by Stacy Jones on Oct 03, 2011
Star Trek Online Senior Systems Designer Geoff Heretic Tuffli has posted the third installment of Star Trek Onlines Path to F2P dev blogs. Todays blog details the upcoming Duty Officer system for the game and how players will be able to assign tasks to their crew and reap the benefits from their hard work.
According to the blog, players will receive their first set of duty officers at the rank of Lieutenant Commander. Additional officers can be earned by spending time at Starfleet or Klingon Academy, trading with other players or by purchasing random sets through the C-Store. These officers can provide benefits in a number of different areas ranging from static bonuses to increased support or attacks. Players can also assign duty officers other tasks that can be carried out over a few minutes up to several days.
Duty officers comes with their own specializations that can factor into their effectiveness for a role. Deciding which officer is the best choice for a given task is something that the player will have to decide based on the qualifications of each one.
Each duty officer has a species, a quality, a specialization, and a set of traits. All of these can factor into their effectiveness in terms of the tasks and roles you set them to. A duty officer who is poor at one task may be better at another, so it is your job as captain to manage the duty roster by allocating the right junior officer for the right task.
Successfully completing a duty assignment will earn you commendation points. Gain enough and you can unlock unique duty officers and less commonly new rare bridge officers. As an added bonus, Star Trek Online players that take part in the Tribble server testing of this new feature will earn a free random duty officer for their characters on the Holodeck server.