Talk:Duty officer

How to proceed?
As I mentioned already earlier if we spend some thoughts on how we're going to add all this to the wiki we save us some serious time cleaning things up later.

In my notes I was at creating a page for each department first. That should be 3 for each class (tac/sci/eng), a tenth for civilian and maybe an eleventh page for doffs that fit in neither of those categorys. Thats 11 pages for each faction at start which sounds manageable. After establishing a good base of DOffs we can expand those lists then as needed. Pages for specific species etc. --Dukedom 12:30, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I completely agree, we should try to organize these efforts in a manner similar to what you described. We'll just have to wait and see, how the system actually looks like, when it hits Tribble to make any informed decisions of the kind. I suggest, you stick heads together with MatthewM, since I have a feeling, that he'll sink he teeth into that much new content, that can be cataloged. :-) --RachelGarrett 22:33, 6 August 2011 (UTC)
 * I just have the feeling that it will dwarf the amount of work I put into the Relief Effort page. --Dukedom 10:56, 7 August 2011 (UTC)

Semantic Forms-based mockup
I've set up a mockup for a Semantic Forms based approach to handling duty officers, at least from the input side. I haven't set up any listing pages yet, largely because I already know how to do that, that won't take long, and the primary problem is figuring out how to get 6000+ duty officer pages in efficiently anyway. Form:Duty officer is the centerpiece of this operation, with Template:Doffpage handling all the layout for the large collection of pages.

For now, Template:Doffpage automatically includes both the work in process and the tribblenotes templates to show we're testing things.

Before anyone gets too excited, the known issues:
 * Yes, the pages are bland. I fully intend to set up an infobox style display that'll look similar to what's in-game.  This was a functionality test concentrating on the input side of things more than a display test.
 * Yes, we need to make buttons for "Edit with form." I didn't know until now that this extension did that.
 * Due to our naming conventions with traits, I may have trouble making that quite as easy as I'd like to, but I might be able to improve things once I have a complete list of the available doff traits. Not sure yet.
 * I am still divided between using the simple name-only page titles I'm using now or "Duty officer: name".
 * For collisions where two different duty officers have the same name, I suggest standard wiki tactics such as "name (specialization)" or "name (department)" and a disambig page rather than setting up a more complex naming scheme that will make the whole system more difficult to deal with. &mdash;  Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 11:50, 9 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, and one more issue I don't think I've come up with enough ideas for: linking to the form.
 * Definitely on the main page under Under Construction when we're ready to go...
 * In a special italic note at the top of the duty officer page?
 * Add the same note (or a similar one) to Template:Doffpage so that basic edit instructions appear on each doff page? &mdash;  Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 11:59, 9 October 2011 (UTC)


 * All available traits, professions and species should show under sort options. --Dukedom 13:45, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

The merge from Doff
I anticipate most of this information will be here only temporarily, but until we have consensus in place on what kind of approach we're going to use, I don't want to discourage collecting this information.

Dealing with careers/specializations: Under the system I'm mocking up, each specialization will be getting its own page, a property to contain the text description (So I can query it automatically onto the doff pages. (And I'm calling them specializations because that's what's on the game interface.) This assumes that the descriptions are the same between for every duty officer of a given specialization; obviously, we'll have to change plans if that's not true.) I was thinking these pages can also get the list of doffs of that specialization, depending on the number. (It may have to be broken into subpages due to the high number of doffs; we'll just have to see how that works out in action. If so, then the specialization pages won't be much more than description and links, but not all pages have to be big.)

Doff traits: This is partially set up already due to the work I did on Template:Traitheader, though I'm already suspecting some changes will need to be made. Still, we already have a system where properties on the trait pages identify which species always have them and which can have them, so that is the likely destination for that information. (Which can tend be queried onto other pages.) Alternatively, the opposite approach of placing properties on the species pages and identifying the traits there would work just as well; the choice in this case is completely arbitrary and is a matter of preference. &mdash; Eyes   18:36, 9 October 2011 (UTC)

Requesting images
Could someone please upload the duty officer rank graphics and trait icons (at a minimum) please? The department and specialization icons would also be nice. &mdash; Eyes   13:41, 10 October 2011 (UTC)

Specialization pages
Are there any objections to just naming the specializations pages after the specialization, or do we prefer to do what we do with missions, abilities, and such and prefix the titles with "Specialization: "? &mdash; Eyes   16:26, 21 October 2011 (UTC)

Differing specialization descriptions
When I was making specialization page a couple days ago, I noticed that a number of them have differing descriptions between what appears in the small infobox and what appears in the more detailed display. Do we think it's worthwhile to include the infobox description in a "hidden" property on the specializations and modify doffpage to put that description in the infobox so it matches the display in the game more closely? &mdash; Eyes   10:05, 28 October 2011 (UTC)


 * Let's postpone that decision until we know exactly how many specializations would 'need' that. You might want to find a solution for those specializations that have no special roster ability at all instead. --Dukedom 10:10, 28 October 2011 (UTC)
 * Since that just makes the entire overview section irrelevant on those pages, simply don't include it. The most important part is that the department for each specialization gets identified and that we have the lists. &mdash;  Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 10:19, 28 October 2011 (UTC)

Doff trait pages
Started on doff trait pages with Trait: Tactful/doff. It's pretty sparse, being as I don't think there's any in-game description for these. Anyone got ideas on what other information should be filled in before I work on a boilerplate for it? &mdash; Eyes   15:25, 11 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Well, we cannot pull information out of thin air can we? I don't think the list with all the DOffs who have that trait should stay there though since I guesstimate it will have at least a thousand entries in the end. That table probably should be split into a fed and kdf version and moved somewhere else. Instead of that we (aka you) could list a more general table on which species the trait can turn up? --Dukedom 16:49, 11 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Yeah, I could make such a list. I was about to say, since SMW doesn't have aggregate queries, but I thought of another way that would work, though it wouldn't be as slick. Still, doesn't seem like that'd be more than a few lines. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 18:13, 11 November 2011 (UTC)


 * If you want it a bit more complicated maybe add an additional index for quality. I can very well imagine some traits only appearing at a certain minimum quality. And we haven't even touched assignments yet. Tables of which assignments are affected by the trait might come in handy at some point. --Dukedom 18:24, 11 November 2011 (UTC)


 * Assignments might end up being the real PitA of this. What we need is to get a solid feel for what's shared between all assignments of a given type, like all "security briefing" missions. It has seemed to me like all the data related to each slot is the same between different assignments of the same type, but I haven't been able to play with it as much as I'd like to. When we know what's the same, then I can experiment with different approaches to the multiple slots per assignment problem to see what's easiest and most flexible. I'm sure those of you who have been using it more heavily and paying closer attention can help me with that. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 18:36, 11 November 2011 (UTC)


 * I'd like to wait on doing anything like splitting the tables. I already considered the table size as a possible problem, but it's only a possible one. It may work out fine, and if it doesn't, we then learned how many duty officers listed on a page gives us an actual problem and can make an informed decision. After all, if we have a problem with just a few hundred, then another solution will be needed. (And the bigger tables mean we find out earlier rather than later.) &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 18:13, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

Emergency Treatment Token?
So, inevitably, I failed an Assignment and some of my Duty Officers were sent to Sickbay. In the Sickbay tab, there was a greyed-out button asking for an Emergency Treatment token. Where do you get these? I looked in ESD's Sickbay, but I only found Regenerators. Help? --BarGamer 09:44, 3 December 2011 (UTC)


 * There is no hard knowledge on how to gain that token yet. Assume for the time being that there is a high (medical) level assignment that can get you a token. --Dukedom 10:12, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Colonist Assignment Chain
As most of us know there is a chain of Colonist assignments for each cluster.. It starts with Site Survey, then Establish First Base, until you get the renown assignment for a blue Doff. I think the chain information should be here somewhere, but not sure where a good place would be.. 86.17.72.80 19:24, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

KDF Plague Weaponization chains
Just some preliminary data since I lack the doffs to do these efficiently.

Chains are individual for each plague and start with Reasearch Biogenic Weaponization for the Omega IV Virus (Requiring Biologist or Research Lab Scientist). Next step is Field Test Biogenic Weaponization of the Omega IV Virus (Bio, RLS, or Doctor). I heard the next part is transport mission but I don't know the exact name.--KitsuneRommel 15:22, 5 December 2011 (UTC)


 * This chain does not award Doff's, it only unlocks a quick, easily critable Medical assignment awarding 98CXP. 86.17.72.80 02:39, 11 January 2012 (UTC)


 * I recently completed Field Test Biogenic Weaponization of Telurian Plague in the Qo'nos system. .--Aoav160 19:05, 07 February 2012 (UTC)

Questions
Why are there so many duty officers missing


 * You haven't added yours to the wiki? I know we have two players who have been adding in every doff that they come across. There's a list of what's in the wiki now.  I could have sworn it was longer: []


 * I believe there's a pending update to the doff system. Maybe they're holding off until that hits.


 * Hope this helps, --Drmike 23:04, 18 February 2012 (UTC)


 * edit: Found a link: http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=253266


 * The names of almost all duty officers were regenerated a few days ago. With no practical way of connecting the old names to the new ones, we really had no choice but to delete and start over.


 * As a temporary solution, I've uploaded tables containing duty officer information from a spreadsheet provided to us by Heretic and Falling Sky of the STO development team. Look at the nav box at the bottom of the Duty officer article and click the F and K next to the specialization names to see these tables.


 * I want to unify the two different systems, but it's become clear that our original system cannot handle 36,000 duty officers until we get some solutions in place for certain problems. I'll be working on these over the next several weeks, but they're going to need a lot of testing before I can safely bring them onto the wiki. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 09:57, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the follow up. I gather we should not be adding any in as of right now? --Drmike 14:39, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * For now, only special duty officers should be added via Form:Duty officer. In general, if the duty officer has a quote/flavor text, you can be pretty sure it's a special duty officer. But adding all the regular duty officers will make the eventual unification much harder, so yes, please don't add those using the form. It'd be okay to add them to the tables on the specialization subpages, though. It sounds like there are still some missing. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 14:45, 19 February 2012 (UTC)


 * We are missing several commendation reward doffs, I've only added 4 categories from Ferra yet, check Ferra and his subpages to see how I did that. The 3 special doffs from the ds9 pack are missing, too. Apart from that no doffs come to mind that should be added through the form. --Dukedom 16:39, 19 February 2012 (UTC)

OK, I see someone adding in what appear to be common doffs into the wiki. I thought we were holding off? Not to be anal about all this but 1) can we get a definite "Yes, add them/No don't add them" decisions? and 2) maybe a method of telling apart the commons and the more unique doffs may be a good idea.

thanks
 * The definitive answer is and has been in yellow text on Form:Duty officer since the day I uploaded the contents of the spreadsheets, but as I learned working in retail, big signs don't often make a lot of difference... some people will still ignore them.


 * Some of them added recently through the form appear in the data I uploaded from spreadsheets and are almost certainly common doffs, but others don't. I'll ask Heretic if there's a surefire way to tell the special handmade doffs from the others. He said before that generally special doffs will have a quote, but that wasn't guaranteed. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 15:39, 3 March 2012 (UTC)


 * I can understand some of them getting all excited about the gamma quadrant doffs slipping through the cracks. :p
 * Which 'special' doffs are missing I already answered above though. --Dukedom 23:01, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Gamma Quadrant doffs up
Heretic supplied me with a spreadsheet of the new gamma quadrant doffs, and I've managed to get them imported to the (hopefully) temporary pages for the regular doffs. And for the record, we're at a count of about 48,000 doffs now. &mdash; Eyes   13:25, 9 March 2012 (UTC)

New plan for duty officers
Testing has demonstrated that trying to import each doff to its page through an import form would be much be slower than I feared. (It's likely only 200-300 doffs could be imported at a time.) Add this to the explosive growth in the number of duty officers we've seen, and it's getting harder and harder to believe that a one-page-per-doff approach is a good idea. I never anticipated we'd ever be dealing with 48,000 doffs, much less within only a handful of months since the doff system's release.

I believe we're left with two options. By keeping the table format simple, the listing pages now linked through List of duty officers is an approach mostly friendly to editors, though rather limited from the user perspective. (The sortability only can work as long as we can keep the doffs of a specialization and faction on the same page. If at any point we're forced to break it up arbitrarily due to timeouts during saves or other problems, the sortability would lose most of its usefulness.) But these are pretty easy to edit for anyone with some minimum wiki-editing experience.

The other approach is stop going halfway with a custom approach and build an extension from the ground up solely around duty officers. This extension would store the duty officers in their own database table behind the scenes. All adding, editing, and deleting of duty officers would have to be done through the extension, and bringing the information onto pages would require using the extension's parser functions and/or tags. One advantage of this approach is that an extension built around duty officers should be a lot more efficient, and more importantly, much more able to deal with further explosive growth in the number of duty officers (due to the database tables being tailor-made for the duty officers, there would be little to no overhead). The disadvantage is that it's less editor friendly because, as noted, the duty officer information would be accessible only through the methods provided by the extension. We'd be able to make it much more user-friendly, though, because a custom-made could provide user-friendly interfaces to display what duty officer information you want and and in what order. (Note: I'm planning on starting on this extension today.)

tl;dr: our Form:Duty officer based approach is likely to have problems dealing with so many doffs; our current tables linked through List of duty officers are editor-friendly but not very user-friendly; we can build a custom extension that would be very user-friendly, but all editing would have to be done through the extension so it's less friendly for editors. &mdash; Eyes   09:41, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * It's too early to comprehend all this this morning. I do want to mention one thing.  I use the "Find a doff that has these two features/traits/whatever" quite often.  If there's anyway that feature, it would be a plus but that's just me.  --Drmike 11:32, 13 March 2012 (UTC)


 * Had a thought on the walk home last night. What about having the table but putting the traits into their own columns and therefore making them sortable?  That way for people like me who use the page to try to find doffs with certain traits can just sort and find them that way. --Drmike 11:30, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Obtaining Gamma Quadrant doffs
Can those be obtained from assignments? When I logged in after the update, some of the recruitment assignments that were in progress during the update gave me Gamma Quadrant doffs. I got a Bajoran and 3 Cardassians with my Federation character and a Wadi with my KDF character. Is this normally possible and how? Or was it just a bug or a teaser?

Specialization Slotting into Active Doff Slots
There doesn't appear to be information on the maximum number of each doff specialization that can be slotted as an Active doff at the same time (for example, three Projectile Weapons Officers can be slotted at the same time, but his information is not obvious). This is a suggestion to include information on the maximum number of the same specialization doffs that can be slotted at the same time.


 * I will research this information and add it to each specialization page. --Eklinaar 04:42, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Special Ferengi doffs
someone passed along this link in doffjobs. if someone wants to add them in, I;m a bit busy tonight: https://imgur.com/a/a5X2j --Drmike 22:47, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Adding specialization descriptions?
How do you edit the descriptions of the specializations? I can't find where that is stored to be able to add it to the wiki. --Three of Seven 10:04, 29 April 2013 (UTC)
 * These are on the specialization pages themselves, which you can find here. If there is a specialization without a page, it has to be added. You can copy/paste from one of the existing pages, or from Boilerplate:Duty officer specialization article, and then fill in the information as appropriate. &mdash; Eyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:Eyes]] 03:06, 30 April 2013 (UTC)

I added descriptions of all the alternate powers to the Tactical officer specialization pages, but they're not showing up here. Did I do something wrong in the code, or is the website serving up a cached version of the page that will update sometime in the future? &mdash;Captainstewart (talk) 18:47, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
 * The reason there are numbers for Has ship duty type, Has game description, etc. is so that you use a different number for each effect. I'll add in support for more than 4 as I see it's necessary now. The system is definitely not going to work correctly when you're reusing 1 and 2, or like on the Conn Officer page, not using the numbers at all. Also, the ability template is obviously screwing up the descriptions; try putting the effects in without any links. And yes, sometimes you get cached versions. Resaving a page without making edits can solve this. &mdash; oOeyes  [[Image:User-Eyes-Sig.png|link=User talk:OOeyes]] 20:28, 5 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the tip on forcing the page to refresh. Also, I've gone back and fixed the numbering on the variants, and with your template edits they show up so much nicer that way. &mdash;Captainstewart (talk) 06:09, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

Update: The addition of duty officer variant powers is, as far as I know, complete. Now we just need to fill out the quality grades of the powers for each of the variants. At least the master table on this page is now complete. &mdash;Captainstewart (talk) 03:41, 8 June 2013 (UTC)
 * Great work on updating all that! It looks fantastic! --Eklinaar (talk) 06:22, 8 June 2013 (UTC)


 * Ok, this helped a lot. Forcing the refresh by saving the doff specialization page without any edits helped when ship duty type wasn't showing, for pages using the newly created Property. --Damixon (talk) 12:56, 4 April 2017 (UTC)

What is the difference between special and non-special duty officers?
I've noticed that some duty officers have their own pages (Dathan), while others don't (Specialization: Advisor/Starfleet (A-M)). What is the difference between them? 110.174.166.224 02:26, 17 July 2016 (UTC)


 * The special duty officers are generally ones that are acquired in some unique way: either they're guaranteed rewards from specific missions or Duty Officer assignments, or they're ones from certain special DOff vendors (like the ones from Lieutenant Ferra at Starfleet Academy/Lieutenant S'stas at Klingon Academy) or the Lockboxes. They also tend to have special Active Roster powers.


 * By comparison, the Duty Officers listed on the Specialization pages are simply generic random-name DOffs w/o any special attributes or powers, and they're obtained from the normal DOff acquisition methods that spit out a random DOff as a reward.


 * Why don't all of the DOffs have pages? I think that there's something like 50 thousand+ DOffs out there; it's simply infeasible to have separate pages for ALL of the DOffs that exist in the game (let alone all the ones to be added in the future), and there's a much smaller set of special DOffs, so only the special ones get pages. --MrTylerMaxwell (talk) 06:09, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

I have another question: if we have lists of every random-name duty officer, why don't we have lists of every random-name bridge officer? 110.174.166.224 08:08, 17 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Well, as far as I know the generic Duty Officers as they are now are still fixed objects; while they were created using RNG when the Duty Officer system was first introduced (random names, traits, etc.), they now exist as discrete entities within the game database. So every [Kaitlyn Eloise McMillan] is the same as every other Kaitlyn Eloise McMillan: same name, same traits, same powers, etc. That's true for all of the DOffs in the game, special or generic. The fact that it is even possible to get the same generic DOff as anybody else is proof that the DOffs themselves exist as fixed, immutable objects (as far as players are concerned anyways).


 * Bridge Officers, on the other hand, I believe are truly randomly-generated and made-on-the-spot when given to the player, either from the BOff vendors or the Duty Officer assignments that give out BOffs: random name, random traits, random appearance (sometimes to horrifying results), random powers, etc. Try this next time you visit the BOff vendor on ESD/First City: hover your mouse over a BOff listing, say a Human Male Engineering Officer Candidate, and watch the name/traits/BOff powers that show up. Then move the mouse over to another listing, or change the store page to look at other BOffs. If you then go back to the same Human Male Engineering Officer Candidate listing as before, the name/traits/BOff powers will most likely have changed; that shows that they're put together on the spot.


 * So there's simply no way to have a list of generic Bridge Officers since they're made-on-the-spot, no player can ever have the same one as anyone else, unless they deliberately copy the name and outfits of another BOff themselves. That's another distinguishing feature: BOffs can be renamed/trained/customized after they're obtained, DOffs cannot. --MrTylerMaxwell (talk) 12:37, 17 July 2016 (UTC)

Martha Jones Smith and Verne Brown
Does anyone know if Cryptic had to get permission from BBC and Universal to include the characters Martha Jones Smith and Verne Brown in the game as duty officers? 110.174.166.224 06:22, 23 July 2016 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure, but even if they didn't, I don't think that it would have been necessary. For one, the Duty Officers look nothing like their counterparts from their respective screen properties (the Verne Brown DOff definitely doesn't look like a 5 year-old kid), and no other substantial elements from them are used: no distinguishing character traits, direct quotes, or anything. The only thing they share are names, and there are likely other Martha Smiths and Verne Browns in the world; so the BBC/Universal couldn't claim trademark over the names alone even if the two of them did have a problem.


 * Besides, it's obviously just a playful homage. No big scandal to write the lawyers about. --MrTylerMaxwell (talk) 09:44, 23 July 2016 (UTC)

Martha Jones Smith looks very similar to the Martha Jones Smith on Doctor Who and Verne Brown's quote is "As Father would say: 'Great Scott!'" That sounds like a distinguishing character trait to me. 110.174.166.224 10:57, 23 July 2016 (UTC)


 * Yeah... to me the Martha Jones Smith DOff looks nothing like Freema Agyeman, and the Verne Brown in BttF3 doesn't say anything at all in the 5 sec. he's on screen, so none of his lines can be ripped off, cuz they don't exist.


 * Again, the DOffs are homages, glorified digital trading cards with no other material from the sources where the names come from. I don't see a problem here. --MrTylerMaxwell (talk) 07:49, 24 July 2016 (UTC)

How many duty officers are there in the game right now?
I'm just curious. Is there a quick way to count them all? --49.192.186.61 09:00, 6 October 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is, but according to dev that created that system, there are over 36 thousand individual duty officers. --Damixon (talk) 21:45, 9 October 2020 (UTC)

I've taken a look at the Duty officer list page histories and they were all created in 2012 with the note "more data from Heretic's spreadsheet". Any chance someone could send me that spreadsheet? --49.192.186.61 06:44, 11 October 2020 (UTC)