Executive Producer Dan Stahl delivers the answers in this month’s extended special edition of Ask Cryptic! Read on for 29 answers to 29 of the most-asked questions from the Stark Trek Online‘s player base.

Q: Angelphoenix12: I’ve been thinking about my question … Are we ever going to have crew death? i dont mean for a death penalty. I mean for when a torpedo hits the hull.

Dstahl: Similar to the idea I mentioned above regarding adding passive crew-members for your ship. If we implement that feature we do hope for crew death to be a factor and for “crew” casualties to have the chance of removing some of the passive crew members. All TBD at the moment.

Q: Bfelczer: Has there been any thought to a paid expansion? If so, what might be a major update that it would be released as one?

Dstahl: It is unclear if we will ever produce a paid expansion as the market is leaning away from expansions and more towards smaller microtransactions. However, if we ever did release a paid expansion, it would be a significant update and add some new functionality to the game that would be deemed worth the price of the release.

Q: Xaben: …Could you tell us more about those set-items?

Dstahl: We will be introducing an item set in the Season 3 release. These items are new special rewards for completing the STFs. These items are thematic Borg components that when equipped on your ship not only provide the stat bonus with the set, but with each item you slot, unique Borg FX and GEO is added to your ship model (we expect this to work with almost all ships). The concept comes from Voyager where they added specific Borg tech to their ship in order to survive specific encounters in the Gamma Quadrant. They look pretty cool. Here’s a screenshot of an Escort enhanced with these items.

Q: HotStuff_ST: When can we expect to get Caitian Bridge Officers?

Dstahl: We’ve been holding on to some very specific Bridge Officer species so that we can first finalize all the details of converting a Bridge Officer to a Captain. Since Caitians are a premium species offered through the C-Store, we do not want to trivialize player’s purchases by allowing everyone to simply go get a Caitain bridge officer and converting it to a playable Captain. So once we’ve worked out the details of how the conversion feature will work, we will come up with a fair way to add these rare Bridge Officers into the game.

Q: MustrumRidcully: How about some Accolades regarding PvP Success?

Dstahl: While not specifically Accolades, the software team is working on the earliest implementation of PVP Leaderboards which we hope to introduce soon so that you can track basic Win/Loss ratios across a set period of time. We hope to expand on this once we get the tech in place.

Q: Simale: Will you enable larger player groups for Fleets to form and play Fleet Actions like the Big Dig or Crystalline Entity or epic space battles?

Dstahl: We still have a vision for allowing Fleets to queue into Fleet Actions. Our software team has been investigating this for a while and we do hope to have it in game eventually, but at the moment software is focused on the User Generated Content tools. We hope to get to Fleet Queues within the year.

Q: JohNyNorMus: What kind of challenge can you offer the players at end game now that you are talking about moving away from special task force missions?

Dstahl: We believe that end game replayability needs a big revamp and I’m hopeful that this can be the focus of Season 4. I’d like to see better dailies, improved star cluster exploration, and a rethink of the “get tokens to trade for loot” stores we have now. In addition, I’d like to see some solid fun challenges for players who are looking to maximize their character builds.

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