It's time once again for Executive Producer Dan Stahl to answer Star Trek Online player questions in another round of "Ask Cryptic". This time, Dan answers more questions than usual in a special extended edition. It seems the Cryptic team has wrapped it's weekly content for Season 2 and wants to get at the heart of the most common questions from the player base. A few of the questions were stand-outs for us, especially in regards to Tholians. That's right THOLIANS! Also, there's a distinct possibility that fleets will have their own bases. Interesting. Check out an excerpt from the questions below.

Q: Lilravegirl: Tholians Tholians Tholians Tholians!!! Tholians?

Dstahl: We’re very interested in the Tholians. It could be some time before you see them in game. However, here’s some concept art we submitted to CBS for our take on Tholians. We think it still needs some tweaks. What are you impressions?

Q: Kovorn: Fleet Starbases...i.e. player housing but for guilds/fleets. I've had a few people in the fleet requesting so I thought I'd ask. On the radar?

Dstahl: This is on our radar for the upcoming year. We want this feature to be released when we increase the level cap to 61 as a Fleet Admiral level feature. The goal is that it would work in conjunction with Fleets and the UGC tools.

Q: CrimsonSpot: Is the bug that some paid for clothing slots can't be used for off duty clothes even being looked into?

Dstahl: We are aware of the issues with purchasing costume slots, especially how it pertains to off-duty costumes. While there is no immediate quick fix for this, we do plan to find a solution that will clear up the confusing way that costume slots are purchased so that players can have more control over the slots they want.

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: EzriRayne: Will we be getting the chance to unbind items?

Dstahl: We are presently reviewing our philosophy around item binding. We are evaluating having some items becoming available for trade but at present there are no plans to unbind existing items you own. It may be possible that future rewards have less binding restrictions than existing items do. Nothing definite yet.

Q: Spots: I'm curious about the Crew stat on ships. Is it really working just as you'd like it to? I imagine there's some desire for a greater meaning in the game. If so, what's the grand vision for the Crew stat and when may we start to see some changes made in that direction?

Q: Elerial: Will we ever get Passive BO abilities?

Dstahl: We have a grand vision for how crew relates to your starship and have plans and design discussions around when we can introduce these changes. The current concept is that officer candidates you receive become “crew candidates” instead and that crew candidates come with passive abilities that improve your starship performance. You can decide to either slot crew in your ship as standard crewmembers, which would then add those passive abilities to your ship. If you decide to convert a candidate to crew it would be a one way commission and the officer “personality” would be lost, but the stat bonus would stay on your ship roster. You would also be able to promote a crew candidate to an Officer (similar to how you can now) and then give them a slot on your bridge. All of this is in early planning, but is a feature I’d like to see in game within the year.

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.

Read the full Q&A session here.

(source StarTrekOnline.com)