YAY! Gonna start watching now!

The original Connie is 800 points, so I would imagine the Galaxy X would be 1000=$12 or more.

The BO idea. Mass Effect 2 did similar stuff with your crew. Doing story missions for a crew member made them become loyal and enabled upgrades and behaviour changes.

Whats the E-mail address for the question? :S

stoked@jupiterbroadcasting.com

Question: I'd love to join the Jupiter fleet!

Ty

great show guys, the whole BOFFs episodes is a great idea that i hope they put in the game because i always thought that is what is missing on STO.

Actually, i care very much about my BOff's i invested time, energy credits and skillpoints to get them were they are today. I have every BOff slot filled.

My problem is: i dont want to discharge them to get some random blue or purple BOff (No i dont want a male Bajoran! No i dont want a Pak'led ..eeew!) that i got from doing Missions. But then i miss out on advanced traits they have!
The *Mass Effect 2* Loyalty Missions style sounds like a good idea to rip off and to give them SOME personality but not so much your idea to debuff them if you dont do it (come on we all WANT to do missions, we're gonna do them anyway.), but give me a chance to increase the Traits of my crew instead!

***

I hated the BOff Voices in Open Beta. I had selected the Ferengi voice and everytime a Text Popup came from the Security guy he screamed “GAPTN!!” at me… if they bring that back i would totally MUTE it.
If they make proper Mission Text Voiceovers that could only add to the Immersion and Atmosphere of the Missions.
I will not stop asking for this only because Cryptic claims it is to expensive… the game itself is to expensive for what it is, but do i stop paying because of that? NO!

I have to say the whole flame war around the Galaxy-X with regards to the referral program is silly. Cryptic is right; the reward is playing with your friends. The Galaxy-X was a great idea as an incentive; having it in the C-store for the high price it's at makes just as much sense as making it a referral reward. Now people will hopefully be actually referring others instead of wasting almost $300 just for a starship.

That said, I do agree that Cryptic is walking a fine line with regards to C-Store items and game balance; both the Galaxy-X and the Caitians are great examples of this controvercy. It's an issue I've always been keenly watching with other MMOs as well, and will be watching it unfold. I've been on both sides of the argument so this will be interesting to see how Cryptic deals with it over time.

Keep up the great reporting, guys!

I really want to see much more content and missions regarding BOffs; the big problem I have with that, though, is the fact that I want to write my BOff back-stories myself; how is Cryptic supposed to make new missions custom tailored to all of everyone's active BOffs? that's hundreds of thousands of unique BOffs, which would become millions of missions, and each mission set would have to be tailored to a BOff that Cryptic isn't writing the story for. And what about all those players that *don't* write back-storied for their BOffs? How would they get custom missions if there's no backstory from the player to generate from? If they could do that, they'd be doing it for our main characters first.

Honestly, I think this is where the UGC engine will come in handy the most. We'll be able to write those missions ourselves, then can even have other people experience the missions as well. They'll get to see our stories just like we watched TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and even ENT. We didn't write those characters, but we enjoyed their stories just as much as if we had. I think the best UGC is going to be people writing stories of their characters and their BOffs that feel like actual episodes, and that we can feel we each made an impact on that story by being part of it.

The Voice packs, IMHO, would be the best option to add to give the BOff's a much bigger feeling of being real characters, and would be easy to implement since they already had them in beta. All they need is better voice acting; they could even have, say 7 or 8 default and even add more to the C-Store, like extra Caitian voice packs and such! ^_^ I think they should have the voice packs recorded with enough dialog to give a sense of growth over your career; have sets of responses and which response set is dependent on your rank and how long you've had them (or how many skill points you've spent on them, or both). When you first take command, the tone and inflection is cold and reserved; they're not sure how to feel about the sudden change of command. As you rise in rank, their tone gets more friendly/trusting and they start using more casual language here and there. When you're a higher rank and commission a new BOff, their tone is formal and gets more relaxed as you spend skill points on them.

Three scenarios for making BOFs more important… if your ship's Captain was kidnapped(like when the Borg took Picard) or if the CPT is unconscious due to a “critical hit.” If he is kidnapped then you have to rescue him with your first officer or if he is unconscious then his abilities are gone and the temporary replacement BOF's abilities appear changing the way you have to fight. The third scenario; if an enemy away team teleported into your medical bay or engineering room and that BOF was there to fight them off.