In another thread someone said the following.
... my anxiety that I could not get to see Star Trek Online expanded and improved to the point where it becomes the game we all want it to be.
I was going to post this as a response but it ended up being far too comprehensive, instead I'm posting it as a new thread. What I have to say would have been a thread hijack and I don't want to do that. This is my retrospective. Knowing what I know now, how I would have done the game differently. How I'd want it to be. I expect a large number of people to disagree with me. That's the point. STO can never be the game we all want it to be because we all want different things.
I do have to say that I've always been rather unenthused by the game. Mostly because it failed to live up to my expectations, which is actually very hard to do because I never expect anything good out of a game. That way I'm rarely disappointed. STO is one of those rare disappointments with my pessimistic attitude toward video games. That said, the way I would have done things at the onset of the game and the way I'd have done things now, looking back, have largely stayed the same but a few ideas have come about as a result of game mechanics in the game as it is.
Once again, I am by no means suggesting that the developers change direction toward my vision. I'm just one person. Sure I'm also a video game developer, but I'm only an independent and have no notable titles under my belt. But the games I have done have highly addictive. No, I can't say what they are because I'm not here to advertise.
There were a number of things that I hoped for in Star Trek Online. Frankly I'm not seeing it go in that direction, nor could I see it go in this direction without it being STO's version of NGE. There's nothing inherently wrong with NGE so much as it is that it was basically dumping, without warning, a completely different game utilizing the same assets. That was enough to alienate everyone. So I'm not suggesting that this is how the game should go, just how I'd rather it have gone from the start.
I'd want STO to be where the experience is "a day in the life of the average starfleet captain." Instead we have "everyone is the star of their own show where they are the bestest captain and ship
evar, the NPCs on the starbases even tell you so".
Many aspects would be somewhat of a cross between a number of games.
The ships would work more like Star Wars Galaxies: Jump To Lightspeed's multi person ships.
There would be relaxing, Eve, and Earth and Beyond style asteroid and gas mining. You could make your entire career just mining and crafting. If course you'd be attacked by the occasional pirate wanting to get your cargo hold. But that's just to be expected. It would however not have Eve's "everybody is fair game" pvp mechanic. Pvp should be relegated either to a dedicated pvp server cluster or restricted to opt in only arenas in much the same way as STO currently has.
The universe would be an expansive, immersive sandbox that encourages roleplay. Missions occur within the sandbox and the is no noticable difference between sector space and non-sector space. As in Earth and Beyond, you'd simply point the ship in the right direction and hit the warp engines. Thing is, unlike Earth and Beyond, you don't have jump nodes to get to new star systems. Instead it'd work more like Celestia where you have a seemless transition from the surface of a planet out into orbit into interplanetary space and off to the next star, the next planet, etc.
Also, just like in Celestia, distances and scales would be 1:1 to the known universe. So for the most part during space battles, planets and moons would not appear to move in the background. That only happens once you're at full impulse which is entirely unsuitable for combat due to low maneuverability; think Quantum Slipstream Drive as it is currently.
Finally, about distances and speeds, warp would not be disabled unless the enemy disables your warp engines or damaged the warp core in some way. It wouldn't disable simply because you fired a shot at a heap of space junk. That's just silly the way it is in the game currently. Disabling a ship's capacity of warp should be something you can only do from certain angles and it should be a deliberate thing. I understand there's an aspect of wanting to avoid exploitation, but I seriously doubt that's an issue. The game already has a mechanic whereby enemy numbers and health can replenish if you break combat. So the only thing you'd be avoiding is a death penalty.
The death penalty combined with the sandbox nature of the game would encourage grouping since anything can happen in a sandbox, it helps to keep friends on hand. This game as it is has missions that force you to group but it doesn't encourage you to do so outside of those missions. This is a bad thing because it encourages antisocial behavior. Too frequently I run up to someone on an STF right as they fall so I can revive them only to have them spend the next FIVE MINUTES sprinting back to where we were fighting. By then we all wiped out. The game needs to encourage more frequent grouping while not excluding solo so people can develop team skills for when it really matters.
The death penalty would be mandatory and stiff since you would actually have means of escape. Also losing a ship is a very expensive business. Star Fleet would NOT be pleased. The death penalty would be a demotion and being placed in command of a lower tier vessel for a probationary period. This is considerably less stiff of a penalty than what might really happen but it's a war and they need every captain they can get, even reckless ones. Just don't expect the best gear if you're not going to take care of it.
Traveling from star to star would involve a lot of waiting. Up to an hour to get to where you need to go for going from the two most distant points. What's more, to keep things interesting, there would be random events on the ship that occur mid-transit. You could get ambushed, run across random anomalies, phenomena, distress signals, etc and force you to make a decision as to whether to investigate or continue.
I would have it so that you don't handle all functions of the ship simultaneously and would provide a basic event driven, client side scripting engine to automate the bridge officer decision making process as to which powers to use. Also, bridge officers would be more than just 4 trick ponies.
The game would be optional between first and third person camera like on most MMOs, and while the scale of interiors wouldn't be identical to what's seen on the show, they'd at least be a reasonable facsimile.
Lastly, the Alien Character Creator would have a number of points you can spend. The more extreme the proportions the exponentially more points you spend. This would cause most aliens to appear much closer to what's on the shows and we wouldn't have horribly deformed aliens running around that look more like Star Wars than Star Trek.