Champions had it's fair bit of problems at launch and still do, but the overwhelming problem with it is that its so shallow, this more than anything will be it's biggest problem when it comes to holding onto subscribers.

If STO can avoid this problem, and i hope they do, im sure it will be a very nice game.

Do you mind giving some examples of what interviews mislead you about Champions?

I don't remember any interviews promising that Champions will have god-mode that lets players face-roll through 100% of the content.

I don't remember any interviews promising that Champions will have enough content to play multiple times without repeating content.

I don't remember any promises of mind blowing PvP or perfectly balanced powers.

I'm not saying CO is a great game, but I guess I am not understanding what grounds you have to disbelieve what they are saying. As with any game ever produced, knowing the feature list doesn't automatically make it fun or enjoyable. It doesn't mean that it will meet 100% of your expectations.

I totally agree. I have learned to hate levels. It's a shallow system that only serves to segregate a game's playerbase. If a game needs to reward player with "dings" to be interesting, I'm not interested in playing it. If players need "dings" to keep themselves interested in a game, I'm not interested in playing with them.

I've said this for so long. The majority of the show revolves around the ship (or station). Things happening on the ship, to the ship. It could have opened a really fun game if they had started with fully fleshed out ships and then added ground based in an expansion. Like SWG did with JtL but backwards. And they could have made in interesting, but to me it feels like they didn't think twice and just went with the ship avatars and everyone is a captain because everyone wants to be captain. (for the record, I don't want to be a captain)

I'm also somewhat disappointed about the execution of the concept as I feel that there was an opportunity here for something very special and unique. As it stands it's more generic but it could still be enjoyable - on it's own terms. It's not the Star Trek MMO that some people (including me) may have wished to see but as a Sci-Fi MMO it may still succeed. Wait and see I guess.

The game would fail under that model, no arguments about it. Forced grouping, inconsistent groups, and less interactive roles. Who would want to be a captain? He doesn't do squat but sit in a chair and give orders. What if other players simply chose to ignore the others and do their own thing? The entire ship is at the mercy of the guy at the helm. If a member of your forced group decides to drop, you're SOL until you find a way back to a station to get a replacement.

Attempting to plan play sessions around a group of trusted players is not something that everyone can pull off. In my entire circle offriends, only my brother plays MMOs.

Your idea of a fun STO would fold in under 6 months. The target market is just too slim and too reliant on players willing to split play time doing boring tasks.

Actually the Perpetual design was based around (At least partially) explorable ship interiors and a player crew. Their solution to the situation of a captain being present, but with no helm was to give the captain control over navigation and the helm be 'manned' by an animated npc which existed as an aesthetic place-holder.
The other stations would be controlled by npcs until such a time as a human player chose to take over. (In the same way we often saw nameless crew members brushed aside when the main cast appeared, or rush to fill their station when they left for an away mission etc...)
Their plan was to have two types of crews, permanent (Such as a 'guild' or clan) and temporary. (A group formed of strangers with a ship granted for a short mission.) From my reading of their intent, for the most part you'd just solo in a small craft when you were not part of a guild in a larger starship. Whoever had the highest rank would be in command of the guild starship if the assigned captain wasn't logged on.
Having said that, I don't think Perpetual would have done this concept justice. But it is a much better aspiration than what Cryptic have on offer. I wouldn't even mind as much if the graphics and animations didn't look so very cheap. I would have at least expected a game with as big a budget as STO to have better space visuals than EVE or Black Prophecy.

Still, it doesn't get around a fundamental playability function. There are only two possible scenarios:

A. The captain is a useless placeholder character that probably will only be a generic buff character since everyone else may or may not pay attention to what he says.

B. All the other players are just glorified hotkeys for whoever is playing the captain, simply carrying out whatever order he happens to decide on at the time.

B is the closest thing to a simulation of the universe but A is the most logical outcome. Even that would promote problems since there would be a tug of war between engineering, science, and weapons as to who gets the limited power output. It certainly won't be fun when you decide the shields need to be raised yet the guy at the helm wants more maneuverability and the guy on weapons wants more phaser power. Who gets it? Does the captain decide this? If so, it falls back into players being nothing more than those hotkeys.

It sounds like a fun time for an incredibly small group of dedicated players, but given the size of the IP, it's a bad idea to try and appease that group. Star Trek is a big property, more so now the latest movie hit, it nearly pulled down $400 million worldwide. Cryptic needs to cash in on that lest they pull a Star Wars Galaxy, a game that was too obtuse to keep the bulk of its player base or even come close to hitting the fanbase. Star Wars is likely a bigger property than Star Trek, yet SWG only peaked out at 300k (from what I've seen).

The current system Cryptic is going with is the best model to keep it financially viable. At the end of the day, Star Trek Online is still a business, and businesses need to make money to cover expenses to justify their existence. A model where even NPCs take up ship positions when players aren't available still forces players out of playing much more iconic vessels like the Galaxy class since that would have been used as a hub in the Perpetual version or a guild/group-only ship in your idea. It blocks out the majority of players who would like to jump into an Enterprise and explore the galaxy, but don't have the time to invest to do it with a guild, me being one of them.

Silent Hunter 3 wasn't a commercial success for a reason.

Yeah, it's good to know that they totally said that there's going to be no explorable ship interiors and all... oh wait, they didn't! Why not wait and read the whole transcript before jumping on the "Bash Cryptic" bus, eh?

I don't know what they said, I'm just commenting on what I have learned from this thread. I don't think i Bashed anyone, just gave my honest opinion based on what i have heard. I really have no agenda.

The game will have starbases (hubs) and ship interiors for some missions, I read that in a dev FAQ, and you can see then in some screenshot around the web.