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What Kind Of Star Trek MMO Do You Want?
Via Gamecloud, a Nielsen survey on the Star Trek Online site giving some interesting insight into what kind of game people want. From the article: "Another surprise was that the Borg is the most appealing opposing player faction. We knew the Borg would be a popular enemy, but we didn't expect that actually playing as a Borg drone would be so appealing. Though it was a surprise, I think we can understand why they would be a popular player faction. In fact, these results would appear to contradict the overall conclusion that faction value is marginal. One explanation is in the wording of the question. We asked people to select their favorite opposing faction. I can only guess that this wording had the effect of swaying people away from the Federation. Still, this point clearly deserves more research." Interesting to see some thought going into player reaction to development plans.
It was interesting reading the analysis of the survey. I suspect a lot of gaming companies do this, yet keep things fairly quiet. Trade secrets and all.
Still, there were cases where the survey results were being ignored. For example, ground combat was listed as a fairly low priority, yet it still seems to be part of the core design. In another question, people responded that they really wanted to play Klingons, yet it looks like they're not part of the initial races to be offered.
There's always tension in surveys, deciding what really reflects people's interest and what is simply a badly worded question. Hopefully they'll be careful with this one. It would be a shame if they had another Star Wars Galaxies on their hands, deciding that virtually no one could play Jedi even though that's what everyone wanted to do.
1. No leveling. What? Did Captain Kirk constantly go on away missions to zap thousands of space rats with his phaser just so he could travel to a more dangerous planet? Hell no!
2. Realistic ships. By god, they have documented each varient of the enteprise down to the excact inch and they better not make any mistakes.
3. Non-loot oriented. Well... Unless you play as the Ferengi faction, but Federation member shouldn't have to buy armor or their own equipment (unless they are stranded on a planet and have to buy a phase modulater from a Ferengi at twice the price and to triangulate their coordinates via subspace to a passing vessel, but not on the ships).
4. Make it open ended and that you always have the choice of which planet to go to.
5. Make it so the players crew the ships. Not some NPCs.
That's all I got.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You know what galls me about Trek? For all that it was ground-breaking in race mixing at a time when that wasn't ever done on screen, since then it only ever got more racist. More precisely, speciesist. Every species has one personality, one government, one religion, one language. Each of them represent some fixed quality, for example, Ferengi greed, Vulcan logic, Cardassian brutality. Even humans are stereotyped as Starfleet functionaries or generic colonists from a bland, humanity-spanning culture. Where a character has any individuality, it's unusual enough to drive plot.
It's as if the socialists who write it can't easily bring themselves to consider people outside of their species collective. Like there's something broken in their heads.
Compare Serenity, where people can be good, bad or indifferent - or even Star Wars, where species mix it in together on the basis of shared individual goals, and where a shared planetary culture creates different individuals. A lot of SW characters are from Tatooine, but they aren't all "Tattooine-ians".
The Borg should be required to speak to eachother in all caps and maybe leetspeak. CAPTURE 477 71F3F0RM5. Furthermore, to be totally acurate, the Borg would have to maintain a strict although dynamic hierarchy in accordance with their wireless network ranges. And any player with greater hierarchy would be able to see the point of view of any lesser player, and if needs be take CONTROL over said player. This would ensure that all players in the Borg faction would conform to the will of the Borg.
Likewise Klingon factions should always have the option of fighting a higher ranking officer to the death to gain their position. I mean seriously what's the point of having multiple races in a MMO if they all have the same play mechanics.