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What exactly is the duty system thing going to be?
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Member, NoReporting Posts: 178,019 Arc User
I don't know what it means
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In addition to the above, they are also adding "missions" that you can send duty officers on. These arent "real" missions like the ones you play with your captain and bridge officers, they are more like a mini-game. You assign which duty officers go on the mission, and then there will be some kind of internal dice role that will determine the outcome of the mission. If it was successful you will get rewards, and if it was not you may lose duty officers(as in they may be killed).
Duty officers are a lower level thing than bridge officers. They have certain unique traits, but can't be slotted in an away team, don't sit on your bridge, and don't have active abilities.
You can assign a number of them to each department around your ship (Security, Tactical, Engineering, Operations, Science, and Medical) and their traits will give you various passive benefits.
The dev post a while ago also mentioned assignments for them. Rather than full missions that you do yourself, you can send an unassigned duty officer on their own to complete tasks for various rewards.
All the specifics, like how you get them, how many you can assign, just how much benefit they give, and what's to gain from assignment missions is all pretty fuzzy yet. The system is fairly early in development last we had word from a dev.
You know, half of a Galaxies crew is only there to manage the other half. :eek:
The amount of slots will be determined by rank, not ship. Dstahl tossed out the number of 20 slots for max rank, although he said that wasnt set in stone. Either way, its not going to be a huge amount you cant manage, and the same duty officers follow you from ship to ship like your BOs. You wont have to re-equip them each time you switch ships.
They did say how many you'd have to manage would be tied to your level, not ship class. So you're not managing all 1000 people on your ship, just the important ones.
Duty officer system is Nurse Chapel.
Department head system is Dr. McCoy.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. However, the duty officers who you equip in the various aspects of your ship should in fact be the "main" department heads on your ship. They wouldnt be the average joe workers. Those average joes will remain unseen.
Ah, i see. Sounds nice. So, now we have Doffs too ? I hate all those abbreviations.
Oh, sorry. Half of what i thought when i posted remained in my head.
I was just wondering why my Sci Boff who is my personal "McCoy" wasn´t considered to be my Chief Medical Officer.
I think I'm wrong about what I said in my last post. Its not really clear what the "department head" system is. But the duty officers arent supposed to be average joes; they are supposed to be somewhere above the unseen crew that performs day to day functions.
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However, it's its own beast: with special teams of duty officers you take onto your ship that grant bonuses or unlock new content or items.
Ha, maybe those Crimshiks or whatever they are called who continue to haunt me have Doffs as well.
I wonder if they'll follow us to our shuttles. There's a clown car joke there just waiting to be told...
Wow, Mr. Sarcasm -_-
I wasn't being sarcastic.
Dstahl mentioned the Duty Officer System is like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. In that game, there's an apprentice system where you send junior assassins out on missions: poisoning barons, protecting damsels, stealing diplomatic papers, etc. Your apprentices gain experience and advance, unlocking better abilities as they go.
In STO, they're talking about something similar.
You have an Active and Reserve Crew Roster: one gets sent out on these missions like AC:B and the other is like assigning crew to parts of your ship.
Different crew combinations unlock unique bonuses, much like a Trading Card Game (think Magic: The Gathering or Pokemon or even Star Trek CCG). It's a lot like having another set of gear: except it's people and their traits might work well with one another (or work against each other, i.e. Odo and Quark, Bones and Spock). The Unemotional Vulcan might have trouble working with the very Coarse Andorian.
(For those who have followed the other thread, this post is just a compendium of the most relevant of my replies.)
http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=211307
It's been a while since we started talking about the Duty Officers, Assignments, Department Heads and First Officer systems in earnest, and now that we're deep in the middle of development of the system, we thought it would be a good time to do a round-up of where it all stands now.
Duty Officers
Players will be able to collect a roster of "duty officers" (Doffs) to either slot into the active roster of your crew complement or send them on assignments - some on board your ship, some off - in return for rewards.
Duty officers will include both active-duty Starfleet personnel and some few civilians. Most duty officers will be able to both be slotted into your active roster or to be sent on assignment, meaning you will have to judge carefully the pros and cons of each allocation.
Duty officers that can be assigned to your crew's active roster will have a special passive ability based on the officer's specialization. For example, a tractor beam engineer specialist might provide a chance to proc an additional effect whenever you use a tractor beam. It is possible to stack different duty officers of the same type, though there are some stack limits. For example, it is possible to fill your entire active roster with Science branch duty officers, though you might only be able to put a maximum of three Warp Theorists in your active roster at any one time.
In addition to specialization, duty officers are also distinguished by species (which sometimes have associated traits), quality (usually expressed as rank), rarity (loosely tied to quality) and gender.
Assignments
Assignments represent both on-board and off-board appointments of personnel (usually) and commodities (sometimes). All assignments take differing amounts of time before they are completed; the time can range from as little as a few minutes to as long as a week - rewards scale, but shorter completion times are weighted more heavily, since they require more player management time.
Assignments may have requirements (e.g., these two slots on the assignment may only be filled by engineers) and may also have modifiers (e.g., this slot gives you a better chance of success if it is filled by an Andorian or a duty officer with the Trader trait).
Which assignments are available will change every few hours, and may also be gated by your captain's rank, what sector you are in, and other achievements.
Inputs may also include commodities such as medical supplies or provisions.
Rewards almost always will include skill points and bridge officer points and energy units. Depending on the assignment, other rewards may also be available including DXP, merits/honor, badges/marks, energy units, commodities, items, additional assignments and new duty officers.
Department Heads and First Officers
Subsequent to the duty roster system goes live we will be rolling out the next component of the system: department heads and your First Officer.
Bridge officers will be able to "eat" duty officers of their branch to learn those duty officer's passive abilities. (Fictionally, think of it as the duty officers are joining that bridge officer's staff.) With the appropriate expenditures of Merit/Honor and for bridge officers with adequate training, a player can appoint a bridge officer to head up one of six departments - Tactical, Security, Science, Medical, Engineering, Operations. Once heading up a department, those "eaten" duty officer skills will become active.
From department heads, a bridge officer can be promoted to a First Officer once you acquire special "trainer" duty officers. The skill imparted to a First Officer, however, will be an active, clickable skill that you can slot on your power bar and use in space.
Integral to the introduction of department heads and your First Officer we will be revisiting the entire crew user interface in an effort to streamline and integrate it, all with an eye to allowing us to build even more deeply upon that to provide even more functionality and depth to your crew.
What About After This?
Once we have the duty officer system integrated into the existing bridge officer system and the forthcoming department heads and first officers, the next step will be to tackle end game issues, including making fleets more relevant and creating fleet assignments and both cooperative and competitive gameplay at a fleet vs. fleet scale.
Q&A
Q: What are the differences between playing these systems at a casual pace versus a hard core pace?
A: We've tried to deliberately set it up to be able to work both for a casual player and as a player who is more invested in the system. I would expect a more casual player to focus more on longer-duration assignments and less micro-managing of the active roster, while a more invested player could easily spend a majority of their time managing their crew assignments and rosters. Ideally, the rewards should be comparable to the time investment of the player.
Q: What kinds of rewards will assignments offer?
A: Other than the numerics listed above, we are experimenting with allowing assignments to make it possible to gather anomolies, craft items and access special duty officers and assignments.
Q: What will the benefit of this system be at end game?
A: We're all very much aware that the end game needs some real love, and improving the end game is something that is going to be a major push following the current batch of work in progress. The duty officer and assignment system will, in fact, offer some rewards and optimization and collection benefits at end game when these systems are launched; that being said, they are also currently envisioned to act more as a major foundation for this to-come push for end game gameplay than as a complete solution at the time they launch. I know it's frustrating to wait, and we have had to make some very difficult choices as to what to do in what order, but we want you all to know we are aware of many of the areas where the game needs to improve and are trying to get to all of it as soon as we can with the level of quality you all deserve.
Q: Wait, did you say the department head and first officer parts of the system will not come out at the same time as the duty officer component?
A: Unfortunately, it looks like this is going to be how it is going to happen. We have the tech, we have the data - but the more we have looked at the system and how it is entangled with the existing way bridge officers works, the more it has become clear we need to do a complete revamp in order to fully integrate bridge officers, duty officers, department heads and your first officer. We tried really hard to avoid delaying the department head and first officer portions of the system, but we have decided we simply cannot roll it out with the level of quality that it needs without more work.
Q: Will duty officers have their own name? Can I change it?
A: All duty officers will be named, but every duty officer of the same exact type will have the same name. For example, out of the ten thousand or so duty officers, every Green quality Bajoran female Projectile Weapons specialist Tactical officer will have the same name. Due to practical database issues, you will not be able to change or customize it. Right now, we're looking at storing tens of thousands of duty officers. To allow players to customize the names of all their duty officers would multiply the data storage requirements by well over an order of magnitude, something we're just not able to do right now. Could this change sometime in the future? It's certainly not inconceivable.
Q: What kinds of bonuses will slotting duty officers into your active roster provide?
A: Passives and procs - no active abilities that you have to click. Some of these will be non-combat, most will be in combat. Most will be for space, although we are exploring having some affect ground operations as well.
Q: What is the actual state of development for all of this?
A: The current state is what I would call "true alpha", meaning it is functional but neither pretty (lacks appropriate UI still) nor polished (needs lots of iteration and usability work). Moreover, there is still vast amounts of data to create including literally thousands of duty officers and assignments. (Some of this can be procedurely generated, but a lot of it has to be hand-crafted.) The basic foundations are in really good shape, however, and it is incredibly exciting to start to see all the places we can take this basic engine and all the other parts of the game we can assimilate. I mean, assist.
Q: What about...?
A: Awesome idea. You should totally post that here. I don't have time to comment on every idea, and some things we can't do for any number of different practical reasons which I may or may not be able to explain in detail, but there have already been a number of really great ideas I've seen and I'm very certain we've only scratched the surface of what can be done with these systems.
This is for the Klingons as well. Moreover, we're building out the assignments to make sense - i.e., no diplomacy assignments that result in DXP for Klingons and instead a lot more conquest assignments.
You will be able to fully staff your rosters with a single species, but it may take a fair amount of time and resources to collect them all.
You will be able to shift duty officers in and out of your active roster out of combat; currently the expectation is that this will be free for duty officers, but will actually cost something (EU and/or Merit/Honor) for department heads. We have talked about saving different builds, though this would be a post-launch feature of the system.
First Officers may be demoted, but there will be an associated cost, probably in Merit/Honor. The former first officer's skills will be retained, although inert unless reinstated. This is also true of department heads who are removed from their position - the passives they ate from their duty officers will still be there, they just will be inert and inactive until they are reinstated. The first officer skills have not been designed yet, but they are currently envisioned as being new skills, probably similar to your captain skills.
Doffs will primarily affect the ship, but some aspects may affect the ground. All six departments currently have passives that affect ship functioning: the departments are Tactical, Security, Science, Medical, Engineering, Operations. Security in space, for example, might have things that affect (or counter) boarding parties. Some of what these affect are partially dependent upon desired revamps of existing system such as redshirt usage for Medical.
The system is currently functional at an alpha level on internal builds. The moving target in this case is exactly how many assignments and of what degrees of complexity we can deliver for the launch of the system; regardless of this, however, the system is such that we will be able to rapidly add additional assignments as time goes on - launch of the system represents only the barest beginning of a system that we intend to expand and support.
Duty Officers will be acquireable through special recruitment assignments, as rewards for various activities in the game, and other methods as well. For characters who are already deep in the progression, we are discussing various approaches from possibly granting starting Doffs to simply engineering the system to enable acquisition of Doffs through other means.
Department head and first officer appointments can be simultaneous with console appointments, and can still beam down on away missions.
All non-civilian duty officers will have a branch (Tac, Sci, Eng), a department (Tac, Sec, Sci, Med, Eng, Op) and a specialization (Projectile Weapons Officer, Transporter Officer, Assault Squad, etc.) These are permanent classifications for that particular duty officer.
Your ship type may allow for unique assignment options. This is still being explored, but may (if it happens) be a post-launch rather than a system launch feature.
Traits are mostly species-specific; there is some overlap with existing species traits, but it's not a one-for-one relationship.
Available assignments kind of (and I emphasize "kind of") work like dailies. Follow up assignments do happen in some rare cases. Follow up missions have been discussed, but there are both schedule and technical complications that may hinder or stymie the ultimate appearance of these.
Department head and first officer skills for bridge officers will be in addition to their existing skills - getting them to play nicely with the bridge officers' existing skills is one of the reasons why that part of the system will be rolled out after the duty officer part of the system.
Department head skills are taken from duty officers in their own branch, so the passive skills they gain will in fact be associated with their branch of service. First officer active powers will probably also fall into this pattern as well, but there is still a lot of design that has to be done in this area so I can't promise anything.
Duty officers who are neither on assignment nor allocated to your active roster remain in your roster, idle. At the moment, duty officers cannot be turned into bridge officers, nor vice versa, and the limits on how many you can have for each are independent. There has been some internal discussion and exploration of promoting duty officers, but that is much farther down the road.
Duty officer set bonuses do not synergize with bridge officer traits. Skills are a more complex issue, and in some cases, they might. Since any engineer bridge officer will be able to eat any engineer duty officer's skills, it is easy to see some potential synergies. For example, if I have the bridge officer tractor beam skill, that certainly synergizes really well with the tractor beam duty officer skill.
Synergies with gear or between species crews with species ships are something that will probably be looked at someday, but not for the initial release of this system. It's a great idea, we just don't have the time before season 4 is supposed to come out.
As for diminishing returns, we are currently planning on no diminishing returns for passive duty officer abilities, but in the end it's going to come down to the balance between being effective if you have one of that Doff versus multiple of that Doff versus how hard it is to get those Doffs, etc. ad nauseum. I would like to avoid diminishing returns because I find them inherently unintuitive, but am prepared to put them in if circumstances seem to require it.
Duty officers of ranks above the very common ones will only be put in sick bay, not killed outright for exactly the reason you described - who would want to risk that awesome duty officer you got? Common ones, appropriate to Star Trek custom, will still be potentially expendable.
Assignments themselves will span the gamut with different levels of risk versus reward, success and failure, disaster chance and so on. Moreover, many of them will allow you to mitigate - or shift - the chances depending on who you assign to them. For example, assigning a Deltan or an Orion to a diplomatic assignment might increase both the success chance...and the disaster chance.
Some assignments may lead to other assignments, though the degree to which this is layered or sequenced will probably be minimal at the launch of the system, though we will definitely be pushing it harder in that direction later because, well, it's just that cool.
Once you have initiated an assignment, it will complete passively in the background, even if you are logged off. Most assignments will have the option to abort them. When the assignment is completed, you can then get a report on the results and receive any rewards as appropriate - just like how turning in a mission currently works.
This iteration of the system builds the foundations to allow for possible customization in the future, but will not allow for it at this time. What customization winds up being introduced - and when - is subject to a great number of factors from schedule to technical issues to inter- and intra-system factors.
You will not be able to take your duty officers on away missions; that privilege is reserved for full bridge officers.
Last week on STOked, Dstahl was hopeful for some time in May.
I would like to be able to send one of my Older Ships into the Hiromi Cluster to do some charting while I'm busy in Psi Velorum fighting the Romulans.
EDIT I'm also curious if Department heads will ever be sent to Sick bay.
It could be REALLY cool to have some Doff-only races so we have a Doff->Boff->First Officer->Captain path for super exotic species.
I'm stoked about this system, I think even the bare-bones that comes out with the S4 release will be a wicked cool addition to the game adding that much depth to it.
A question regarding First Officers....
From the start, Riker hardly ever let Picard beam down with an away team, and always got antsy and unhappy when it happened. I realize this is adding yet more bloat to the player data, and essentially creating two characters for every slot, but would it be a desirable idea to create a 'first officer' character who can (at the player's option) beam down to ground maps in place of the player captain? Or should we just go with the idea that Starfleet has tossed that regulation?
This would be an EXCELLENT reason for all of us with the rank of 'Admiral' to actually, you know, command multiple ships rather than one.
I LIKE that idea!
It will, in fact, be a quite innovative system that I do not think is in any other space combat MMO that I know of. (A set that at this time includes only EVE and Vendetta Online. Maybe Space Pirates, but that's a web-game.)