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With all that has gone on with Cryptic’s Star Trek Online since its launch, we felt it was time to head back into deep space and track one of the team down to ask them a few questions.

Somewhere in the Bajoran sector I eventually found Craig Zinkievich, STO’s Executive Producer, taking a few pot shots at passing asteroids. Here is what he had to say about the launch and game so far…

Star Trek Onine has been live for a while now. How do you feel the launch went overall?

I feel the launch went pretty smooth for an MMO.  We had a few moments where our servers went down or there were some lag issues, but we resolved them pretty quickly.  So overall I was pretty pleased with our launch.

As good as beta-tests are, they will never show you everything. What do you feel is the most interesting thing you have learnt from the players since launch?

It’s really a situation of mass. We have more people playing now than we did during the beta, so we’ve got so many more eyes on what we’re doing. Just due to scale, we’re getting more feedback on what we do.There’s a lot of interesting things you learn from players.

When you design something it’s easy for you to see what to do and how to do it because you’ve been working on the game.  So you try to watch players closely and whether they’re doing the mission how you designed it.  Is it too easy or too hard?  Are they not going to a location they are supposed to go to? Etc.

While we’re on the subject of the beta-test, I’ve always wanted to ask a developer this question. What was the funniest bug that has manifested in the game?

There were a couple funny bugs we encountered.  Tribbles would grow to alarmingly large sizes, or another one that was pretty common during the beta was you would beam down to a planet and your ship avatar would show up, or when you were out in space, instead of appearing as your ship, your Captain would just be out there floating in space.  Fortunately we were able to track down those problems.

You have already added several content patches since launch, which part of these are you most proud of?

I like the Special Task Forces, especially because we’ve been able to make them available not just to Federation players, but to members of the Klingon faction as well. We want to keep showing support to both factions, and this is just the beginning of that.

Which of the patch features (if any) would you have preferred to have been available at launch?

Many of the things in the Season 1 we wanted to get in at launch, but just knew they wouldn’t have been as good if we did.  So we would have liked to get those in but it was better to wait.

Season One: Common Ground has given Klingon’s access to more PvE content and even some simple ship customisation options,  but it’s still not as much as the federation players have available. Can they expect more of the same attention in the upcoming patches?

Klingons will continue to get more love and  more PvE content in the upcoming Seasons.  We’ve even got some Klingon-specific stuff planned to release later this year. We want to provide Klingons with an experience as similar to the Federation side as possible, without duplicating the experience completely. We want Klingons to feel different, because they represent vastly different philosophies and approaches in the Star Trek universe.