While STO space combat is a fun diversion from reality almost every thing else will bring you hurdling painfully back.
Instanced = Bad.
As i am sure most of you are aware the game is instanced up with most massed instanced supporting something like 25 players and most other instances supporting 5 players. While at first i liked this aspect compared to other MMO's due to the fact that you would not get stuck trying to do a quest only to find out that the baddies you are looking for where just killed by another group and you where stuck ether waiting or moving on. while that was the bonus the failure was that it was a MMO and the instances cut the game up to the point that if just feels like a single player game with multi-player elements you feel cut off most of the time from the community.
Lack of Voice Chat.
The year is 2409 and there is no in game group voice chat which makes it imposable to relay strategies in real time. I am sorry but if counter-strike could do it so should you cryptic there is no excuse for this. I don't care is there is a limitation on the engine of the game it is at this point in time a major flaw. I am not talking mass voice chat between hundreds of people just voice chat in groups that's all that is needed at this point and time.
Skills and modifiers.
While i like the constant progression of the game, unless you are a star trek fan the vast majority of the skill tree dose not make much sense and almost feels useless. While it has been broken down more since beta it still needs to be streamlined and show what it actually dose for you in numerical form. The modifiers in armor and and other ground and space gear are not so clear cut its guess work some of the time just equipping what you think might be better but not seeing any results and at that you don't even see your base modifiers. Give us some base modifiers along with some + or - on them and possibility cut some of the modifiers out. "i am a doctor Jim not a Astor physicist"
Attachment to NPC's.
I am not going to lie i can care what happens to a digital representation of some one. You feel disconnected to your bridge crew while i am not asking for a BioWare game (or maybe i am) i would like to be able to forge an attachment or my in game "pets" this could be done by creating side missions for these characters that delve into there backgrounds.
Fleets where are they?
By fleets i don't mean in game player fleets that you join you end up an admiral at the end of the game and from my understanding when you are an admiral you are in command of multiple ships. You get to promote your bridge officers and "own" multiple ships so why not get to have a fleet of ships. I am not asking for 10 but 4 including your command ship would be a nice number this would give the game an epic feel later on but out of every thing i would want this is on the bottom of the list.
Expansion of Klingon's and other races!
While this content is coming i hope it dose not stop till there is a full Klingon story line and tutorial and i would like to see aces to Gorn and Nosican ships for the Klingon fleet. There also needs to be Romulan and Cardassian playable content put in with the relatively short time span to end game it is going to be a push for cryptic to stay ahead of players so they don't lose players in droves after they reach endgame.
Crafting or lack of it.
Crafting in the game is extremely simple and shallow to the point that it might as well not even be there you go out find anomalous Data scan it and get some resources to upgrade your equipment. The only problem is you get upgraded equipment so often that it is a wast of time since its really not all that fun. What needs to be done is dig a pit and dump that old crafting system in and walk away with a smile then go and get some lunch then after lunch build a whole new crafting system. Now i am no expert on the crafting system me being just a simple contractor who builds stuff on a daily basis and all, but it seems to me that to build something you need parts. Possibility from there break it down into subclasses of parts wow i might be onto something now put these common parts into different combination's along with special parts to build different items with different modifiers. Now make it so you can break down items and rebuild them and make the vast majority of parts common to many items so that you don't have have too many different types of parts lying around. You just may have a decent crafting system now break the crafting system into classes which you can have one space and one ground and you have diversity between players. Now like i stated i am no expert but that sounds better then the silly crafting system they have now.
Ground Combat the oh no of this game
This for me is the true killer because its not something that can be over looked due to the fact that you cant do to much without running into it. If space combat is the savior to the game ground combat is the killer of the game. Every time you have to go into ground combat you have the urge to just turn the game off ground combat needs a complete over haul already starting with the AI. AI is a hard thing to master in games even in games that had great ground combat like Mass Effect some times your team mates can seem a little touched in some games where they will do some things that just don't make a lot of seance. Well if in some games they seem a little touched in STO they seem like they have full on Mad Cow where they will role around randomly and be just generally silly. That being said they are at least effective against your NPC opposition you could just sit back and watch them kill your enemy's. Now moving on from the AI ground combat just generally seems cumbersome and sluggish with no regard for the environment this being said the game should have a cover mechanic I know in the future you have all sorts of gadgets like shields and reactive body armor but i have a funny feeling that you still would not want to get shot. So put in a cover mechanic also you have a limited number of special ability depending on the kit and weapon you have this is not a bad thing, until you mix it with a targeted cool down RPC style of play some other people my call it something else. But that's what i call it when you click on an enemy and press buttons each button having a cool down till that enemy is dead. This isn't a bad thing when you have a bunch of cool ability's like in WoW but when you have a limited number of them the combat needs to change direction into a 3erd Person Shooter. Now some of you are saying what you just described sounds an awful lot like mass effect well that's because that is exactly what i just described and some times that's what needs to be done is emulation, and in this case that is exactly what is needed to make ground combat more enjoyable and tern it from the games killer to one of the games strong points.
So STO isn't what we all wanted and hoped it would be. There a lot of things that need fixing and tweaking and outright changing but if its one thing that i haven't lost yet is hope. I hope for the future of STO that change will come and it will become the game it should be, the game we all want it to be. We have hopefully years to make it the game that it should be and tern it from the game of "wishes" to a game that we can all enjoy and not say oh no not ground combat again. I will close this out with Live long and prosper STO for that you will have to evolve.