Players often ask why game companies running MMOs don’t run polls more often and show the players the results of those polls. The answer is simple: in the players minds, those results are binding, even if there is no way for a company to act on those poll results in the immediate future.

Things like that were flashing through my mind as I read the poll results that Star Trek Online released. In particular, even though STO will only be able to ship with the Federation, it seems that players would vastly prefer an opportunity to play a Klingon or a Borg (27% an 29%) to a goody-two-shoes Starfleet hack (17%).

The Borg is of interest to me for the same reason that the huge player groundswell to make Stormtroopers playable is of interest to me: there seems to be a huge proportion of players who are not interested in a strong sense of identity as much as they are interested in being part of a role-playing collective. It seems like there’s a dissertation in here somewhere for some sociology student.

The poll goes on to discuss their general surprise that players vastly prefer the idea of the space experience to that of the ground experience (i.e. ‘Away missions’). Why is that a surprise? The ‘away missions’ episodes are generally the episodes that feel like they were done on an eight dollar budget.

I’ll tell you what wasn’t a suprise – the Holodeck features being at or near the bottom of everyone’s list on the prioritized features. I guess I’m not alone in thinking that the holodeck episodes, as a rule, sucked.
Original comment thread is here.

Edit: The fiancee notes that it’s pretty funny that a lot of people want to play the borg, yet a lot of other people want to be in command. One can only wonder how much overlap between the two there is.

(Thanks to J, whose post reminded me to make this one)