Star Trek Online and why it will fail

A guest post from Ben, the man I like to call "husband" and the resident Super Nerd.


Star Trek Online is coming to a MMO near you sometime in the future. It seems to combine both space combat and planetary outings. Some people have said that it combines Eve and Wow together.

I think that the MMO will do really well since they have an established fan base that actively embraces technology. More another reason that it will take off is that currently there isn't any new release Star Trek TV series in production.

With the ready base of Trekkies, I think some people will be roleplaying in this game. While role playing is fun in certain settings the idea of role playing in the star trek universe to me is hilarious. All I can think of is that the people role playing will be 400lb middle aged men dressed up in Star Trek uniforms, covered in Cheeto's crumbs, with their mothers yelling at them from the top of the basement stairs that they need to clean up their room.

People are going to take great advantage of the tightly bottled up nerd rage that is contained within each of these people.

Firstly they will be frothing at the mouth at any tiny technical error in the Star Trek universe - does the inverse tachyon beam interact with the temporal field in this manner, pages of flames on the official forums will ensure, and it will take a brave software developer to venture forth and tell them to STFU. This just comes about from the amount of information put forth in the Star Trek Universe from 40 years of tv shows, movies, and countless novels.

Secondly some people will take great enjoyment out of winding up these die hard fans; in fact I know of one online community that takes great delight in doing this.

Nerd rage - how will this destroy a game that isn't even already released? Well it's easy - go to a group of your geekiest friends and ask them which is better: Star Wars or Star Trek. Just make sure you bring popcorn and play devils advocate whenever they seem to be running out of steam.

So due to a fan base that is going to have unreasonably high expectations on the final product and a subset of the players that get their kicks out of winding up the hard fan, or as they call it, "harvesting tears," I believe that the community will turn upon itself rapidly and end up two tiered: you will have the elitist jerks who make life difficult on the second main group, which is the newbie/casual gamer that is playing for fun.

So here ends my first blog post. Hope you enjoyed it.

P.S. I do enjoy watching Star Trek on TV