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Better use for Ship Bridge Interiors
gameverseman
Member Posts: 1,110 Arc User
First off, before I get into the main fray of it, all ships NEED full interiors. Not a select few. Going by Trek (since this is a Star Trek MMO, no?) Most of the time was spent on the ship/station itself.
With that being said I propose that the DOFF system be integrated with the ship's interior. For example, instead of pulling up a UI to start a doff mission I would like to be able to go up to the DoFFS (Replace the random NPCS in the interior with your actual DoFFs just like the bridge officers are your BoFFs) and be able to send them "personally" if you will to do missions. In addition, I would also like to be able to heal my captain as well as my officers from my sickbay(is that not what it's there for?) and I would also like to be able to repair ship injuries from engineering (just like in Star Trek because, again, this is a Star Trek MMO, no?). Aside from account bank access I feel like my bridge and interior is useless.
What are your thoughts?
FYI, saying that their are better things for them to be working on is irrelevant since your (if you apply) response was not required.
With that being said I propose that the DOFF system be integrated with the ship's interior. For example, instead of pulling up a UI to start a doff mission I would like to be able to go up to the DoFFS (Replace the random NPCS in the interior with your actual DoFFs just like the bridge officers are your BoFFs) and be able to send them "personally" if you will to do missions. In addition, I would also like to be able to heal my captain as well as my officers from my sickbay(is that not what it's there for?) and I would also like to be able to repair ship injuries from engineering (just like in Star Trek because, again, this is a Star Trek MMO, no?). Aside from account bank access I feel like my bridge and interior is useless.
What are your thoughts?
FYI, saying that their are better things for them to be working on is irrelevant since your (if you apply) response was not required.
Post edited by gameverseman on
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The devs have already integrated the duty officer system with the ship interior. To do any of the Department assignment, you originally had to run to each of the Department Heads on your ship to do the proper assignment. Unless Cryptic has changed it, there are some assignments that are only available by going to the proper Department Head like the assignment to power Ancient Artifacts to get the Powered Alien Artifacts for random consoles. Note: The Department Head is not who you assigned in the Duty Officer window, but generic npcs like Security Officer or Chief Engineer.
That doesn't make any sense.... and (I'll let Piccard explain) I think there's a fine line between what's needed for Trek and what's "needed" for players. They NEED to meet the standards for Trek at minimum (Which they have not yet satisfied). This would include full interiors and full functionality. The player's "Needs" would consist of custom interior design yadda yadda yadda. Now I believe you are correct when it comes to player "needs" but the Trek standard is still a valid concern for more than obvious reasons.
Customizable ship interiors satisfy what we need and what Star Trek needs. The work needed to create a full ship interior takes weeks to do. If Cryptic had a dedicated dev team that just worked on full ship interiors, then we could get the ship interiors that we need. The last ship interior was the Intrepid Interior and that was only due to there already a ton of work done on it for Delta Rising missions. Therefore due to Cryptic's small dev team, players need to be given the tools to create ship interiors. Some players will create really crazy ship interiors that would never be found in Star Trek while others will create ship interiors that matches what was shown in the series or close to it.
If you are talking about full functionality, then you have to determine what it means. Do you mean that every single ship has the same set of functions so every ship will have a poker table, astrometrics lab, bar, etc or are they customizable functions similar to Wildstar's housing system so you can have a poker table, dabo table, and bar, but no astrometrics lab.
2. The staffer in the Medbay might sell / have a mission to build regenerators, the staffer in engineering has repair components. Not 100% "talk to staffer and fixed" but also not 100% "useless".
3. There's talk in another thread about having your BOffs from the department head screen replace these staffers instead of sitting around the bridge proper.
4. Many people have been asking to have more missions take place on the interiors, and the original interiors were built "gigantic" because of the concept of running missions on them.
That has fallen through it seems, however...
To rob a line: [quote: Mariemaia Kushrenada] Forum Posting is much like an endless waltz. The three beats of war, peace and revolution continue on forever. However, opinions will change upon the reading of my post.[/quote]
I already listed the two main ones in my OP. I don't think you understand the fine line between players "needs" and Trek needs. Players want options... I want all the ships to get full interior and for those interiors, with whatever they entail, to function (Trek standards). However you keep bringing up customization options as if they were functions when they are not. But, to answer your question, I would not be opposed to doff missions that provide interior features like poker tables, bars, dabo tables, etc. On another note, if Cryptic can't follow through with all these ships they pump out (i.e. interiors) than maybe they should stop pumping out ships and actually finish the ones that we already have. But that's beside the point.
Why would I need to go to med bay to get components to "manually" heal my captain and officers instead of just healing my captain and officers OR why can't the same hold true for the chief engineer in engineering?
How do you propose that every ship gets full interiors? The devs are obviously incapable of doing it. The devs seem to be capable of about 1 full ship interior per year which is obviously not enough. STO 3.0 will likely be out by the time all the current ships a proper ship interior at the rate they are going. As I said before, it is up to the devs to give us the tools to do the work for them and in a year's time we will have numerous versions of each type of ship with some being far closer to the original interior than others.
As much as i would like to see interiors revamped, im sure its last on a list of probably 200 other things.
It's a Trek Standard and this IS a Star Trek MMO. Need I say more?
For one thing regardless of how incapable the devs are they still need to do it. It's not our job to do it for them(i.e. Foundry). Second, how will these customization options come to fruition? It would stand to reason that these special rooms or amenities would need to be constructed, yes? So why wouldn't DoFFs (which are essentially your crew) be able to build them? And Minigames like poker should NOT be the reason(s) for going to your bridge. However, Minigames that help improve your ship would be an acceptable reason for going to your bridge/interior so long as the devs are able to parallel it with something in Trek which is easy enough to do( like running a level 3 diagnostic successfully on the warp core gives you bonus power or EPS rate for X amount of time) Hell, they could even make that a DoFF mission in itself but that would sort of defeat my argument..... But I think it's a cool idea nonetheless.
And where is the exploration and the away missions where things are solved by diplomacy rather than phasers? STO has a coating of Star Trek, but beneath the coating is just the last seasons of DS9 not TOS, TNG, Voyager, or Enterprise.
I agree but that's a much broader issue.
What OP has been describing sounds more like making the ship interior an adventure zone in of itself (with the mini-games and interactions). Doing that for all of the ship types and classes, in my opinion, is a feat that can only be accomplished by hiring multiple studios to tackle.
Previous attempts to give the ship interiors meaning (such as unique DoFF missions only accessible by going up to the NPCs themselves in your ship interior) have largely been unsuccessful. Arguments were made for excessive map changing and for the fact that, as a captain, you can simply call up the NPC from your bridge chair to give them orders instead of finding them.
While true that much of Star Trek takes place inside the ship, it is normally the Bridge, mess hall, sickbay, transporter room, and engineering that get seen.
That actually brings up a question: OP, what to you is considered a "full interior"?
(UFP) Ragnar
I will answer with an example.... my Vaadwaur Manasa has only a bridge. No transporter room, no mess hall, no sickbay, and no engineering. What I thought I had gotten across is that all current ( and future) ships should have full interiors. The galaxy bridges for example are my idea of full interiors( they just lack functionality).
Ah, so basically you want for all ships the interior room sets that is normally found in Federation/Klingon ships from the early days of STO (bridge, captain's quarters, sickbay, transporter room, and engineering). There's not much I can say for that in terms of your Vaadwaur, other than for deadlines were the most basic room built (the bridge). Only the interiors that was needed for the Featured Episodes were built (which is why the Intrepid got a themed interior instead of the standard Federation palette) and then shared with the players.
That being said, I suspect Cryptic has their own plans for ship interiors that they want to implement but are not ready to do so yet. Or, that they don't want to put work in an old system style that they might be replacing anyway.
The best that you and I can do is wait and provide feedback when asked. When a new ship interior system drops (if it does), then we can revel in it. Or criticize it, whichever strikes your fancy.
(UFP) Ragnar
Or... it might never get done if it isn't maintained as a pressing issue. Like look at how long Rommies had to wait for a full interior for faction ships.
I won't quite call it a "pressing issue" but I can agree that we should still say we are interested. Sector space was an voiced issue for a long time and we recently had that addressed. Same goes for the "Galaxy-class" ship and the T6 Iconic bundle (opinions may vary).
As for the Romulans, they still got their interiors didn't they? No need to panic; just patience. For what it's worth, I believe we can be more helpful for ship interiors if we have more threads that were more like "it'll be cool if ship interiors can do this or integrate with these other parts of the game" rather than "the state of interiors is a crime against the franchise".
In the end, I advise patience. Ship interiors are not getting in the way of the game's functions nor will it be a system that will simply be discarded.
(UFP) Ragnar
Sorry, have to disagree. There is a huge difference between "need" and "I want". There are a lot of things I *want* added/changed in this game, but that does not mean any of them *need* to happen.
OK, so if we could change the past, I would say that the DOFF system should have been ship interior *only*. Why? Because it would have given people a legitimately rewarding reason to visit their ship interior that they couldn't get without doing so. But at this point, it's too late. People are used to Doffing in sector space, and it's much more convenient than having to load into your ship interior.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
I appreciate your idea on this and I agree that the option of this could/should be implemented. However, I'm a little baffled when you say "Restrain your restrictions" in regards to all ships having unique interiors and how that would be an unreasonable work load. Although I understand where you are coming from I still feel like having just a cramped bridge on my over-hyped and expensive ship (i.e. Lockbox and some C-store ships) is a bit half-assed. In my opinion, if you are going to do major marketing on any ship (or any item for that matter) it should be complete. Having just a cramped bridge is not my idea of complete when you compare it to other ships. Which is ironic since some of the hype comes from comparing the marketed ship to pre-existing ships. But I digress, I think your idea has potential but I still think it would be cool if the interactivity within the ship interior could have a passive effect in either(or both) space and ground combat. Like my idea of running a diagnostic on the warp core and, if successful, You will receive a bonus to power or EPS for X amount of time or have a minigame where you can run a combat simulation on the holodeck and, if successful, will receive either a bonus damage or bonus accuracy in ground combat for X amount of time.
I remember having a cow when they were thinking about doing that. I'm the captain of the ship...people report to me...I do not track them down. I don't have to communicate with them personally for every menial task that they are assigned. I assign the task. They do it. I can later check the progress of how the assignment went. It never made sense to me.
Forcing me to go somewhere I do not want to go is only going to lead to resentment and eventual abandonment of the game...
As for having the full interiors for all ships...
Would likely be something they'd do on Voyager or the like with us heading over there, eh? They've been trying to give us that tour.
What could be done is something like one default model for each ship type and faction. So, for example, a full Escort layout could be chosen for your Federation Defiant class Escort. But that same Escort layout would be the one used on every single Federation Escort in the game. And so on and so forth for every type and faction throughout the game.
I would say though, that even that suggestion I described in the above paragraph would be one hell of an epic task for the Cryptic "Ship's Guts Devs" to accomplish over any given period of time.
There is a reason we only have what we have now. Plus, you have to consider that ship interiors is not the place much of the "main action" occurs. We get some ship interior battles and interactions, but I'd say that portion of the game is a lot smaller than any other portion we might discuss.
I have to put a disclaimer on this post and probably should just put this in my sig: I could be not only wrong about anything I say, but I could be completely out of the park and on into Bat Country. So be kind, and just hand me a fly swatter if I get squirrelly eyed and start lurching at invisible attackers. The drugs will wear off eventually. Or did I forget to take my medicine?
The Foundry is currently limited, and replicating some pieces, like proper ship-bridge or even Engineering is close to impossible, as we don't have assets for that. But yes, something like this, letting us build our own, and possibly even link it, with our characters, whenever we'd click 'Visit ship interior', it'd kick us to what we built. I'm obviously not sure how hard this would be, but... it'd be quite a nice feature, imho...
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What we need is interiors that can be part of a story or mission, where we go to places aboard the ship to advance the story, and if neccessary, can even have fights.
If that means deleting all interiors (and I bought many bridges!) and replacing them with a new standard interior that can be used for that, I'd be delighted. Sure ,if they can keep the ones we have, that's neat. But we need missions using our interiors more than another interior.
But don't they do that? They take us to the interior of a ship and the story continues? Our ships? No...but we do go inside ships, yeah? One of these days we'll get that actual tour of Voyager.