Star Trek Online Survey Floats Fleet Command, Era Focus

Star Trek Online players have been handed a homework assignment, and it's one worth doing.

A survey link has been shared on the game's Discord. The questionnaire asks players what they would like to see added to the MMORPG, and it does so by listing a handful of possible features. Some of them are modest. Some of them are big. None of them come with a date attached, and the people running the survey are very clear that none of them are promised.

That last part matters, so let's get it out of the way first.

Hypothetical, and they mean it

The Discord announcement describes everything in the survey as "hypothetical ideas." That isn't modesty. It's a warning label. There's no roadmap here and no timeline, and there's no guarantee that any single item on the list will ever make it into Star Trek Online.

So nobody should read this as a feature reveal. What it actually shows is a development team trying to work out which direction excites its players most before it commits to anything. That is a reasonable thing to do. It also means anyone who cares about where the game goes next has a rare chance to say so in a format the developers have asked for.

What's on the list

The ideas fall into a few broad buckets, and together they paint a fairly specific picture of what the team is at least thinking about.

Life aboard your ship. The survey references "deeper life" on a starship, with activities and missions built around it. In a franchise where the ship is practically a character in its own right, the idea of spending more meaningful time inside your own vessel is an easy one to understand.

Frontier exploration. More exploration is on the table, both out in space and down on planets. The word "frontier" is doing a lot of work there. It points at the classic Star Trek idea of going somewhere nobody has charted yet.

Bridge officers with a bigger role. Your bridge officers could become more important to the story. Right now that's only a line in a survey. But it hints at crew members who matter for more than what they bring to a fight.

Roleplaying with consequences. This is probably the most interesting bucket. The survey mentions "stories with multiple choices" and "characters who change based on [players'] decisions." Branching narrative and reactive characters are ambitious goals for any MMO, let alone one with a long history behind it.

A single era. One idea is a more focused, single era of Star Trek. The survey doesn't explain what that would look like in practice, and it would be a mistake to guess. It's still a notable entry, because it suggests the team is weighing breadth against focus.

Commanding a fleet. Finally, there's the ability to command a fleet of ships. Going from captain of one vessel to commander of several is the sort of fantasy Star Trek fans have probably daydreamed about for years.

Why you should bother answering

It's tempting to shrug off a survey full of ideas that may never ship. That would be a mistake. The whole point of the exercise is to measure interest, and the only interest that gets counted is from people who fill it out.

If fleet command is the thing that would bring you back, say so. If you'd rather have choice-driven stories, or deeper exploration, or a richer life aboard your ship, say that instead. The developers are clearly asking which of these directions lands, so a few minutes on the Discord link is the most direct way to have a say.

Reading the Signals

Surveys like this are never just surveys. The list of options is itself a hint about what a team considers within reach, or at least worth discussing. And this list leans heavily toward roleplay, story and the feeling of actually living the Star Trek fantasy, rather than toward new gear or combat systems. This suggests the team may be thinking about identity as much as content.

Long-running MMOs have been wrestling with that same question all year. Some have learned the hard way that skipping the conversation with players can backfire, as Jagex found when it had to apologize to angry RuneScape veterans. Others, like SWTOR's still-undated expansion, show how long the distance can be between an idea and a release. Asking first and building later is arguably the healthier path.

It's worth watching whether the developers share any results publicly, and which of these ideas, if any, resurface in a more concrete form. Players should keep their expectations in check, though. A survey is the very beginning of a process, and this one says so itself.