A Rear Admiral, Lower Half, By Any Other Name...

Before I get into my little rant, I'd like to point out that the latest Engineering Report is up on the STO website:

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=207260

I love the game, but there's one little annoyance that I can not shake.  And that is how the game uses the character's name and rank in mission text.

The most visible and controversial evidence of this are players who have reached the exalted rank of Rear Admiral.  The game assigns the proper formal ranks of "Rear Admiral, Lower Half" and "Rear Admiral, Upper Half".  Unfortunately, there is no code that correctly interprets the informal verbal address of "Admiral".  So instead of being "Admiral G'eek", I was for a time known in mission text as "Rear Admiral, Lower Half G'eek".

It would have been far worse if my character's full formal name had been in play; "Rear Admiral, Lower Half G'eek, Son of N'erd" is quite a mouthful in conversation.  And very, very disruptive for immersion.

I understand the need in game for distinctive ranks, and that it is probably hard-coded all over the place.  I'm not expecting that to change.  The simple fix for the Rear Admiral annoyance is a simple substitution filter that applies only to mission text.  The substitution itself is but a minor exercise.  The game logic that would implement it might be far less simple, but I imagine it would be something achievable.  At least in newer missions, if it couldn't be easily backported to old missions.  But the problem goes beyond that, I'm afraid.

The game assumes a Western naming convention, for another thing.  First name, Last name.  There is little room for any creative parsing of a non-Western name.

The point I am getting at is that the game should have the right "tags".  There should be a user-configurable tag for [PreferredName] that gets used pretty much everywhere and guarantees that the player will be addressed in the way that they expect.  There should also be a user-configurable [FormalName] tag that insures that the player is addressed properly in a formal situation.  Both tags should have reasonable defaults so that players only need to mess with them if their names are getting misparsed.  [FormalRank] and [Informal Rank] would be determined by the game, allowing them to be precisely applied in mission text.  Beyond that, there should be tags for [Faction], [Species] and [Gender] and various gender pronouns and game logic that allows them to be used in missions for mission text and for mission triggers.

Imagine the flexibility!  The level of immersion that would be possible in both Cryptic-authored missions and in player-created Foundry missions!

Imagine a mission in a diplomatic setting, where the player is not only addressed by his Formal Rank and Formal Name in the appropriate situation but where one of the alien delegates might react angrily because of the player's Faction or Species!

Or to take a classic Trek example, it could be "Captain James T. Kirk" or "Captain Kirk" or just "Jim".

I know it's not happening in the near future.  Cryptic has quite enough on their plate at the moment.  But 'Never' is a poor solution to what appears to me to be an unfortunate and annoying limitation in the game.