out more clear and understandable terms in the game would benefit all players and very likely some of the staff too.
After all, it's kind of hard to tell the difference between "a bug" and "works as intended" when we have no idea what things are supposed to be.
I would call this a minor annoyance, but really, I would certainly hope this isn't "works as intended" because we basically have to look up external sources of information to find out the basic operation of the facilities.
It could be fixed in one minor dialogue patch, and really really should.
Mid-Term
Allow us to sort the market by price, quality, and sort based on bracket qualities such as [CAP] [CRTH]
It's not easy scrolling through 100 items per page trying to find a good price and the stats we want. Help us out. I know that's not the kind of thing that gets put in over a week-end, but it's worth doing.
You've already taken the steps to say "You can't craft X tier until you make [Quantity] Y tier" why not put in some other crafters on the same lines with access to higher quality goods for the various tiers?
Craft greens into blues, blues into purples, and give us a very real incentive to continue to make use of the facilities in Memory Alpha. An expansion of content that won't take six months to release.
It's more content, and it helps normalize the economy. Which is something often neglected that games in this stage of their life could really really use.
Long Term
I'm not going to presume to know what the devs are planning for future content. I'm not going to push it, because I know the community has been churning out ideas that are better than what I have. I haven't reached "end game" yet, so I'll leave that for those who have.
These ideas are a bit smaller, the first one is just additional content to allow us more than a couple ways of playing the game, and a good excuse to give us some new ship models, because I -love- going through all the various parts to put together an interesting look.
The second gives us something to do while we're not saving the galaxy... shaving tribbles... whatever the heck we decide to do for a few hours a day... gives us something to screen and show off, to share with each other, or keep to ourselves. Our own little slice of paradise.
The third gives us perhaps a daily quest to go fix this or that, talk to this person, address concerns of that person, restock some supplies and what-not. Not dramatic stuff, but a nice little diversion and a chance to meet some non-essential crew that will probably die the next time we go on an away mission.
So yes, I end this on a humorous note, but I feel my suggestions are valid all the same. Hopefully at least a couple of them will end up being put into play.
- Do something to help the Cruiser turn rates; at least the T4 if not all of them. Aside from this I have zero complains about anything relating to ship mechanics.
- Clarify some of the skills tooltips. Right now in the character sheet you have a huge list of skills and it's not readily apparent what they do some of the time. Same goes for item tooltips, especially for deflector dish-slot ship items.
- Better facilitate doing group content by putting premade teams into instances that will get all the members of the team in there at once, creating a new instance if necessary. Right now trying to do Fleet Actions or DSEs with actual fleet members breaks down into a poor game of "telephone" while you all try to scramble to the same instance before it fills up. Even better; let us queue for Fleet Actions remotely. There's little reason we should have to fly out to each individual fleet action while we can queue for pvp via a (clunky) menu.
- Sort stores better. Have individual tabs for different classes of items (weapons, armor, shields, etc.) or ship components (shields, engines, consoles broken down by duty station type, etc.) or bridge officers (science, tactical, engineering), and bridge officer trainers (one tab for ground skills, one for space) instead of having everything dumped into a single game-chugging list.
- Mark station maps. There's no reason why station sections aren't marked and their NPCs clearly labeled along with their jobs. Even City of Heroes did this while it was still under Cryptic's watch.
- Improve Aid the Planet exploration sub-mission rewards. If we have to leave the sector and go out of our way to find and then purchase otherwise useless commodities for the flimsiest of excuses, then we need to be better compensated for it. 100 skill points per 1000 credits' worth of commodities at the very least.
- Fix my joined Trill's space traits.
- Federation vs. Federation pvp matches. Call them "war games" like KvK are "house matches." There are plenty of in-canon examples to support this. You don't even need to make new arenas to do this.
- Remove the Master Loot loot option from PvE. I can't think of many legit uses for it in STO as opposed to a game with more ubiquitous bind-on-pickup loot items, like WoW, and even the legit uses for it (have a speedy escort master looter so the group isn't held up by a slow-turning cruiser) are pretty flimsy. Right now I've only seen it used by people who want to vacuum up everything for themselves until someone finally notices what it's set to.
- Short/Md term: Fix the weirdness with tileset lighting. The "Memory Alpha" style tileset frequently seen in Exploration sub-missions is blinding, and many maps (especially the brown cave tileset) have buggy lighting that makes some rooms inexplicably dark until you get halfway into them.
Medium term:
- Do something about how much of a performance hog the game's UI is, especially on the ground. Hitting Shift-F12 to disable the UI jumps my framerate from 49 to 90. That's ridiculous and completely unacceptable.
- Put in the last ten levels worth of content and then either uncap player skill gain again or give us a (very) generous skill cap and easily-available unlimited amounts of respecs for either energy credits or a modest amount of Starfleet/KDF merits.
- Give Klingons something PvE. Anything. Doesn't matter what it is. A targ petting zoo is an improvement at this point.
- Once the KDF has its PvE content, let them be played on a new account from the get-go. As it stands, there will never be parity in the populations of Klingon and Fed players. Any new factions' players should be supported without unlocks as well.
- Medium/Long term: Do something with Memory Alpha. I'm not sure what and frankly I don't care. It's currently a bit of an embarassment and the rewards aren't even much to write home about. Find a reasonable Memory Alpha suggestion thread and run with that.
Long term:
- Content, content, content. Leveling content, max-level content, solo content, group content, multi-group content. The more variety there is on the way to and at level 50, the better. More variety to explorations. More pvp scenarios. Just more.
- If you're going to put in more playable factions as you say to be planning, you need more character slots. Three is near-draconian, even with an uncapped skill system. The bare minimum we should have with the game as it stands now is six. Not two with an additional unlock. Champions currently has the same lack of replayability as STO, and it has what, eight?
- Territory control. I've seen it mentioned around the forums a bit, where the neutral zone areas could be swayed in the favor of one faction or another through the use of diplomacy (providing large amounts of special commodities - possibly earned through the various Resource Control pvp matches? - in a faction-wide joint effort) or providing security against pirates that are aided by an enemy faction. As incentive to get people to participate, maybe have a "raid" zone or something unlock for the faction that is more in favor; kind of like what you get for controlling Lake Wintergrasp in WoW or the old Darkness Falls system in Dark Age of Camelot.
- Ship interiors. If you're not going to put wandering NPCs on there anytime soon, then reduce the bridge sizes by at least 50% for each bridge. Some of them are downright cavernous. Let us also go to the Captain's ready room, crew lounge, and main engineering at the least. Better yet, let us design our own versions of said areas with a tool similar to CoH's supegroup base designer.
What I feel is clearly lacking is episodes on-board your own ship. I've been playing since release day and from what I've experienced the only on-board episode is the tutorial.
I would really enjoy taking on boarding parties on bridge and investigating my crew members in the engine room and spar against my bridge officers in the rec room and host first contact meetings in my ten forward.
- I cannot stress this enough...Give us the Ability to Respec our Skills.
- Fix Major UI issues such as Mouse cursor disappearing, Also the infamous Rubberbanding across the universe. The UI really needs a Facelift, Its way too traditional and quite honestly boring to look at, Skills should be color coordinated to represent which Division they belong too etc etc.
- Class Balancing/ PvP Balancing nuff said.
Mid-term
- Exploration needs to be completely revamped, It is far too linear and not random enough. Whatever happened to the idea we are supposed to find new life and interact with them? There should never be objectives when exploring, Kinda defeats the purpose don't it?
- New End game content/Fleet Actions/ PvP Maps (New Objectives as well) Ground combat needs to be reworked so it feels less clunky and more smooth.
- Ability to customize interiors of your ship *not the current system that is in place*, Access to entire ship sections, Access ships computers and controls so that it really does feel like its your ship and not some random NPC. And oh yes Star Bases soon please!
- Patrol Missions need to be reworked so they don't have the same grind to them. Go in and kill so many and warp out... Far too redundant and needs more flavor to keep me interested.
Long-term
- Access to All Planets and Systems, and I do mean all of them.
- I cannot Stress Exploration, It needs to be done right and not the current system in place. Not only should I be able to find new life, I should be able to experience the Genesis system to its fullest, Like finding spacial anomaly's such as comets and nebula's and then categorizing them.
- Sectors that Allow Open PvP, Ability to invade other Factions territory and the ability to defend it.
- A constantly evolving changing world...Storyline content, New missions should be every few weeks so we never can get bored with the game.
Stop mobs camping spawn points in deep space combat
Fix the UI so it saves my presets such as expanded quick launch trays (1,2 and 3 showing)
When I want to change instance - let me know what instance I am already in
Supply a good manual for the game - I want to know what you devs know about how things work (not the technicals obviously)
Fix the 'aid the planet' missions so they are worth the extra effort - people are just skipping then at the moment
Medium
'Fleet or group invite' be able to invite people enmasse to join instances be it someone's bridge or whatever.
Implement a real crafting system which will in turn breathe new life into an economy which is otherwise going to stagnate fairly quickly
Let's have some pretty ship models please and some fixes to the one's that are already present.
The game in terms of mission scripting and, to some extent, variation gets better from lvl 11 - you need to hook people much sooner than this. It's almost like the early content was rushed more than the later content...
Additions to the starship including worthwhile and meaningfuly interactive areas. Such as missions on the view screen, set course from the bridge, customisation and purchasable items for the bridge, in-ship missions, chairs etc that you can it on without emoting, interactive crew who will offer helpful advice.
Additional fucntionality for sensors (both ground and space) - background information on location, nearest klingon life sign etc etc
Inventory renamed 'hold' (I dont carry supplies and onomolies around in my pocket) and made relevant to the class of ship - ie a bonus for large cruisers and a 'penalty' for escours or some such
Long
Diplomacy and exploration done right. Much more indepth, branching decision driven storylines etc - you guys have underestimated the audience's thirst for this sort of thing quite dramatically. I know you wanted the game to be fun, and you've achieved that, but to many of us solving missions with out minds rather than with our guns IS fun - bold because it is the single most important thing to me on this list.
Let's see starfleet acadamy and Starfleet Command please (along with Klingon equivilents) - let us not only see them but let them have real meaning and purpose as locations. Ineractive NPCs, training programmes, further ship mods, BOs recruited fresh for the acadamy, give Admirals an office at starfleet command.
Planetary hubs - massive interactive cities as you would expect to find in all MMORPGs
Starbases for Fleets, bought and maintained by fleets themselves - cost of purchase should be astronomical as should 'monthly maintenance' so that obsoilete starbases are quickly removed.
The Klingon experience must be as complete an experience as Federation players have.
Content, content, content - more please!
Good post Sir! Would just say though, that the bridge needs to remain fairly large for those of us who want to host fleet meetings on them. I was at one such yesterday and we had to crm 30+ people in there and there will be significantly greater numbers than that wanting to join in.
Short term:
Finish the building we've moved in to. The roof is still leaking and you completely forgot the basement - a typical American oversight. I can only assume that you're doing this anyways and the only dev department that will not have their hands full right now is probably Art. Then again, there's always some design that can be improved...
Mid term:
Begin extending this game beyond the arcade action shooter it feels like right now. Watch a couple of seasons of any Star Trek show and see that many awesome things can happen to you which do not include killing dozens of enemies.
Throw some toys at the Roleplayers. They can be your most loyal fans if you give them something to work with, they require very little maintenance both content and support wise and they'll stay longer then those pro-gamers who'll just look up the fastest way to exploit their way through the game just to move on to the next big thing, with a short stop on your forums to let everyone know the game sucks and they're moving on. (Yes, I am biased.)
An example for RP content: Add a captains ready-room and a lounge to the bridge instances. Only a minor upgrade to already existing content compared to the long term improvements I'll address next.
Long term
Fluff, fluff and more fluff. Yes, more endgame stuff and raids and new levels are important, but I must beg again that you do not forget the RP aspect. They'll make up their own content if you only give them the proper tools. One of those tools is of course:
Player housing: Luckily, we already have our house: It's the ship, and we already love it. But more functionality would be awesome. Add a cargo hold, where we can drop off those samples and commodities from our full inventories. Add a holodeck, where we can experience our favorite episodes again (You know, those that you will have added, the ones where we could decide if we want to talk of go trigger happy. We want to see what happens if you shoot everyone.) Add main engineering, where we can realign the dilithium matrix to add 0.02% to our top-speed...
I'm sure there's a lot more, but this post is already getting too long. Thank you for reading all of this, or at least for skipping everything but this last paragraph...
mid term
long term
Non-combat timesinks ftw!
- Fix Server stability/Capacity (Laggy at US peak times in the UK 10/02/2010)
- Fix Reported Mission bugs
- Fix Graphical Glitches (Ground Held animation, object interaction)
- Add Sort Options to Exchange
- Improved Help Tool Tips for Skills, Items etc.
- Stop music player from vanishing on session change.
Mid-term requests
-Add Ship Refit Option
As in, take your Constitution class cruiser and promote Bridge Officer stations, possible attach console points (not upgrade weapons slots, not required)
- Add a few more ship skins to the classes.
- Planet Wildlife it's a bit bare at the moment.
- Mission Variety.
- Klingon Racial Ships (Gorn fly their own racial ships etc)
Long-term requests
- Continuous Content expansion
- Community/Developer interaction and input.
Red for priority
- Stop the lag
- Allow me to use my custom costumes on my boffs
- Native joystick support
- More Klingon content
- Fix the remaining bugs from the launch
Medium-term:
- Proper z-axis for ship combat
- Give boffs personal problems/goals/missions of their own that you can help them out with
- More non-combat PVE content for all factions
- Improve AI quality for friends and foes
- Create more room (and more to explore) on the Sector Space map
Long-term:
- Completely re-design exploration and diplomatic missions to feel like proper Star Trek
- Allow players to design the interiors of their ships and invite people on board to look around
- Set up holodecks/holosuites and empower players to create their own programs (i.e. their own content)
- Playable Romulans
- Playable Dominion
1. Currently, when looking at the map, other players close to a NPC often block the NPC, and if there are enough players, you cannot see the NPC at all. NPC's should be shown on the map regardless of how many players are around.
2. In game place to keep notes. I have a poor short-term memory.
3. Add auto-fire to ground combat.
Mid-term:
1. Improve store interaction. I'd like to see a way to sort and search through store inventory. For example, show me only Mk IV items, or all bridge officers with a particular skill.
2. A way to save and apply a uniform you create to all of your bridge officers.
3. "Official" uniform designs. By clicking one button, you can have (as an example) the TNG or TOS uniform (shirt, badge, pants, shoes, colours) applied to your character or bridge officers.
Long-term:
1. Dominion as a playable faction.
2. Missions that happen aboard your own ship.
3. A way to lock features during character creation, and randomize the rest. For example, I like this hairstyle, but randomize everything else.
- TOS Uniform Miniskirt. Really there isn't any acceptable reason this is not in the game. It was hawked as a marketing item, and it's at least part of the reason why I fell for pre-ordering the Digital Delux edition from Steam. It should be in the game one week ago, if not sooner.
-Turn rate on Cruisers. There is not a single issue that concerned players are more united behind, not even full autofire on all weapons. I can see why Federation Cruisers might be slower turning than other types of ships, but the magnitude is ridiculous. 8 should be the absolute minimum, and 9 or 10 preferable. You know what you have to do, Cryptic, get to work.
-Skill descriptions. Again, what is going on here? Every single skill and ability should be absolutely explicit in every bonus it gives. At the moment it is generalised, ambiguous and "some examples include" just doesn't cut it. As an addendum to this the ability to retrain skills is a must. It just boggles the mind that this kinda stuff isn't there from when code was first being laid out!
Mid-Term
-Filters for the Exchange. I hate to couch it in these terms, but there is a benchmark out there (WoW), and if you don't meet it from launch, you cannot expect people to stick around with your game. The Exchange is just a mess at the moment, and there's - once again - no good reason it should be.
-How about an end-game? I'm not far off Admiral and there's plenty of people already there. Something worthwhile to do at this stage isn't just preferable it's a damned requirement for launching! If this isn't in place with some relative haste, and it isn't satisfying expect to haemorrhage players like nothing else.
-On a related note, how about a reason to group up? At the moment I can find none, and in most cases it's advantageous for me to go solo (I don't have to share anomaly scans or loot drops), or else I'm an individual flying around with a group of other individuals.
Long Term
-This game needs to shift its focus away from pure combat. Don't get me wrong, I like the combat but that is not the be-all and end-all of Star Trek. The missions you have that pay lip service to non-combat gameplay are a complete joke. Really I'd be embarrassed if it was me who came up with the multitude of "run here press F, run here press F, run back press F" missions and think that it constitutes a game. I'm short on suggestions but you need to develop a way to make exploration fun, varied, and important. I would also suggest something to improve scanning as well, perhaps some kind of minigame or skill and equipment development involved. If Memory Alpha is your answer for crafting, just drop the idea altogether. It seems like it's only there for the sake of satisfying some unwritten trope of MMOs that you must have a crafting system, which isn't a good reason on its own it doesn't fit well with the Star Trek idiom.
just a proposal i don't want to let die
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=112123
Short-term requests
PLEASE let us apply special uniforms to our Bridge Officers!
Incorporate a "Distress Call" acceptance/denial choice before being pulled into a random space encounter (or something to that effect)
Mid-term requests
Figure out some way to get rid of the gold spammers! This is going to crush the in game economy!
YES...Please add some sort of "punishment" for defeat. Not only will it add more adrenaline to the combat in the game, it will change the tactics used by most players and provide for more "thought out" battles.
Long-term requests
YES... Fleet owned Starbases, with a system of player run defense and the ability of enemy fleets to attack and possibly destroy if not properly maintained
Add Romulans as a playable race!
Thanks for all the work you guys do!
I list this as short term because I feel its paramount to the game: You need to be able to Captain a ship from the bridge. Bridge Commander did a fair job of this considering when it came out, it shouldn't be too hard to do especially while traveling.
Mid Term
There needs to be some things you can do while on the bridge in addition to travel. Interacting with my officers would be nice. Maybe some mini-games.
There should be other places on my ship I can visit...and there should be activities there.
Long Term
It may be hard to do in the Star Trek genre, but the currency and ranking system kinda stinks, You get leveled out way too fast with way too little benefit. The currency and merits are down right confusing!
Planets are awful big places, why are the places we can go so small. WoW had huge cities, but the ground based places I have visited in STO lack any activity are feel so small.
Fix PvP queue system (no games starting at T5 even though 60 people are queued)
Add fleet actions for Admirals
Fix certain bugs like Science Team III and carrier bays
Medium-term:
End game content <- important
Add more PvP objective based content
Death Penalty
Long-term:
Open world PvP (with rewards / penalties)
More end game content!
Fix contribution count not relying solely on damage or hull healed
short term
-fix the issue where if I'm in a mission, and I use the sniper shot, I get stuck, having one or two laser sights pointing in the ground, with a repeated draw weapon motion, and have to abort the mission to get unstuck
-remove badges of exploration as a requirement for ANYTHING. There are too few as a reward for missions, and to get new consoles, we need to get too many of them, making it take too long to get new consoles for ships. Just use energy credits. Use badges for achievements.
-allow us to drop missions after accepting by accident. I've done 'defend sirius block' twice, once by accident, and I don't want to do it a third time.
mid-term
-open up more uniform choices for all players, including formerly exclusive content
-get rid of global cooldown and the incredibly long cooldown for hypos and batteries
-organize the inventory and have similar items automatically combine to save space. I have a number of tribbles that take up unnecessary space and the 14 tribbles could combine instead of taking up 14 slots of inventory. Also, tab the interface so that while in the ship, I don't see ground-only items. On the ground, I don't need to see consoles, weapons, and ship batteries. The salvage/artifacts should also show up in a different category as well.
-change the 'receiving a hail' screen from a simple pop-up to a view of my bridge, and me sitting in the captain's chair, and the person on the viewscreen. More Trek-like and more in-universe than having a simple pop-up.
long-term
-add new ships to the Federation and Klingon factions: Galaxy class from All-Good-Things, Excelsior, Enterprise-B Excelsior variant, Niagara class, New Orleans class, Yeager class, Ambassador class, etc. Also, heavy cruisers should have 3 fore, 2 aft weapons, not 2-2; battle cruisers should be 4-3; tactical escort should be 4-3, and fleet escorts should be 5-3. The Galaxy class deserves more weaponry than you give it currently.
-add more ranks. We should start the game as enlisted or as ensign currently, but then go to Lieutenant JG, then Lieutenant, Lt. Cdr, Cdr., Captain, Commodore/Vice Admiral, then Admiral. If a person is leading a task force, name them Fleet Captain in the game for the duration of a task force.
-implement badges/medals for achievements in the game, like City of Heroes. Use them for exploration, investigation, tactical missions, etc. Who wouldn't want the Pike Medal of Valor for completing a series of missions or a task force mission?
-on-ship missions, time travel missions, and mirror universe missions - the ship hits a mine and we have to repair the ship before we have a core breach, things like that. Many episodes of Star Trek were bottle shows; also, seeing an evil duplicate of my own ship would be nice, especially for infiltration missions. I would like to be able to walk down to sickbay and talk to my Chief Medical Officer about xyz, and that starts off a mission on-ship. Or talk to the engineer about the dilithium chamber needing an overhaul, leading us to a mission-specific starbase instance (they have these in City of Heroes all the time), which has instance-specific characters to interact with to complete the mission. Perhaps a washed-up starfleet officer in my instance has a part, but I need to help him/her get 3 or 4 things taken care of at base. Time travel back to the original series era, or to modern-day earth for some reason or another. just some ideas.
-ability to more greatly customize the bridges and interiors of our ships. I'd really like to specify for my Constitution Class ship a Star Trek 6-style bridge, but perhaps different chairs, railing, captain's chair, etc. For a Galaxy class, I like the Generations-style bridge. But someone might like the season 1 bridge with the season 3 captain's chair, or the season 6 carpeting colors. Trek fans do pay attention to these things, and would like this kind of customization.
-The starter bridge looks like an off-sides rounded rectangle, not a real Star Trek bridge. I'd like to see a fully rounded bridge like the original series bridge or movie bridge, with customization options for console positions, console style (buttons, full touch, or mixed touch/buttons), chair style/color, railing style/color, helm/nav console, viewscreen, flooring, and center area flooring (it changed each movie). The Constitution-class ship should have an original series bridge, and the movie-style Constitution class should have a movie style bridge, which you can customize to a preset for ST:TMP, ST 2, ST 4, ST 5, and ST 6, or mix and match. For the Galaxy class, we start with the TNG bridge, but with options for Season 1, Season 2, All Good Things, Generations, and all the different carpets from the seasons, captain's chairs, etc.
-allow me to assign crew to positions we see on the series: Chief Medical Officer, Chief Engineer, Chief Tactical Officer, First Officer, Assistant Chief for those positions, nurse, counselor, helm, navigator, chief operations manager, etc. I would like to be able to assign a CMO, and on an away team, take 2 security officers, my doctor, and a nurse on the away team. Some other away team, perhaps my Chief engineer, counselor, First officer, and two security personnel. Then the option to promote/transfer crew to other ships I own, so that my CMO on my Miranda goes over to my new Galaxy class ship, and I can then assign a new bridge officer to my old Miranda. Then, when I play my Miranda class ship, I have one officer, and on my Galaxy, another. You can keep the same 3, 4, 5, 6 'bridge officer' space options you currently have, just use those as the 'chiefs' of their respective departments - engineer, science officer, and tactical, and the second of each is the assistant chief.
- i know the Admiral level quest stuff is comming, but short term i need some high end stuff to keep going. Must have more quests, more exploration and better rewards. Solo High end encounters would be great for those of us who like to fly solo some times. (not to say purple drops but high end fights that present challenges to an admiral)
- need to be able to buy more then one item at a time. 160 Provisions double clicking then hitting ok for a single profision made me want to sprint into the street at rush hour.
Mid:
- Must have more reasons to play. Three admirals are nice on my accoucnt but i really want to love to log into this game.
Long:
- I want to take that turbo lift on my bridge to other decks. It would be really nice to have a little storage space on my ship. Realistically (in a make believe sort of way) these ships are Huge. If there is Long term storage that you have to access your bridge to get to (so its not right in your cargo) it would allow some of us to stay out in space longer (you can scale it to rank with the rest). I want to see my Warp core and walk around different parts of the ship. Flying it is cool but Star Trek happend inside the ship a whole bunch. A small combat room with drones we can test our ground skills against would be wonderful. Running Quests on our own holodecks would be sick. -You do this i will play for life.
- I want reasons to keep playing, not just Daily quests. Those were neat but there was only so much you could do. Some tailored quests for solo and group encounters on our own holodecks or through out the sectors would be great. Just because Sirius sector block was the starting zone doesn' t mean we cant run quests there and elsewhere.
-Maybe some better crafting that lets us build kits/ weapons/ and other stuff to our design. instead of just buying stuff at the store. Being able to add skills to our kits or design how our weapons fire, normal vs exposed traits and so on.
- Make some of the episodes longer, I was able to blow through some of these quests in under 15 minutes (stopping to collect everything in the area) i have always loved epic type chain quests, it gave me something to log in for. Honestly i would love to see worlds you can beam down to and find 10 or so quests all over the place, even if you have to transport between locations.
You know that you can do that already?
Short Term:
1. When joining an area, make it a priority to join the group with team- or fleet-members inside.
2. Make it possible to zoom in on the galaxy-map to sectors you are not currently located in.
3. Possibility to trade/exchange officers with other players.
Mid-Term:
1. More ranks. Definitely more ranks. There are a lot of different Admiral-Grades and different Lieutenant-Grades present in StarTrek - why not in the game?
2. Deep Space Encounters should not be counted per instance, but per group or individual. There are too many people just switching instances to take the reward, without firing a single shot. Or even more simple: Lock already started instances for additional players.
3. PvP: Include a simple list to show who's playing on what side. I played a lot of rounds where Fed-Players just quit, because they though there were no Klingons playing, not realizing they were cloaked or out of sensor range.
Long-Term:
1. More PvE for Klingons.
2. New playable fractions like Romulans, Cardassians, Free Borg, etc.
3. There should be a ladder or similar system to only allow a limited number of people access to higher ranks at a time. They can keep their ship and stuff, but for the pure "titles" only e.g. the upper 20 top-scoring players per week should be e.g. an Admiral of the Fleet, maybe 100 the next lower rank, 500 the next lower rank until the "normal" Admiral and maybe even Captain. Maybe even limit the or at least some ranks to members of fleets. It makes no sense to fly with 10.000 admirals after 6 months.
Let's not forget that Admirals rarely get out into space at all, ESPECIALLY in StarTrek. Remember, that Kirk willingly accepted being degraded to Captain to be able to keep his command.
Wishlist:
- It would be great if it was possible to design own batches for your ship, show them in your bio, or replace the UFP/Fleet-Logo or even on your uniform
- Access to more areas of the ship like engineering, etc maybe even the holodeck?
Wouldn't it be great if you could spawn a number of enemies on the holodeck? Could also be good for some intense and very different missions. It sure was in the StarTrek Series.
- More options to change the appearance of the ship would be great.
- Please add some classic shipdesigns, like the Nebula-Class, Oberth-Class, Excelsior-Class, Light Destroyers like the Saladin-Class (or USS Kelvin), maybe even carriers (The USS Akira, for example, was designed as a carrier originally, hence the twin-secondary hull).
- A readyroom with trophies or personal things on display (like that original Sniper-Phaser-Rifle from my first mission)
-Fix steering the ship in space so it is more agile and maneuverability. so its lees like steering the Titanic in space.
-Better beacons on map to see where we need to go I feel even more lost when i open my map or look at my mini map.
- Make Quest Givers Unique Pat a ? over there head or something. I cant tell one NPC from another and they all look like the person that just gave the quest.
Medium term:
-Make the space stations less foreign i fell less at home on the space station then i do on some random planet
- Make vendors feel more like vendors and not like some dude standing there that has a super long list of things to buy that i can barely scroll though to see the items that when moused over take up the entire screen.