Star Trek is a society chock full of selfless citizens who live to better themselves and the world in which they live. when speaking of the federation, very few people are motivated by greed or material wealth. this becomes a problem for an online game because it is an excepionally common tactic in online games to provide loot in one form or another to help to entice players to continue to play by allowing them to upgrade their characters.
The federation is, in effect a perfect socialist system. no one recieves any sort of material reward for their efforts, but everything a person could want or need is provided for by the system. everyone feels all hunky-dory about being alive, happy and improving themselves. the problem with this society is that it is largely incongruent with the basic drive of people who actually play online games. playing an online game without loot can be a pretty flat thing. I played City of Heroes for quite a long time and the game is very nearly without loot - it has changed somewhat in the last year or so but the game is still largely without loot of the sort youwould see in a game like everquest or world of warcraft.
The problem comes when you look at the mechanic of offering loot. having a loot system, especially one that offers rare or enticing loot rewards helps to encourage players to continue to log on and play. it is one of the more basic mechanics that game developers include almost as a matter of course to ensure that the playerbase they aquire remains as an active subscriber for a longer duration. the reward to effort of continuing to defeat enemies, complete quests and interact with the game world to gain access to rare loot and special upgrades to their character is a very powerful motivator that can do the game an aweful lot of good.
The federation is quite simply far too altruistic to allow one person to simply find "uber item 1" and keep it. A starfleet officer would take said uber item and send it to starfleet R&D for study, reverse engineering and replication.
Example: If a starfleet captain was cruising along, ran across a derelict ship that had a vastly superior sensor array, he would not simply snatch it up, adapt it to his ships systems and run around gaining the sole benefit of this super sensor array while snubbing his nose at everyone else who had to make do with the standard issue sensor array. he would take it, study it, try to gain some preliminary findings to upgrade his standard array and then send the array back on to starfleet to be studied and have the technology integrated into a standard array for the next class of starship and integrated into the upgrade cycle for ships going into a maintenance cycle.
So... how do you add loot to a game environment where the players will tend to react in exactly the opposite way that a starfleet officer actually would...
here is how!
When a player finds a rare or advanced piece of technology or other interesting item, the player's character automatically acts in the way that a starfleet officer would. the item is tagged to that player as having been discovered by them, and an allotment of prestige is then placed in the player's account. this prestige should be sufficient to purchase one copy of the new technology that is found. there would be a delay artificially installed in the game that would represent research and development time after which the player would get first dibs to purchase the item, allowing for a brief period of exclusivity hich should be sufficient extrinsic reward to allow them to feel good about finding it. after another, shorter period, the item would become available to all players who have sufficient prestige and appropriate need to purchase it.
Well, how does that not leave payers who are not out constantly questing, pushing the edge of exploration or simply powergamers out in the cold! what if you simply want to be a freighter captain or a scientific ship officer or a miner or any other similarly pedestrian occupation. the simple fact of the matter is that everyone in the game should get prestige for whatever they choose to do, it would for a sort of currency that would allow all players to benefit from all other players efforts - now that is a starfleet way of doing things if I ever heard of one.
so now you have your runabout, you have been piloting it for a year or so, have upgraded engines, sensors, weapons, armor, shields, interior, replicators, computer and everything else has been upgraded to the Nth degree, but you decide that you want to trade in your ship for a bigger, more powerful ship so you go to the shipyard to aquire a saber class starship. the runabout would be placed back to the stardard configuration, ready to be commissioned again and the player would recieve credit for all of the upgrades that were placed on the runabout. this composite amount of prestige would then be added to the players account and available to use in purchase of the now ship andin the purchase of upgrades for it.
The same system would basically apply to all other items in the game, tricorders, personal sheild generators, weapons and so on. the intent behind the system I have outlined here to ensure that a loot system of sorts can be placed in STO, allowing the core mechanic or enticing players to log in both more often and for longer to be included in STO and to allow that system to be as starfleet as possible, allowing it to retain the feel of star trek. keeping players logged in and engaged is important to the long term health of the game and to the playerbase.
