A few months back, Star Trek Online went F2P. So I decided to try the game out. I had a preorder item from three years ago that had been sitting on my shelf (I bought it at Target for $2, expecting it to appreciate), so I plugged it in and went. I was impressed to find that the item had in fact appreciated and was now seen as a status symbol. The item is a gun that allows the player to shoot through barriers - including boss doors - so it has many creative/exploiting uses.
When the game went F2P, a new gameplay element was introduced - an EvE-like system of managing virtual personnel, sending them on tasks off the ship. This became known as the doff (duty officer) system.
More recently, a new batch of doffs were introduced. And shortly thereafter, the innovator of the system said he was leaving the company after seven years, for reasons that remain unclear.
Some of the duty officers have very interesting names.
Some are puns on the nature of their profession...
A doctorAnother doctorA biochemistA geologistAn entertainerSome are blatant sexual innuendosAnother exampleYet another exampleAnd yet anotherThe name is actually a reference to a famous line in the fifth Star Trek movie (if you don't know what it means or get the joke look it up then read
Section 33)
Some take the form of rough anagramsAnother similar anagramAnyone who has ever seen DS9 knows that is not what Vorta look like (they have purple irises and light grey skin)With the developer who designed this system no longer with the company, players have taken to collecting and speculating on the anomalous duty officers, which are tradeable as items. All the above are from my personal collection. Some players have
even more outrageous ones.
Yet more evidence of where this dev's brain was when he created this system are the duty officers he chose to make rewards from superlative achievements: attempts can be made to acquire these -
this one and
this one - only once a week, with at most a one in three chance of success (which of the two is received is random). A player can have multiples. There are no male versions of these duty officers, nor versions of other species, they are only marginally useful, and cannot be traded or sold. Both are references to Star Trek jokes.
There are several distinct thousand duty officers in existence, and the system itself is fairly buggy. The company that maintains the game seems to have made no effort to correct what they claim are anomalies of the supposedly RNG naming system, although it has become extremely obvious that puns are cropping up much more often, with greater consistency in theme, and to the exclusion of benign themes than can be explained by any RNG.
Anyway, it's too bad we don't see Tseric-level insanity like this in WoW anymore. And somehow I doubt we will in GW2. I wouldn't recommend STO to anyone, either, but I still thought it was hilarious. Less the names themselves than that this disgruntled dev actually took it upon himself to program all that in.
