This game is clearly unfinished, but perhaps that isn't as much of a negative as so many people and reviewers have made it out to be. We are talking about an MMO here, this genre receives more patches in a month then most purely single-player games receive in a lifetime. This opens an opportunity for the community (depending how open Cryptic is going to be in regards to feedback) to to help shape this game and help craft it into the game we want to play.
Now, the first thing to keep in mind when catering to any large body of people, you have to first acknowledge that EVERYONE IS DIFFERANT. If you go to a restaurant, you will probably notice they don't force you to all eat the same thing. They give you a menu with various choices and in most cases will even prepare a chosen meal in a particular way to satisfy the customer. Thus options are important and provide a way to keep most people happy to at least some extent.
For me, a lot of the spice and verve of a the game is lost without the risk and reward factor. Frankly the game needs a death penalty. Now before you set your phasers to flame, let me finish. I have a lot of RL friends that play games (I admit few play this one) and they are all different in their likes and dislikes, I myself love challenging games. I find that when games are too easy they often don't keep my attention for long, thus I find myself playing most games on a harder or even the hardest difficulty (and yes dieing often) or even modding games to make them more difficult. However, I know a few people who are not going to like this (if they ever read this they will know who I'm talking about

). Some people just want to log in and have a good time. Thus, I propose an OPTIONAL death penalty feature to the game. Implementation could work something like this: When you are in character select screen, there will be a new tickbox that will appear next to the play button. This option can be enabled or disabled anytime you're in the character select screen, so even people that enjoy challenge can take a break from it occasionally. By enabling this you accept the added risk and perhaps rewards for having the death penalty enabled. I suggest people that enable this option are rewarded with more experience, and energy credits for completing missions and or perhaps increase the odds of getting better drops from mobs.
The next thing I wanted to address is world PvP. I figure this system would be optional like the death penalty. Cryptic themselves emphasized that any PvP in the game would be strictly consensual. Another tickbox would appear in the character select screen. Since Cryptic has already divided the game into multiple instances of the same places, why not enable a type of world PvP in a select few. Everyone that has enabled world PvP in the character select screen would simply appear in the PvP enabled instances. Where as people who do not want to participate will only enter the "normal" instances.
How would you do world PvP in a game like this you ask? Simple I say! It would work the same way as sector contacts work, when someone makes contact with a player of the opposing faction in sector space, they will both be sent to a PvP Deep space encounter instance. There, the two players will face off. Perhaps adding objectives to spice it up a bit, maybe the defending player only has to stay alive for a certain amount of time and they will warp away. Or they could possibly even they could take it to the next extreme and when the attacking player brings the hull of the enemy down to 1% the game will pause and the attacking player will receive a message, asking if they want to finish the defender off and take a smaller reward now, or risk it all and move in for the real prize by send a boarding party, consisting of their bridge officers to pit them against the player and bridge officers of the defender.
You could have the ground battles as a simple death match or objective based. Perhaps the attacker will have to seize various important areas of the defenders ship, while the defender holds those areas for an allotted time.
Allow me to close by saying I have faith in this game, I went for a lifetime subscription AFTER I played the beta. I had an idea of what I was getting: a clearly unfinished game that is still rough around the edges. But a game that none the less has great potential, and as a bonus is a Star Trek game to boot.