Everyone's a captain in multiplayer Star Trek Online

In the 25th-century timeline of the upcoming MMOG Star Trek Online, every player is a starship captain, either Federation or Klingon. The game, now in its fifth year of development, begins in 2409 (no, that's not the release date).
Players cannot choose to form a group on one starship, with each fulfilling a different role; you have to be the captain. To MMORPG gamers who enjoy group play this may be a weakness. In PvP starship encounters, your customized ship and trained crew will be pitted against those of other captains. As you level up you get bigger, more powerful ships. As captain, you can customize the physical appearance of your bridge officers, but their stats are predetermined; as you level, you can choose how to spend their points, however. Planetside face-to-face confrontations can feature away teams of grouped players who fight NPCs. Open PvP encounters will be confined to contested, remote sectors of space between captains, with consensual PvP and competitive PvE in the Neutral Zone. Ship and crew customization seem to be the major selling point as of now, especially a feature that allows players to create their own unique character races, sets of traits that will then be available for other players to use. Players can also choose between Human, Vulcan, Andorian, Klingon and a few other character races. Game visuals will include Starfleet Academy, Vulcan, Bajor, Qo'noS and, of course, deep space.
Star Trek Online, now being developed by Cryptic Studios, is posting weekly scenarios to be solved in online forums; Friday's offering was Kobayashi Maru Vol. 18 by Rekhan. These are interesting little problems, and the old-fashioned, purely verbal nature of the solution posts has a nice throwback feel if you like that kind of thing. You can post your own secnarios and see what people come up with.
A date for the Star Trek Online public beta has yet to be determined.
http://www.examiner.com/x-11230-Star-Trek-Examiner~y2009m6d21-Everyones-a-captain-in-multiplayer-Star-Trek-Online