Does your 4 bridge crew always come with?

[evan.is.weyoun]

I was just thinking, if I want to go down to DS9 and get a drink at Quarks, does my bridge crew have to come with? Or will places be marked as "Player hub" and it will allow you to just go down alone? What do you guys think? I hope it's not like Guild Wars where player interaction is almost solely done at player hubs. I want to meet other players doing the same quest as me.

[RookActual]

I was just thinking, if I want to go down to DS9 and get a drink at Quarks, does my bridge crew have to come with? Or will places be marked as "Player hub" and it will allow you to just go down alone? What do you guys think? I hope it's not like Guild Wars where player interaction is almost solely done at player hubs. I want to meet other players doing the same quest as me.

You will probably be allowed to leave crew vacancies when you assemble an away team. Even on an away mission, it may be optional to have 1-4 toons.

[PicardoManeuver]

Not sure on that. We only know that away-missions will consist of your player plus 4 others, which can be a mix of other players or your bridge-crew NPCs

[TruthSeer]

Also just want to point out that we don't actually know how many bridge crew members we'll have it's just the maximum on an away team (no news on a minimum) will be four.

[Manx]

I was just thinking, if I want to go down to DS9 and get a drink at Quarks, does my bridge crew have to come with? Or will places be marked as "Player hub" and it will allow you to just go down alone? What do you guys think? I hope it's not like Guild Wars where player interaction is almost solely done at player hubs. I want to meet other players doing the same quest as me.

I think it would be pretty cool if your chosen bridge crew members would temporarily become station NPCs when in a social hub type place; maybe you could run into your tactical officer in the bar, or see your chief medical officer out shopping for souvenirs.

[lorddarsoth]

It would be great to have the choice and if given to me I would rather go alone. Unless I had some premature idea of what was going to happen badly then I may consider company. But if it is mandatory I would be fine with it as long as I don't have control them.

[jhem99]

Someone or something has to monitor you that you don't do anything in game that you would regret and leave this game for Eve or WoW.:o

[Beaver8]

I think it would be pretty cool if your chosen bridge crew members would temporarily become station NPCs when in a social hub type place; maybe you could run into your tactical officer in the bar, or see your chief medical officer out shopping for souvenirs.
Or your first officer trying to pick up green women of the night :p

[perfect_nosferatu]

IMHO I think that you'll have a choice about whether they come or not, if it is a social hub you're going to (like DS9) but if you have an away mission, there might be a requirement of that mission to have you and 2 or 3 other characters beam down with you!

I'm not sure, but I can't really see the need for Bridge Crew to come with you if you're socialising!

[HyorD]

I expect that at a social hub like DS9, you wouldn't actually be allowed to bring your entire bridge crew, as it would get very cluttered with all those AIs running about. Maybe you'll get to bring a single officer (your "pet"), but I doubt you'll have a full away team.
As for meeting people doing the same mission as you, I wonder if that will be possible, seeing as most missions will be procedurally generated for each individual player. There may be some exceptions, and there may be some "area quests" that people in an area can cooperate/compete to complete (here (http://hailingfrequency.co.uk/boards/index.php?topic=426.msg5941#msg5941) is an example of such a quest involving tribble hunters, although unfortunately some images are gone), but apart from that you may have to team up with them before you actually warp off to your destination.
That being said, maybe they'll allow you to "host" missions, in a sense, much as you could host games on Battle.Net. You go into some sort of mission generation video, select the type of mission you'd like to do. Then, other players can open up some sort of mission joining window and read a synopsis of the mission you're gonna do, and if they think it looks interesting then they can join you.

For example:
While at the For'Chan Station, at the frontier of Klingon territory, I right-click the base and choose "Task force". I'm then taken to a menu that allows me to choose between creating a task force and joining one.
I choose "Create task force", pick a name for my task force and then pick a mission category (for instance, I could choose "Science - Medium" and then the sub-category "Planet cataloging", or "Combat - Hard" and subgroup "The Great, New Tribble Hunt", or I could just choose "Random"). I might also select such things as a level range (odds are most missions won't be suitable for children of all levels) and any other fancy options one might want.
Having done this, I'm shown a brief synopsis of the mission I'm about to do. It doesn't tell me everything about the mission, but it may give some clue as to what sort of experience I can expect out of it. If I accept this synopsis, then I click "OK" and my task force gets added to the list of task forces people can join.
When somebody checks out one of the task forces they can choose to join, they get to see the synopsis that was generated for the mission in question, and if they like it then they can join. While people wait, they can chat with each other in a special task force chat box, and when I feel my task force has enough members I hit the command to warp us all to the system where the mission is to take place.