This thread is tangential to another, but that one is barreling down the tracks of "Group vs Solo", and rerouting it would be nearly impossible. Thus, I decided to make a new thread, in hopes of fostering more civil conversation.
With that said, I do not believe in the concept of "group only" missions. I believe that my ship and her crew are a group in exactly the same manner that five different people with the same goal are a group. So there will be few discussions of making things work only for a group of players. The idea here is to make grouping a more enjoyable experience, which will then cause players to want to group up more.
Ideally, this would work a lot better if we had all of the players as the crew of a single vessel. But, if you will pardon the pun, that ship has sailed and there is little to be done about it now. I may make side notes about missed potential anyway, as I am wont to do.
To start, it seems best to identify the major problems that grouping has right now.
1) Dialogue. Right now, the fastest player controls the story.
2) Obstacles. Anything encountered can be overcome by anyone.*
3) Pacing. There is little reason to stop and interact with your teammates.
*This is not a negative overall, it is in fact a huge positive for the game. But it does prove an issue for teams.
I believe that these are the three biggest issues in regards to team play. So let's tackle how to deal with them.
Right now, dialogue is for flavor only. For most missions, one need only click the green words and continue the mission if one should so choose. Which means that, in a team, whomever clicks the words fastest progresses the mission on. This is also a pacing issue, since certain missions spawn an ambush which will begin combat whether the rest of your team is done reading or not. But that is far from the only dialogue issue.
As we have seen from the various diplomacy missions, the devs are experimenting with branching dialogue. Right now, it is of the "make the right choice or fail" variety, for the most part. But eventually we will likely see missions where the choices the players make changes the way the mission unfolds. In this scenario, if we allow whomever clicks through fastest to progress the story, then the rest of the team is at the whim of that player's desires. To solve this, I propose the following changes.
First, dialogue should not advance until everyone on the team has finished it, within reason. Thus, the ambush should not spawn until everyone has completed the pre-ambush threats. Or when a certain amount of time has passed. I choose to believe that the developers can figure out an appropriate length of time to protect teams from griefers while still allowing those who choose to read more slowly ample time to complete the dialogue.
Second, when the day comes that we do have truly branching missions, a new option be added to the group status window. An option for how to proceed with the branches. Three settings should be sufficient: Leader, Vote, and First. First will be exactly as it is now, whomever gets to the option first may select which path the group takes. Leader is as it sounds, only the leader may make the choice (again, with safeguards in place to prevent the leader from making no choice at all and thus preventing the team from continuing). Vote would allow all players on the team to choose the option they like best, and the majority wins. A mechanism for deciding ties would be required, but that is also not really important to this discussion at this time.
As a personal aside, I would love to see a fourth option, Unanimous, which would require all of the team to communicate with each other and unanimously decide which path to take. This would provide for excellent roleplaying opportunities, but is also very open to being griefed.
I think that these changes would allow everyone on the team to more fully enjoy the teaming experience. Especially in the cases of ambushing attackers, I often find myself choosing between finishing the dialogue or repelling the enemy that just took down my fore shields. By slowing things down a bit, it allows the entire team to enjoy the story.
So now we move on to obstacles. This will be the biggest one. Both in the opportunities it provides to the teaming experience, as well as to solo play. I believe that we can all agree that the profession based encounters during the Devidian mission "What Lies Beneath" were wonderful. I would love to see more of that. And this provides us an amazing opportunity to both support teaming AND enrich solo play. But to do that, we need to discuss your ship's crew.
As many of you know, we have mechanics coming to more specialize the divisions on your crew. What we don't know is exactly how it will work. So my ideas here will be at least partially speculative. But if this is not how the crew management will work, I would like to encourage the devs to take a look into doing so in the future.
Right now, your officers are nearly meaningless on the ground. They don't do anything special. And while that's alright for the missions we have, if we want to provide a deeper experience then we need to start specializing those officers a bit. First, we need to stop having the Captain do everything. This has been a common complaint since before Beta ended, but to provide additional depth we really need to see this happen. Once that changes, then we need to start making more important decisions about who makes up your away team.
As anyone who has ever watched Star Trek will tell you, different officers have different positions. In Star Trek Online, one engineering officer is as good as another. This takes us back to crew management. We need official positions for each crew member. Chief of Security, Chief Engineer, Transporter Specialist, Chief Medical Officer, et cetera. Then we need to make these choices matter.
Let's say you beam down to a starbase to investigate an attack. Standard Star Trek stuff. You find injured people, also standard. If you brought your Chief Medical Officer, you can treat them and perhaps pick up an XP bonus or an accolade for doing so. Or, rather than injured people, the base seems abandoned. Until the ambush happens. But if you had your Chief of Security with you, you'd spot the ambush before it came and be able to avoid the sneak attack.
Now, let's go back to "What Lies Beneath". Remember how the turbolift got stuck part way? Well, if you had your Chief Engineer, you could override it without all that extra running around. You'll save yourself quite a bit of time by choosing the right people for the job. And in a truly ideal sense, we want to see more options in some missions than you have available officers. Thus everyone gets a different experience based on who you choose to bring with you.
"But Aris," you ask. "How does this improve teaming?" As an actual player, rather than an NPC, you have more skills at your disposal. For example, I play a science character. This means that anything that comes up for your Chief Medical Officer, Chief Scientist, Archaeologist, Counselor, I'd be able to take care of it. A captain, after all, must be skilled in many areas. However, that is ONLY true when in a group. This provides incentive to group with others, as your availability of bridge officers is reduced for every person you bring along. When solo, your captain must depend on your officers, as well as one personal area of expertise, decided on either during character creation or based on what sort of kit you wear.
This provides a distinct benefit to playing as a group: you can cover more ground and see more things. If you are in a group of three where one of each class is represented, you can deal with any obstacle that comes your way. And even if you play solo, you benefit from increased immersion and options through your officers. This would add depth to the teaming process, while not shutting out the solo player or resorting to utterly pointless "activate four consoles at the same time" mechanics that do nothing to foster teamwork and everything to breed resentment.
By giving everyone the ability to enjoy the dialogue, we benefit teaming. No longer must we choose to stop reading the story because someone else was faster. By giving us real options and the tools to work together, teaming is improved through increased communication. And by providing unique scenarios for captains, we build better teams because people will want to team up to see what else is out there. Some of these changes are certainly more difficult than others, and some are not quite ready to happen. But if we took the game in this direction, I believe everyone would benefit.
Comments
I can testify that most of my teaming experience has been virtually silent.