[Mascalzone]

MMORPGITALIA: Despite the terrible answers from the community in the beginning, it's been several years since every game having fighting factions began to not let them talk to each other. Why did you choose differently? Once I even did a mission with an "enemy"!

Craig Zinkievich: Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. We thought it made it more fun this way as you may have friends playing as a Klingon and you as a Federation. This way you guys can chat and brag when playing PvP

MMORPGITALIA: Don't you think that forcing people who want to play a Klingon right away to have a Federation character first could imbalance the population among the factions? It's easy to grow fond of a character, most of all with such a detailed creation tool.

Craig Zinkievich: People will quickly get access to Klingons not far after they have played as a Federation character. We think that people will really want to have both. Sometimes you may feel like playing as Federation and other times you may want to just play as a Klingon. Also there will be people that will just want to play as Klingons and people that will just want to play as Federation. So we feel the balance between the two shouldn't be too big of an issue. We've also built intra-faction warfare into the game, so if for some reason a Klingon player can't find any Federation players to fight, he can fight Klingon members of rival Houses. So there will always be something to do, on either side of the war.

MMORPGITALIA: Do you plan to add a PvE career to Klingons or do you firmly want them as a PvP-only faction?

Craig Zinkievich: That will really be up to the community. If they want more PvE content for Klingons then we will look at adding that in.

MMORPGITALIA: While the Federation starting base is organized and well built, with everything at hand's reach, Klingon's one is an architectonic nightmare, and even only looking for the High Council is a quest by its own: will passive time sinks be part of MMORPGs still for long?

Craig Zinkievich: We're always looking for ways to improve the quality of life of our players. Really, if something feels like a time sink, it wasn't designed well enough. That's something people are beginning to learn the hard way, and it's why we design our games to be very action-oriented without a lot of forced downtime.

MMORPGITALIA: There's been a lot of chatter about ships bridges and their function. While I was flying my Bird of Prey I felt I could have found very very useful a first person perspective, or at least a frontal viewpoint, to better aim my cannons. I mean: will we ever have an interactive bridge like this or will they be only tied to the social stuff?

Craig Zinkievich: It's already something we're looking into. This is definitely one of those things we want to make happen after launch, but didn't have time on the schedule for.

MMORPGITALIA: Klingons' specialty is mounting a whole lot of cannons on the fore side and grind the enemies, but cannons did too much damage so you chose to give them a shared cooldown, making unhappy many testers who liked to pilot single weapon boats. Wouldn't just decrease their dps have worked?

Craig Zinkievich: Yeah, but then people wouldn't have liked cannons at all, since they don't do enough damage! J Designing stuff like this is a balancing act. Ultimately, we decided the game played best with this cooldown style of cannons. However, if after some time it turns out it doesn't work, we'll refine what we're doing and make it better.

MMORPGITALIA: Related to the previous question: "Hit and Run" should be Klingons' favourite strategy, supported by their ships agility and many weapons to the front. This last aspect especially gave birth to the "turret games": a captain stops his ship, goes into reverse and shoots like there's no tomorrow, diverting all the shields to the front. The secret: the speed at which a ship turns, into that gear too. To tell the truth, I've never seen a real (cough cough) Klingon go backwards: couldn't you just remove reverse from Klingon's ships?

Craig Zinkievich: That's something we'll look into, but the other way to look at it is it's an interesting example of emergent gameplay. Maybe Klingons in the Star Trek movies would've been more successful had they employed this strategy? Seriously, though, we don't want to force people to employ just one strategy to be successful. That'd make the game less fun for people who enjoy optimizing their characters and ships to be the best at what they do.

MMORPGITALIA: Is there an estimate of how many testers usually play a Klingon character right now? And what's their ratio with Federation's? I'm asking because sometimes I felt I was playing alone.

Craig Zinkievich: We're not giving out exact numbers, but we were pretty happy with the way the factions balanced themselves out. Keep in mind that we're going to have just one server for everyone to play on, so when the game is released to the public, issues like this tend to scale themselves out of existence.

MMORPGITALIA: Klingons fight Federation. Federation members can shoot at, other than Klingons & C., Romulans, Cardassians (which I just adhore, I felt guilty every time I shot one down), Species 8472, Hirogens and anything else they could stare at. Will the plot develop into showing us pacifist Klingons?

Craig Zinkievich: Have YOU ever seen a pacifist Klingon? J We're always looking for ways to develop the Star Trek Online story and make it compelling for our users. Stay tuned.

MMORPGITALIA: Last at last: what Klingon insult would you shout at me after such absurd questions?

Craig Zinkievich: Your mother was a Targ and your father was a Fed Rat without honor! How's that?

MMORPGITALIA: I wuv u, thank you Craig!