Outside the PvP thing for which I have no interest at all...
I wish they had lunched with a Free Lance/Merc/Free trader faction. It would have given a home for all those ships that went into lock boxes and made a joke of the idea of serving in one of the primary faction fleets.
But, too late and now I don't see much point. I'd rather they put the effort into a mini-Orion faction.
While this game obviously is never going to turn into something like Eve or the X series, I completely agree there should be a more unaligned, economy focused faction. Not only because rogues, scoundrels and space pimps like the outrageous Mr. Mudd were important characters in Star Trek, but also because this is a video game and it would simply be a lot of fun. I have a number of thoughts on how this could be made into a rich experience for the player with already implemented game assets and mechanics.
1. Reverse leveling path: this faction would not need to be shoehorned into the storyline missions but if they felt that the leveling process was absolutely untouchable you could always have these players be captains who "quit" starfleet/kdf/rr after becoming disillusioned with all endless violence we have to participate in as captains in STO. So, you would do a normal playthrough and it would be the inverse of the 23rd century captain. At the end of the story arcs a new 5-10 mission starter arc would appear to start you on your new path as a civilian.
2. Exclusive ships: This faction should be limited in which ships it can use. For more dangerous tasks, escort-style ships and SMALL ones at that. For space trucking, large freighters with extremely limited offensive capabilities. No access to giant battleships and cruisers! Remember the focus on this faction would be economic. You're not going to be flying scimitars to 500k dps in your post-military career.
3. Space Trucking and Scoundreling: You would have an offensive oriented ship as mentioned above and or a freighter type vessel. The offensive ship would be for the storyline missions and your scoundrel type missions, bounty hunting or other mercenary tasks where you're a hired gun. The freighter vessel would be your only bigger ships and they would have minimal armaments and not be allowed in pve queues. The freighter could be used for space trucking tasks. Carrying cargo from Andoria to Cardassia for example. Perhaps there would need to be some speed limitations on these freighters so you couldn't simply transwarp and borg-engine your way around the map like tour of the galaxy.
4. Captcha tasks: A freighter would need to be piloted. Certain random events could occur on the sector map while hauling cargo which would need the attention and cognition powers of the captain. This would prevent someone from loading 100 windows and automating these economic tasks. Autohails, a minigame to repair damaged systems, inspections from benthans, whatever. It wouldn't need to take long, just prevent someone from pointing all their ships on a straight line and collecting the rewards.
5. Unique system patrol replacements: Instead of the normal patrol missions when visiting destination star systems, which most people never do in this game. This faction would get slightly different missions. As they're approaching their destination planet lets say naussican pirates spawn and demand your cargo, or the bounty contract you're there to kill/capture is spawned by the game. This might break up the monotony of space trucking, and would be necessary for bounty/merc work.
6. Economic Alternatives: Most importantly, this faction, could be a way for the player to gain dilithium and energy credits for their main toon in a manner consistent with the logic of the universe we're inhabiting. Currently, the power user has many alts. In real life, even in the 25th century, we would not create 50 clones of ourselves and link their minds together to complete tasks simultaneously to gain resources. Maybe in the 26th century that sort of scientific devil magic might be permissible but not here not now. This faction would create an opportunity for the player to make resources by actually DOING something and PLAYING a character instead of just mechanically logging onto alt characters, slotting doff/admiralty/RnD missions, and logging back off.
7. Fleet interactions: Your fleet is already serviced by a number of NPC traders. This faction could take on that role. You could take on contract work for the players making fleets in the original factions. Every fleet would want their members to have a trader toon and do a little hauling. IT COULDN'T BE WORSE THAN CHOPPING DOFFS.
8. Exploration and Diverse Locales: Right now there's little reason to ever get out and about other than completing a small number of repetitive tasks like Tour or Colony clusters. And there's certainly very little point to exploring. Space Trucking and Space Scoundreling would give people more incentive to be somewhere other than the homeworlds. The universe would seem more alive and populated as movers and shakers are out plumbing the depths of space's seedy underbelly looking for latinum. Perhaps this would give the developers an opportunity to introduce more interesting and diverse locals to visit as well. Like say a space station that's already visualized but there's no interior for, or a spaceport on vulcan. More cantinas?
On the surface this might seem like a lot of work but if you think about it most of the groundwork for this has already been implemented in the game. We can do patrol missions. We have cargo holds. Etc.
This would be much more engaging for the players than adding another quasi-military style faction that's almost the same as before but slightly different (coughs 23rd century coughs).
I'm all for this idea. I've been wanting an independent/civilian "faction" in the game for a long time now. I wouldn't count on it actually happening, but then I never thought we'd ever get a T6 TOS Connie, let alone several Kelvin ships in the game either, and yet here we are.
Let's be honest, this is more likely than going back to 90% exploration 10% violence that is actually what the "canon" Federation was about. So don't "fix" the Federation.....Cryptic sees money in a mostly militaristic game, and that's fine. Solve it in an expansion with Rogue/Mercenary/Civilian/Trader/Pirate faction. Heck, to stay cannon, just make it the Orions. In STO they have been a sub-race of the Klingons only, but in all the on-screen versions, the Orions were a race....but the Orion Syndicate was a GROUP made up of ALL species working towards a common goal. Kinda like the On-Screen-Federation, but the goal was money and power rather than peace. So in STO since the Federation is all about power and shiny stuff, let the Syndicates be about everything else.
Some of the above posts are brilliant. Take some notes from Starfleet Battles, recurring mission was convoy raid or convoy protection detail. So you can have missions as either a freighter captain, or an escort captain. Kinda "Tour the galaxy" style mission that takes 20 minutes, but you can't deviate from "shipping lanes". So you can be attacked by pirates (or you can BE the pirate and attack convoys). And in the series/on-screen/previous games, the Syndicates always had WAY fewer ship types....but were uniquely customizable. So in STO version, each character level would have access to ONE SINGLE Syndicate ship. With a set weapon layout (per "canon" they were always slightly under armed for weapon hardpoints, but very versatile) say something more like a Science ship for NUMBER of weapons (they were NEVER mentioned as going toe to toe with ANYTHING major from a serious race, like a Galaxy, or Vor'cha, etc) But they special Syndicate-ness would be the ability to juggle the eligible CONSOLES.......so if you want your T6 to have 5 Tact, 5 Eng, and 0 Sci......ok. Or if you want whatever combo you want. They get cloak available as a CONSOLE (so sticking to the if they had it they had to have stolen it mentality).
Etc. etc. etc.
This could be doable. Use existing models too from NPC ships. Quite a few Orion "Battleships", "Dreadnoughts", and "Slavers" we don't play now. Throw those in for the new faction, and then make something like Drozana Station legit, and players can buy existing ZEN store ships from pirate auctions.....and pay something like 500 Zen above standard "Market" prices. So most players would stick to what ships are part of the Syndicate faction....but if you have a Fed character that bought the T6 Dreadnought and it is your favorite ship period.....your Orion Syndicate char can fly it, but would have to pay 500 zen to "steal" said ship......
There are a lot of great ideas here, and I do think this could be great faction or mini-faction. I also agree that a lot of the fundamentals to creating this are already in the game. I envision both independent and retired military characters, with perhaps bonuses given to Orions, Ferengi, Talaxians, etc. I do NOT think this would be that hard to do.
By the way, the late great FASA Star Trek role-playing game had such an expansion. It went into two editions and is loaded with additional ideas:
If they ever do this I would hope that it would allow an existing captain to "go rogue", so to speak, rather than having to create a new character. My afore-mentioned privateer has some items that cannot be transferred via the account bank - special items from lockboxes, outfit from the lobi store, a Borg boff from the C-Store - that would be difficult to duplicate.
If they ever do this I would hope that it would allow an existing captain to "go rogue", so to speak, rather than having to create a new character. My afore-mentioned privateer has some items that cannot be transferred via the account bank - special items from lockboxes, outfit from the lobi store, a Borg boff from the C-Store - that would be difficult to duplicate.
An interesting idea but it's unlikely they would do that since making new toons and actually working on them means more profit.
Comments
I wish they had lunched with a Free Lance/Merc/Free trader faction. It would have given a home for all those ships that went into lock boxes and made a joke of the idea of serving in one of the primary faction fleets.
But, too late and now I don't see much point. I'd rather they put the effort into a mini-Orion faction.
While this game obviously is never going to turn into something like Eve or the X series, I completely agree there should be a more unaligned, economy focused faction. Not only because rogues, scoundrels and space pimps like the outrageous Mr. Mudd were important characters in Star Trek, but also because this is a video game and it would simply be a lot of fun. I have a number of thoughts on how this could be made into a rich experience for the player with already implemented game assets and mechanics.
1. Reverse leveling path: this faction would not need to be shoehorned into the storyline missions but if they felt that the leveling process was absolutely untouchable you could always have these players be captains who "quit" starfleet/kdf/rr after becoming disillusioned with all endless violence we have to participate in as captains in STO. So, you would do a normal playthrough and it would be the inverse of the 23rd century captain. At the end of the story arcs a new 5-10 mission starter arc would appear to start you on your new path as a civilian.
2. Exclusive ships: This faction should be limited in which ships it can use. For more dangerous tasks, escort-style ships and SMALL ones at that. For space trucking, large freighters with extremely limited offensive capabilities. No access to giant battleships and cruisers! Remember the focus on this faction would be economic. You're not going to be flying scimitars to 500k dps in your post-military career.
3. Space Trucking and Scoundreling: You would have an offensive oriented ship as mentioned above and or a freighter type vessel. The offensive ship would be for the storyline missions and your scoundrel type missions, bounty hunting or other mercenary tasks where you're a hired gun. The freighter vessel would be your only bigger ships and they would have minimal armaments and not be allowed in pve queues. The freighter could be used for space trucking tasks. Carrying cargo from Andoria to Cardassia for example. Perhaps there would need to be some speed limitations on these freighters so you couldn't simply transwarp and borg-engine your way around the map like tour of the galaxy.
4. Captcha tasks: A freighter would need to be piloted. Certain random events could occur on the sector map while hauling cargo which would need the attention and cognition powers of the captain. This would prevent someone from loading 100 windows and automating these economic tasks. Autohails, a minigame to repair damaged systems, inspections from benthans, whatever. It wouldn't need to take long, just prevent someone from pointing all their ships on a straight line and collecting the rewards.
5. Unique system patrol replacements: Instead of the normal patrol missions when visiting destination star systems, which most people never do in this game. This faction would get slightly different missions. As they're approaching their destination planet lets say naussican pirates spawn and demand your cargo, or the bounty contract you're there to kill/capture is spawned by the game. This might break up the monotony of space trucking, and would be necessary for bounty/merc work.
6. Economic Alternatives: Most importantly, this faction, could be a way for the player to gain dilithium and energy credits for their main toon in a manner consistent with the logic of the universe we're inhabiting. Currently, the power user has many alts. In real life, even in the 25th century, we would not create 50 clones of ourselves and link their minds together to complete tasks simultaneously to gain resources. Maybe in the 26th century that sort of scientific devil magic might be permissible but not here not now. This faction would create an opportunity for the player to make resources by actually DOING something and PLAYING a character instead of just mechanically logging onto alt characters, slotting doff/admiralty/RnD missions, and logging back off.
7. Fleet interactions: Your fleet is already serviced by a number of NPC traders. This faction could take on that role. You could take on contract work for the players making fleets in the original factions. Every fleet would want their members to have a trader toon and do a little hauling. IT COULDN'T BE WORSE THAN CHOPPING DOFFS.
8. Exploration and Diverse Locales: Right now there's little reason to ever get out and about other than completing a small number of repetitive tasks like Tour or Colony clusters. And there's certainly very little point to exploring. Space Trucking and Space Scoundreling would give people more incentive to be somewhere other than the homeworlds. The universe would seem more alive and populated as movers and shakers are out plumbing the depths of space's seedy underbelly looking for latinum. Perhaps this would give the developers an opportunity to introduce more interesting and diverse locals to visit as well. Like say a space station that's already visualized but there's no interior for, or a spaceport on vulcan. More cantinas?
On the surface this might seem like a lot of work but if you think about it most of the groundwork for this has already been implemented in the game. We can do patrol missions. We have cargo holds. Etc.
This would be much more engaging for the players than adding another quasi-military style faction that's almost the same as before but slightly different (coughs 23rd century coughs).
You have some excellent ideas in there. I give you two thumbs up and hope that someone important is reading.
Some of the above posts are brilliant. Take some notes from Starfleet Battles, recurring mission was convoy raid or convoy protection detail. So you can have missions as either a freighter captain, or an escort captain. Kinda "Tour the galaxy" style mission that takes 20 minutes, but you can't deviate from "shipping lanes". So you can be attacked by pirates (or you can BE the pirate and attack convoys). And in the series/on-screen/previous games, the Syndicates always had WAY fewer ship types....but were uniquely customizable. So in STO version, each character level would have access to ONE SINGLE Syndicate ship. With a set weapon layout (per "canon" they were always slightly under armed for weapon hardpoints, but very versatile) say something more like a Science ship for NUMBER of weapons (they were NEVER mentioned as going toe to toe with ANYTHING major from a serious race, like a Galaxy, or Vor'cha, etc) But they special Syndicate-ness would be the ability to juggle the eligible CONSOLES.......so if you want your T6 to have 5 Tact, 5 Eng, and 0 Sci......ok. Or if you want whatever combo you want. They get cloak available as a CONSOLE (so sticking to the if they had it they had to have stolen it mentality).
Etc. etc. etc.
This could be doable. Use existing models too from NPC ships. Quite a few Orion "Battleships", "Dreadnoughts", and "Slavers" we don't play now. Throw those in for the new faction, and then make something like Drozana Station legit, and players can buy existing ZEN store ships from pirate auctions.....and pay something like 500 Zen above standard "Market" prices. So most players would stick to what ships are part of the Syndicate faction....but if you have a Fed character that bought the T6 Dreadnought and it is your favorite ship period.....your Orion Syndicate char can fly it, but would have to pay 500 zen to "steal" said ship......
By the way, the late great FASA Star Trek role-playing game had such an expansion. It went into two editions and is loaded with additional ideas:
http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Trader_Captains_and_Merchant_Princes
memory-beta.wikia.com/wiki/Trader_Captains_and_Merchant_Princes_(2nd_edition)
An interesting idea but it's unlikely they would do that since making new toons and actually working on them means more profit.