Multi player 1 ship!

[Tornkool]

So my wife and I will be playing this when it comes out.

I have read a handful of official posts and others talking about being able to have multiple REAL people operating a single ship.

As far as i can recall and conclude from the posts is that we will not be able to do that, my wife wants to be Ohura and I my self Spock if you catch my drift.

On top of the fact that a human on your deck would be way more fun then AI, this is after all a MMORPG.

This will definitely not stop us from playing the game but my wife is a killer gamer and i would like nothing more then to act under her command or vise versa.

Hoping they eventually take this into consideration.

Oh and this is going to be an insane game !

And i appreciate feedback as to why this would not be a good idea.

I also appreciate the polls big time as they have taught me a lot more about the Star Trek universe then i had really ever anticipated i would need to know lol. (not a Trekkie) but am becoming 1.

[IanD967]

from what i know there wont be any player-bridge crews at launch purely because the technology isnt available yet to pull that off plus there isnt any easy solutions as to what a medical officer can do on the bridge compared to a tactical officer :)


hopefully as an expansion it will be possible in the future hehe

[onesoul1982]

So my wife and I will be playing this when it comes out.

I have read a handful of official posts and others talking about being able to have multiple REAL people operating a single ship.

As far as i can recall and conclude from the posts is that we will not be able to do that, my wife wants to be Ohura and I my self Spock if you catch my drift.

On top of the fact that a human on your deck would be way more fun then AI, this is after all a MMORPG.

This will definitely not stop us from playing the game but my wife is a killer gamer and i would like nothing more then to act under her command or vise versa.

Hoping they eventually take this into consideration.

Oh and this is going to be an insane game !

And i appreciate feedback as to why this would not be a good idea.

I also appreciate the polls big time as they have taught me a lot more about the Star Trek universe then i had really ever anticipated i would need to know lol. (not a Trekkie) but am becoming 1.

Player crews may be an option, but not at launch. It has been discussed over and over..and its not something to happen right away. As for it not being a "good idea" the main one I keep repeating is..say you're off on some mission and your tactical officer has to suddenly log off or any other member of your crew..or their AFK or refusing your orders as captain. I'm perfectly happy having a NPC crew not question my orders or suddenly log off for whatever reason. Even if Cryptic decides to go the route of player crews I'll still stick with my NPCs.

On the flipside, they have said that during away missions you can bring other players along with you.

Welcome to the forums.

[KashikoiBaka]

from what i know there wont be any player-bridge crews at launch purely because the technology isnt available yet to pull that off plus there isnt any easy solutions as to what a medical officer can do on the bridge compared to a tactical officer :)


hopefully as an expansion it will be possible in the future hehe

I expect it will never make it in game, there just isn't enough fun in any one station to keep people playing.

[IanD967]

I expect it will never make it in game, there just isn't enough fun in any one station to keep people playing.

exactly! you have to try and find something that can keep all the stations active and fun which is just almost impossible :)

[Zepath]

Two reasons I don't ever see this getting in game;

1) As mentioned above, certain stations would just be flat out boring.

2) You have the problem that there can only be one Captain on a ship. And while you might play well together as a husband and wife team ... typical MMO don't play well together.

You get the inevitable ass that always has to be the one telling everyone else how to play. Or you get the guy who can only feel secure about himself by verbally abusing everyone else and putting them down. Or when the mission fails, everyone blames one person. Or you end up with the "leet" crew of 15 year olds who can play and train 80 hours a week (so the rest of us are at a huge disadvantage).

Then you have the problem that exists in all MMOs: You spend 40 minutes getting ready for the mission (people finishing up what they are doing, or late from work, or have a phone call they have to take) ...

Then your spend 20 minutes getting to where you're going to go ....

You work your way through the easy part of the mission, and just as your start the final fight that's going to take another 20 minutes, the guy who took the Weapons Officer postion types in chat, or says in vent..

"Really sorry guys, but I have to go! Huge Wife-Aggro here! Really sorry, thanks for the invite."

That's about the time I end up having to get another monitor because I just threw my bottle of beer through it.

And then people wonder why so many people want to solo in an MMO.

[onesoul1982]

Two reasons I don't ever see this getting in game;

1) As mentioned above, certain stations would just be flat out boring.

2) You have the problem that there can only be one Captain on a ship. And while you might play well together as a husband and wife team ... typical MMO don't play well together.

You get the inevitable ass that always has to be the one telling everyone else how to play. Or you get the guy who can only feel secure about himself by verbally abusing everyone else and putting them down. Or when the mission fails, everyone blames one person. Or you end up with the "leet" crew of 15 year olds who can play and train 80 hours a week (so the rest of us are at a huge disadvantage).

Then you have the problem that exists in all MMOs: You spend 40 minutes getting ready for the mission (people finishing up what they are doing, or late from work, or have a phone call they have to take) ...

Then your spend 20 minutes getting to where you're going to go ....

You work your way through the easy part of the mission, and just as your start the final fight that's going to take another 20 minutes, the guy who took the Weapons Officer postion types in chat, or says in vent..

"Really sorry guys, but I have to go! Huge Wife-Aggro here! Really sorry, thanks for the invite."

That's about the time I end up having to get another monitor because I just threw my bottle of beer through it.

And then people wonder why so many people want to solo in an MMO.


Agreed 100 percent.

[Kinjiru]

exactly! you have to try and find something that can keep all the stations active and fun which is just almost impossible :)

Not if it's only a temporary group, put together just like an away team.

The problem that Cryptic has with it (and I agree) is that they would need to create enough content to keep someone engaged and having fun in these "secondary" stations for as long as they play.

I say, don't.

Forget that model. We will never see "Chief Third Class Engineer's Mate" Ian. It will never happen in STO.

Throw out the thought that players will ever be in subordinate positions to each other for any length of time, or that your sole job while playing the game will be to man the science station. It's just not going to happen.

If, however, you can invite other players onto your ship to man a console for an hour or two (at the end of which time they go back to their own ships) then you only need to build the functionality of the station, you don't need minigames, or subordinate-office specific content.

If someone gets disconnected, or goes afk, they're "beamed" off of your ship, (back to their own, it would be presumed) and replaced by one of the your NPC Bridge Officers. If for some reason, you decide they're not doing their jobs, kick them from the group, they go back to their ships.

They'd see the exact same HUD that you as the captain would, but only the functions of the console at which they're temporarily using, so no special console HUD design is needed. They'd see the same 3rd person view of your ship that you would.

The system that I've outlined uses the exact same group dynamic already in play for away missions, so no changes would be necessary there either.

This is completely possible, and if they do decide to include a feature such as allowing other players to work with you as a team onboard a single ship, then this is also the only way that I could see it working.

Think of it in terms of ST: First Contact. Picard beams Worf (captain of the Defiant) over to the Enterprise, where he takes over the Tactical station temporarily. At the end of that 2 hour "mission", he goes back to his own ship.

[marscentral]

As far as i can recall and conclude from the posts is that we will not be able to do that, my wife wants to be Ohura and I my self Spock if you catch my drift.

I think that might be better realised for all of us through a trip to a costume shop, I'm sure they do TOS Trek uniforms. That way the rest of us can concentrate on the game.

[Tornkool]

I would think there would be some one else on the ship (AI) to relieve any person who DC's would be a viable option.......

And the other spots could be multi tasked by said person, if they feel as though there position didn't offer the fun they are looking for.

I still would rather have a human in place of any position on my deck, that could do more then scripts made for the game, regardless if they get me into more trouble or find a better solution to the problem.

Just food for thought and thanks for the reply's as this is my focus for the next year or so is to participate as much as i intelligently can.:eek:

[Tornkool]

I think that might be better realized for all of us through a trip to a costume shop, I'm sure they do TOS Trek uniforms. That way the rest of us can concentrate on the game.

ROFL i was not in total talking about cybering :)

more along the lines of knowing i had a competent person playing with me that that has more interest in the game the getting that better upgrade, like RPG aspect and the camaraderie that goes with caring about your bridge crew generating authentic feelings for importance of staying alive :)

And yes the Star Trek get ups have already been talked about, my wife and i are gamers we love Star Trek and the game is what we want to play in every aspect that we can, and if further ideas can generate a better gameplay for everyone then so be it, that is why WoW does so well its not just for the people wanting to smash numbers to destroy research so on so forth.

I want this game to blow WoW out of the water as i love Sci Fi way more the Fantasy.

[Zepath]

I want this game to blow WoW out of the water as i love Sci Fi way more the Fantasy.

Well, I'm with you there. I'm sooo over the D&D theme and FPS themes. There's only so many ways you can kill a dragon or cast a fireball. And if I have to play one more FPS I'm gonna puke.

[Tornkool]

Gene Roddenberry and William Gibson for life my friend.............. for life..............:cool:

[Drexxus3d]

I am a guild and raid leader in WOW at the moment and we raid all the new content as it comes out, Yogg-Saron on farm and working on hardmodes in 25man.

I love being able to orchestrate and command 24 other individuals, each fulfilling their own unique functions towards the end goal like killing raid bosses. That is the most fun thing in the game for me and one of the only reasons I actually still play it.

I have thought about in depth what it would be like being the captain of my own ship in a multiplayer star trek game with all my officers and crew being real players that I gave voice commands to over ventrilo (or probably an in-game voice system). I think having a crew of engineers instead of healers, various tactical officers operating different weapon systems instead of DPS, a helmsman performing the manuevers and "raid positioning" and actually controlling the ship would be similar to a tank role, and science officers could perhaps perform other functions like mixxed DPS/CC/Defenses.

However, here are a few problems with that design...

Firstly, for something like that to work you'd have to make getting to the rank of captain and having your own ship be just ridiculously difficult. In WOW terms perhaps getting your own ship would be like forming a guild, but instead of 10 signatures you'd need like 50. Then the "gm" would be the captain of the vessel and all the players would perform roles on the ship.

Problem is, requiring that many people to operate a ship effectively is a logistical nightmare. I have a hard enough time getting just 25 people to be online at a time for 4 hours a night, 3 nights a week at specific times, but trying to maintain a functional crew compliment long enough to play basically all day would be very difficult. You'd need hundreds of players on your ship (in your guild) so you would have sufficient people to operate it all the time, like imagine having a 25-man raid going like 12 or even 24 hours a day with different people logging in and logging out at random intervals throughout the day.

I mean for me, it would definitely be fun, but the realities of something like that just doesn't seem feasible. It would take hundreds of people to operate a single ship, vs a game like STO where those hundreds of people all captain their own ships representing a large fleet. The tactical importance of a single ship would be drastically more meaningful though, and I think it would better capture the "feel" of star trek.

I would say not everyone would want to be stuck in engineering all day long and do nothing but make repairs, but people are willing to play healers full-time in other games, so I don't imagine it would be too different.

Another downside to that is despite MMORPGs being multiplayer games, TONS of people prefer soloing most content and playing by themselves. Don't ask me why, that's just how people are and a game of that design would make solo play completely impossible.

One cool thing though, the entire ship could be made up of instances. You could fully realize the insides of the ships, everything from the bridge, corridors, personal quarters, and so on all in a fully explorable 3d enviroment and have a lot of the game focus take place INSIDE the ship and not just running around killing stuff outside of it.

Although I suppose if people got too bored doing their jobs on the ship, could always go for a planetary mission and have everyone beam down to do things on the planet, that would give people another style of play to enjoy besides their primary ship's function. Would allow even engineers to engage in a phaser battle with a hostile enemy species instead of strictly repairing things onboard all the time. Not to mention while the ship is not in combat or performing some other mission, the player crew could just explore the ship, go hang out, even mess around on the holodeck for some other forms of entertainment. Again in WOW terms it would be kind of like just sitting in Dalaran chatting or doing dailies or pvp dueling in between raids, you'd have lots of personal activities to do on the ship or on planets, but you'd have to man your post during ship missions (raids).

Maybe one day such a game will exist, I know i'd play it ^_^ but I believe it would probably be more of a niche market, not the mainstream money-maker that most MMORPGs are aimed at becoming, hence why EVERYONE is captain of their own ship in STO. They want to give every individual player that feeling of having their own ship with their own crew and what-not.


Edit: The more I think about it the more fun I think it would be to do :) You could have small guilds flying smaller craft like defiants or birds of prey, then when they recruited more crew and reached a certain threshold they could upgrade to a slightly higher tier ship with more space for quarters and required more people to operate, so on and so forth. So most ships out there would be pretty small, like most guilds in WOW are tiny and of no consequence, but then you'd have a very few of the huge ships like galaxies and sovereigns which would be more akin to the more hardcore raiding guilds you see in wow that have tons of players in them. :P

[Zepath]

They already have the real-world mechanics for raids. Flotillas.

I'd be fine with a Fleet (guild) or even the Raid Leader being allowed to have the designation as "Flag Ship". That is where they will likely take the rank of Admiral (if when they add it) to justify allowing players to have that rank and still be on a ship.

Consider, if you are a player and you are an Admiral, all you need is a ship that has Captain as a BOfficer position and everything is according to canon, according to how it is done in the real world, and it all makes sense.

[Kinjiru]

Sigh... does no one read my ideas at all? :confused:

[Tornkool]

Sigh... does no one read my ideas at all? :confused:


I did and i liked it :) good suggestion on the porting back to there ship upon DC'ing or if they are not a player you wish to be partying with there is definitely a way to accomplish this i believe however i dont write code as of yet so am at the mercy of Cryptic to fulfill my needs for this game and the ability to allow my wants to still be a reality :) :D

[Kieshdor]

With players operating you ship you could have buffs added to your ships staff like as said a medical officer would increase you ships medical capabilities so you wouldn't loose as many crew in a fight, and to give the player some thing to do he/she can operate remote controlled fighter shuttles and fly by wire torpedoes although i think a limit to player crew would be 3 so 4 people can coop a ship and FBWTorps and fighter shuttles would need to be replaced at a starbase. This could also add in a carrier ship with lots of shuttle bays cause i haven't read or found any thing about a carrier class in star trek and like in modern day navies carriers are important so in this navy(btw navy doesn't mean ships just in water) this could bring this important class back into the fight since this is an era of war and chaos.

[wrussandrews]

Sigh... does no one read my ideas at all? :confused:

Sure. Most just choose to ignore them and reframe reality in whatever manner suits them. That is, we see what we want too.

[Tornkool]

Sure. Most just choose to ignore them and reframe reality in whatever manner suits them. That is, we see what we want too.


Now that there is not a post counter that makes me leeter then others i would like to say

LoL to this post ! not in a negative way either :)

[Kinjiru]

Sure. Most just choose to ignore them and reframe reality in whatever manner suits them. That is, we see what we want too.

Hehe, apparently Tysis. :)