Star Trek Online players have questions and Executive Producer Dan Stahl has answers. In the latest Ask Cryptic, Stahl fields a number of questions from the community about Foundry improvements, improved story-driven content delivery and the state of PvP. While players are unlikely to see PvP improvements over the short term, Stahl does indicate that there are a number of improvements in the works that players should begin seeing with the Season 7 update and continuing to evolve through Season 9.

Dstahl: My personal opinion is that PvP has never been a strong suit of STO or of Cryptic Studios in the past. Over the last year, the studio has been coming to terms with this and has dedicated internal development resources to analyzing and building a fun PvP prototype. This has helped us learn and understand the tech necessary to make PvP a healthy part of our games.

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PvP improvements are in the works and should begin a gradual rollout starting in Season 7.

That effort was largely successful internally and helped identify how we should proceed with PvP in the future. Earlier this year, STO jumped at the opportunity to be the first Live Cryptic game to use this new tech and started work on revamping a space PvP map that could serve as a test bed for players to provide feedback. That test map was nearly finished when “Gozer” left the team. It has since passed to another designer on the team and he is coming up to speed on everything that had been developed over the past several months.

At this point, we do not feel that rushing something out right away is going to help. In order to improve PvP for the players who currently do like it, it will need more extensive testing time than we’ve typically allowed in the past. The first step is going to be putting a test map out for players sometime in the next few months and then seeing where we go from there. Only after we believe the existing PvP community confirms our opinion that this is an improvement to PvP, will we consider putting serious development effort towards a releasable map set.

Thus, the writing on the wall is that PvP will continue as is for the duration of Season 6 and will slowly begin to improve in Seasons 7 through 9, with the end goal of having an awesome and fun PvP “battleground” like map by the time Season 9 ships. Not exactly the best news if you are waiting for new PvP maps, but at least it gives a clear view of what we are doing.

Stahl also touched on coming UI improvements, expanded inventory slots, account binding items and more. Read the full Ask Cryptic for all the latest details.

Source: Star Trek Online Ask Cryptic – August 2012