I don't think the rest are to be blamed, the founder built semi sentient puppets who were made to serve and die. What forms of control and manipulation Hitler had was nothing compared to essentialy building biological robots with no will or control of their own.
As far as the Breen go , I would agree in some sense that they are opportunist , I would say that the main goal here for STO isnt to make Startrek canon through player chosen races, but give the player a viable option of role play. It would also make sense for Breen players to get negative connotative dialog. There should be Cardassians, Breen, Shapeshifters, Vorta, and Jemhadar who trust, distrust, and hate or cooperate in different degrees. Instead of an alliance of conquerors, they would be an alliance of necessity. Which would make a great backstory. Because without the puppet strings of the founders, the races can be given that which the founder took away , which is true freedom.
As for True Way , they are post Dominion War , Post Ds9 STO noncanon.
The absolute truth of the matter is if you want a deep and profound story , watch the tv series or the movies. We aren't going to get STO episodes written by Moore or Ira. What we signed up for wasn't a show , it was a video game. JMHO , but the most important thing in this game isn't profoundly deep life changing storytelling, it's the experience of being a captain of our own ship and setting our own paths in this RPG.
STOs appeal isn't canon accuracy, it's the fun.
I will repeat myself, the founder and orchestrator of the Dominion War is in prision, the bonds on the subservient races of the founder's chains are broken. The Jemhadar no longer needs to obey a Vorta, and a Vorta could be reprogrammed to not to believe changelings are gods.
Finally I want to reiterate that the the former subservient races of the Dominion all but Breen had a leash, and cardassians work better under the table , and outside dependency on KDF/FED/RR.
Fine, like I said maybe in the new age of Cardassia they could forgive and forget, but I'm still not seeing a real reason why they would go out of their way to align with them.
All I see with a allegiance like that is downsides...I'm sure there are plenty who hate it, some may see it as a step in going back to their old ways for one.
Second major downside...if DS9 has taught us anything it is that the Dominion are vulnerable...thanks to the Wormhole...their forces are on another side of the galaxy...what if the Cardassians or the Alpha/Beta powers in general align with the Dominion to fight the Inconians...what is to stop the Iconians from blockading the Wormhole on either side...or who knows...with how powerful the Iconians are they could perhaps even collapse it.
Controlling or destroying the wormhole would be in the best interest of the Iconians if there ever was a alliance with the Dominion and we don't exactly have the kind of control they do to just pop anywhere in the galaxy or even other galaxies.
While on the other hand they have the Federation which has been watching over them for decades and is located right at their own back door...
I just honestly don't see any good reason why they'd join the Dominion again...sure maybe fight with them for the greater good of the galaxy, but not align with them again.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
The most likely next faction is Liberated Borg, followed by Cardassian, but there would be a "choose alignment" situation like romulans had. Even though the Klingon war is over, Crpytic won't want to split a third faction at this point.
I'd rather see a expansion focusing on stories and worlds in the alpha/beta quadrant (pitching title here: "Homefront"). Do 2-3 episode story arc each on Andor, Feringanar, Trill, Gornar, Orion, and that Reman city under the New Romulus capital.
Umm...the votes on the straw pole seem to favor Cardassians...not to mention the vote the Devs ran long ago...first place was Romulans and second place was Cardassians.
If Liberated were to possibly be a faction with DR it wasn't because of popularity...it's because they fit the most with the location of the expansion.
They wouldn't fit at all in the Alpha/Beta side of things...they'd have to make a whole new story for them basically which would be based in the Delta quadrant I imagine.
I don't see them throwing a second Delta quadrant expansion at us...least not one after the other.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
Truth be told, I think it would better for the game and player base to just scrap the different factions altogether and just have a Grand Alliance at the lvl 50+ state.
Changing "Admiral" to "General" and adding "Rarr! Honor!" doersn't change the fundamental bias of the mission's story text.
It really doesn't, nor does doing a bad job of 'getting' what the Federation is all about change that teh writing is Fed-centric to, at times, a nauseating degree of out-of-character behaviour.
Basically most of the mission stack after you reach level 30 (iirc the crashed BoP ship mission is the last really KDF kdf mission you get,and it predates LoR...)
Geko even stated it in public...
"...we ended the...war, so that we wouldn't be forced to...do faction specific content."
the guy who actually controls things in this game, who's outlasted 4 Executive Producer changes, doesn't want to be "Forced" to do faction-specific content.
Okay, so faction-agnostic, right?
"...Prime Directive Sez..." some jerkoff Starfleet junior officer upbraiding every KDF GENERALwho's done the Temple mission on Kobali prime. you know, a junior officer from one country verbally *****-slapping a senior flag officer from another country...and getting away with it-by invoking a law that does not apply to the KDF, and arguably shouldn't apply to a Romulan Admiral either-unless said admiral wants it to.
basically the equivalent would be an American Lt. Commander or Major telling a British general officer (or german, or French, or gods-help-us Russian) that they can't do something because of Posse Comitatus. (an American law restricting the use of military forces in domestic situations.)
the rebranded level 30-50+ "Faction agnostic" stuff is rife with this sort of thing. ("Kurland Here!") the faction-specific elements used mostly break down to the following;
Dialogue elements "Raar! Glory!! HONOR!! GRR!!" and title change of "General".
1 doff mission in "the 2800"
1 set of side-bits you can run in "Of Bajor" whre, surprisingly, you're actually doing something in-character for the faction and gathering intelligence.
and...that's it. everything else, and I mean everything else is written from a Fed POV, with the aforementioned dialogue-box changes.
Romulans don't get to have as much as KDF does-not one actually "Romulan" thing to do after finishing the Legacy of Romulus chain.
Nothing. Most of the time they don't even get the "Rarr! Honor!! Rarr! Glory!!" dialogue changes.
A lot of this. I'm a reasonable person, I understand that Cryptic is a pretty small studio and resources are limited, so faction specific missions along all the arcs might be hard to do, so faction agnostic missions would be a reasonable compromise, but they aren't faction agnostic, they are Federation missions that KDF and RR characters get awkwardly plugged into with the occasional dialog choice that recognizes your faction, only to have the entire rest of the mission ignore it completely.
Major argument against playable Borg: Flying around Cubes or even Tactical Cubes would be insane. A Tac Cube is almost as huge as ESD. Imagine the Sol System with a COUPLE of them. Absolutely ridiculous. IF Liberated Borg are a playable faction, the biggest ship we should be allowed to control is a Sphere imo.
I'd imagine they would make "Hugh Borg" like ships that aren't traditional Borg ships if they made a Liberated Borg Faction.
This thread is funny because they could not even balance 2 factions let alone 3 or 4.
If this game did not have the franchise name it would have died off several of its lifetimes ago. So I am really interested in seeing how they attempt to save this game on the brink of its fated ending. Possibly they know its coming to an end and why they made an enemy like the iconians in it the league of dieties that most franchises die off ie stargate when you funnel in the gods or ascended beings into the mix.
So I don't say yes or no I say watch it burn to the ground while eating popcorn and slamming back targ blood. As far as infractions go we don't really care. You must be new to think we have limited amounts of mule accounts to switch between lol.
I would like to see an 'independent' faction that utilizes the current 'faction-generic' trend.
Race: any available from all three current factions
Boffs and Doffs: any races and abilities from all three current factions
Ranks: Captain as this faction is decentralized.
Home base: 'Drozana' type stations throughout the galaxy. No home planet.
Fleet base: an abandoned space station
Ships: start with a freighter, or something, and offer new space ship designs unencumbered by faction sensibilities.
Create a Tholian Assembly used spaceship lot run by a Ferengi.
Uncap the diplomacy reputation. This would include creating Federation and Klingon reputations similar to Romulan.
Also, provide leveling access to different faction ships unlocked via Diplomacy and faction reputation. Buying one would cost significant dilithium and reputation marks.
Story-arc: pick any idea. For instance, a new player, on a freighter, discovers clues to Undine or Mirror activities. These characters would access assorted current faction specific episodes to find clues to re-purpose old content; and create new faction free content. Something similar to the Delta Recruit/Iconian arc.
...what is to stop the Iconians from blockading the Wormhole on either side...or who knows...with how powerful the Iconians are they could perhaps even collapse it.
They'd have to use a servitor species to do so, and don't see much luck with that. Remember they are vulnerable to time travel and the time abilities of the the Prophets.
Everything past the Breen is made to be cross faction.
Your entire argument about "BUT TEH RULES DON'T APPLY TO THE KLINGONS!" ignores the fact hat as part of an ALLIANCE they have ALLIES, and that ALLIANCES have ESTABLISHED RULES AND REGULATIONS that sometimes differ from that countries normal rules.
I am honestly not sure if you are simply ignoring the whole fact that ITS AN ALLIANCE, or you literally cannot grasp how alliances work,
Yes usually in an alliance there are compromises on all sides, funny how all the rules are Federation ones and we're almost always, with a couple of intelligence operative exceptions, taking orders from federation personnel that all of us actually outrank.
That's why the missions are a Federation POV, because they are written to follow federation guidelines 98% of the time.
Surface Tension is a good example of an exception to that, while yes ou're taking orders from Tovok for much of it even if you're KDF or KDF allied Romulan, the setup for the conference has those players taking care of additional things for the gorn guy and after species 8472 show up those players join the defense of earth because its the honourable thing to help an ally in their time of need. from there on its simply a fight for reasons explained previously and both sides of the coin get pretty equal 'screen time' when you reach Qo'nos.
Romulan players get a little shafted becuase the triggers depend on which faction you allied with rather than having romulan specific things at the start, BUT its still a good example of a cross faction mission well.
The Delta Rising missions are literally identical for all sides and clearly follow the Federation formula with only a few word changes and maybe some inconsequential one liner dialogue options that sort of fit non-federation views sprinkled in.
B. Its actually fiarly common to have a person you outrank be your boss in war situations. If that person got assigned to be the "lead" of some sort of special mission, you can very easily be taking orders from someone a lower rank then you if you assigned to said mission.
You really don't seem to know how the military works.
I'll admit my knowledge of military hierarchy is limited. though at our ranks most of us would be behind a desk not front lining errand missions I would think, but that's more an issue with how Cyptic did the ranks than anything. I'll also admit that having members of the Voyager crew take the lead on many of the Delta missions does make a degree of sense as they have first hand experience in most cases, this does also go somewhat towards explaining why these missions have a distinctly federation bent to them.
That EXACT same thing applies to literally every DR mission.
You are doing it because you ****ing HAVE TO to stop the Iconians, not to further the Federation's ideals.
Minor nitpick here, we don't actually know the Iconians are involved until the last 1-2 missions in the Delta arc, its assumed there's someone behind the Vaadwaur but you don't find any actual evidence until later.
This is why so many people have a hard time taking your kind of argument seriously.
It all based in fallacies, double speak, and willful ignoring of what actually happens in the game to cry afoul.
Plenty of willful ignorance to go around it seems. Play the revamped Klingon War arc for the feds, then compare to the early missions for romulans and kdf, each set of missions have their own flavour. For 'faction neutral' missions, the Delta Arc and most of the others to come out that are supposedly neutral all play like those early federation missions. That is the crux of the argument.
They'd have to use a servitor species to do so, and don't see much luck with that. Remember they are vulnerable to time travel and the time abilities of the the Prophets.
Well all it took was a mine field to keep the Dominion away...I would say the Iconians could come up with ways...including servitor races.
Can't have a honest conversation because of a white knight with power
In fact I think the Borg needa revamp , they need the level of threat value equal to or greater than the iconians, I expect a race with thousands of planets and who assimilated hundreds of races.
one way i can think of making borg an actual threat is after iconian war is over.
the borg start by assimilating random iconian artifacts until they overcome the "blow a large hole in the center of the cube" protection from one of the romulan episodes, then move on to assimilating iconian tech, then heralds and their ships, then eventually a dyson sphere, gaining access to its omega molecules. maybe even throw in an iconian to the whole assimilation mix.
you think iconians are bad, try assimilated iconians augmented with a combination of iconian and omega-powered borg tech.
Now clowns, that's another story. They scare the crap out of me.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
Major argument against playable Borg: Flying around Cubes or even Tactical Cubes would be insane. A Tac Cube is almost as huge as ESD. Imagine the Sol System with a COUPLE of them. Absolutely ridiculous. IF Liberated Borg are a playable faction, the biggest ship we should be allowed to control is a Sphere imo.
IMO, the cube's size used to be a visual representation of how powerful the ship was. However, Borg have been dumbed down so much in this game, their cube's might as well be the same size as player ships now :P
With all this Cardassian talk I decided to create my own on the KDF faction. I plan to fly one of the Gorn ships like this one I am ranked high enough.
Using the Cardassian and Dominion it might be cool to have regular access to the Bajoran Warmhole and open up the Gamma Quadrant. The one part that isn't part of the map. I don't know.
But I do agree that they should fix the current game before expanding further. For example, why do we have interior bridge sets if it serves no function to the rest of the game? We can't interact with the ship on the outside from the bridge interior. That's something I wouldn't mind seeing before we open a new faction. Being able to set course from the bridge. Being in the mess hall and seeing your fellow players fly by the window. Just a thought.
Comments
Fine, like I said maybe in the new age of Cardassia they could forgive and forget, but I'm still not seeing a real reason why they would go out of their way to align with them.
All I see with a allegiance like that is downsides...I'm sure there are plenty who hate it, some may see it as a step in going back to their old ways for one.
Second major downside...if DS9 has taught us anything it is that the Dominion are vulnerable...thanks to the Wormhole...their forces are on another side of the galaxy...what if the Cardassians or the Alpha/Beta powers in general align with the Dominion to fight the Inconians...what is to stop the Iconians from blockading the Wormhole on either side...or who knows...with how powerful the Iconians are they could perhaps even collapse it.
Controlling or destroying the wormhole would be in the best interest of the Iconians if there ever was a alliance with the Dominion and we don't exactly have the kind of control they do to just pop anywhere in the galaxy or even other galaxies.
While on the other hand they have the Federation which has been watching over them for decades and is located right at their own back door...
I just honestly don't see any good reason why they'd join the Dominion again...sure maybe fight with them for the greater good of the galaxy, but not align with them again.
Umm...the votes on the straw pole seem to favor Cardassians...not to mention the vote the Devs ran long ago...first place was Romulans and second place was Cardassians.
If Liberated were to possibly be a faction with DR it wasn't because of popularity...it's because they fit the most with the location of the expansion.
They wouldn't fit at all in the Alpha/Beta side of things...they'd have to make a whole new story for them basically which would be based in the Delta quadrant I imagine.
I don't see them throwing a second Delta quadrant expansion at us...least not one after the other.
A lot of this. I'm a reasonable person, I understand that Cryptic is a pretty small studio and resources are limited, so faction specific missions along all the arcs might be hard to do, so faction agnostic missions would be a reasonable compromise, but they aren't faction agnostic, they are Federation missions that KDF and RR characters get awkwardly plugged into with the occasional dialog choice that recognizes your faction, only to have the entire rest of the mission ignore it completely.
I'd imagine they would make "Hugh Borg" like ships that aren't traditional Borg ships if they made a Liberated Borg Faction.
If this game did not have the franchise name it would have died off several of its lifetimes ago. So I am really interested in seeing how they attempt to save this game on the brink of its fated ending. Possibly they know its coming to an end and why they made an enemy like the iconians in it the league of dieties that most franchises die off ie stargate when you funnel in the gods or ascended beings into the mix.
So I don't say yes or no I say watch it burn to the ground while eating popcorn and slamming back targ blood. As far as infractions go we don't really care. You must be new to think we have limited amounts of mule accounts to switch between lol.
Ah there is your mistake, it doesn't matter what the community wants or favors, its whatever Mr Geko fancies at the time.
Personally, I think ponies are long overdue.
I think he's smart enough to know that the Borg suck big time.
.......
Dinosaurs
.......
Let's get the Pony faction ingame already!
Race: any available from all three current factions
Boffs and Doffs: any races and abilities from all three current factions
Ranks: Captain as this faction is decentralized.
Home base: 'Drozana' type stations throughout the galaxy. No home planet.
Fleet base: an abandoned space station
Ships: start with a freighter, or something, and offer new space ship designs unencumbered by faction sensibilities.
Create a Tholian Assembly used spaceship lot run by a Ferengi.
Uncap the diplomacy reputation. This would include creating Federation and Klingon reputations similar to Romulan.
Also, provide leveling access to different faction ships unlocked via Diplomacy and faction reputation. Buying one would cost significant dilithium and reputation marks.
Story-arc: pick any idea. For instance, a new player, on a freighter, discovers clues to Undine or Mirror activities. These characters would access assorted current faction specific episodes to find clues to re-purpose old content; and create new faction free content. Something similar to the Delta Recruit/Iconian arc.
They'd have to use a servitor species to do so, and don't see much luck with that. Remember they are vulnerable to time travel and the time abilities of the the Prophets.
Except that the Co-operative are using the a-typical Borg ships also.
Yes usually in an alliance there are compromises on all sides, funny how all the rules are Federation ones and we're almost always, with a couple of intelligence operative exceptions, taking orders from federation personnel that all of us actually outrank.
That's why the missions are a Federation POV, because they are written to follow federation guidelines 98% of the time.
Surface Tension is a good example of an exception to that, while yes ou're taking orders from Tovok for much of it even if you're KDF or KDF allied Romulan, the setup for the conference has those players taking care of additional things for the gorn guy and after species 8472 show up those players join the defense of earth because its the honourable thing to help an ally in their time of need. from there on its simply a fight for reasons explained previously and both sides of the coin get pretty equal 'screen time' when you reach Qo'nos.
Romulan players get a little shafted becuase the triggers depend on which faction you allied with rather than having romulan specific things at the start, BUT its still a good example of a cross faction mission well.
The Delta Rising missions are literally identical for all sides and clearly follow the Federation formula with only a few word changes and maybe some inconsequential one liner dialogue options that sort of fit non-federation views sprinkled in.
Both of which are the intelligence officer exceptions I already mentioned, there's also the romulan officer that shows up in some of the patrols.
I'll admit my knowledge of military hierarchy is limited. though at our ranks most of us would be behind a desk not front lining errand missions I would think, but that's more an issue with how Cyptic did the ranks than anything. I'll also admit that having members of the Voyager crew take the lead on many of the Delta missions does make a degree of sense as they have first hand experience in most cases, this does also go somewhat towards explaining why these missions have a distinctly federation bent to them.
Minor nitpick here, we don't actually know the Iconians are involved until the last 1-2 missions in the Delta arc, its assumed there's someone behind the Vaadwaur but you don't find any actual evidence until later.
Plenty of willful ignorance to go around it seems. Play the revamped Klingon War arc for the feds, then compare to the early missions for romulans and kdf, each set of missions have their own flavour. For 'faction neutral' missions, the Delta Arc and most of the others to come out that are supposedly neutral all play like those early federation missions. That is the crux of the argument.
I would also like to see the Romulans get the faction specific things they are lacking.
"Most likely" based on...what?
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
My character Tsin'xing
So...you are answering my question by telling me what I said in the OP of this thread? :P
Seriously though, commodoreobvious seems to think that LB is the "most likely" next faction, so I am asking him why he thinks that.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
My character Tsin'xing
Well all it took was a mine field to keep the Dominion away...I would say the Iconians could come up with ways...including servitor races.
the borg start by assimilating random iconian artifacts until they overcome the "blow a large hole in the center of the cube" protection from one of the romulan episodes, then move on to assimilating iconian tech, then heralds and their ships, then eventually a dyson sphere, gaining access to its omega molecules. maybe even throw in an iconian to the whole assimilation mix.
you think iconians are bad, try assimilated iconians augmented with a combination of iconian and omega-powered borg tech.
We fight them too. Entire armies spilling out of Volkswagens.
We do our best to fight them off, but they keep sending them in.
All it took was a minefield?
Self replicating stealth minefield.
IMO, the cube's size used to be a visual representation of how powerful the ship was. However, Borg have been dumbed down so much in this game, their cube's might as well be the same size as player ships now :P
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Hugh was flying around in Lore's ship / which was also the mine in Voyager...so maybe that instead of a Cube or Sphere?
Yes...and I'm sure with the technology the Iconians wield they could pull something like that off as well...or even worse.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
But I do agree that they should fix the current game before expanding further. For example, why do we have interior bridge sets if it serves no function to the rest of the game? We can't interact with the ship on the outside from the bridge interior. That's something I wouldn't mind seeing before we open a new faction. Being able to set course from the bridge. Being in the mess hall and seeing your fellow players fly by the window. Just a thought.