I can hear combat-addled achiever-types whining already.  As that's typically a fairly large group, I'm not sure we want to go pissing them off by saying you can't be an action-minded Captain.  Demoting oneself requires too much humility for most people to muster, in my experience.  I think the challenge should come on the front end.

I do like the idea of having a player lose their ship/command for not maintaining it.  It makes sense, and is fair for all.  It's based on direct consequences: don't take care of your crew, you lose crew until your ship can't run.  Captains who have worked their butts off to get there and suddenly can't keep up with their crews get moved to smaller and smaller ships, like 'position decay' back along the advancement line until they're back on newbie runabouts.  Of course, getting back up the ladder is easy once you've already been up it once.

I don't think giving a player a 'desk job' is... fun.  We're not trying to actually punish the people, we're trying to teach them to play through the system, which means never discouraging them from wanting to play.

I don't know how many people here are aquatinted with the old SWG leveling system.  When entering the game, we should not have to, at default, choose a profession, rather, we go through the game doing what we want to do to get to the goal.  To clarify, in the old SWG system, you would enter the game as an avatar, on your profession sheet, you would, see if memory serves, all the possible profession trees, and in order to get each skill, you needed relevant experience.  For example, if someone wanted to go Doctor, they would need to build xp, by healing people, or doing simulations, this xp will in turn allow you to acquire a new skill in that profession, but the xp would not be able to be used for, lets say combat.  This would allow greater flexibility in STO among professions, Captain would be something almost everyone would want, so they would need, I think a more rounded experience plus, perhaps a minor concentration, Picard seemed to have diplomacy/tactical, Janeway, Science, etc.  You in turn of course would be limited to a max amount of skill points obtainable.

I can tell everyone here right now.... The ranking system of this game could either make the game, or break the game. It will be so important in establishing the playerrs role in the Trek universe that if there are things that are unbalanced and quite frankly 'censored', then this game could fail. But i know how good Cryptic Studios are at this freelance kind of stuff, so i know they are probably one of the best developers for the job. I just hope they spend as much time as is needed working out the perfect ranking/levelling/progression system with STO.

Well, there are a number of different ways they can do this, but i think we are going to find out sooner rather than later about what route they are gong down.

This is something that normally has to be decided very early in development