Star Trek Online's "Special Task Force" lead designer offers new details about "The Cure" and "Infected"

Last week in our feature story, STO: Cryptic Preps "Season One," Improved Support, ZAM rounded up the latest details about Star Trek Online's new "Season One" patch and other post-launch content, including "Special Task Force" (STF) missions. If you're not familiar with STO's gameplay, these STF missions can be thought of as "raids," or massive encounters that require group play and teamwork to accomplish. Cryptic Studios introduced its first STF, "Infected," earlier this month. The newest STF, "The Cure," launched last week on March 18.

Yesterday the folks at MMOCrunch hosted a special developer chat with "Gozer," Cryptic's lead designer of the Special Task Force missions. During the interview, Gozer revealed some behind-the-scenes details about the development of "Infected" and "The Cure," including a few exclusive nuggets of wisdom about the STF gameplay. Check out the details after the jump.

Highlights of the STF developer chat, recently published at MMOCrunch.com:

Regarding the Infected Mission:

1) The tactical cube in Infected drops a purple item if played correctly. Nobody has yet achieved this.
2) On the test server the gate health is now 800k instead of 200k and has a 20 second window in which the shields are down. One wave comes out and then the gate shuts down. The gate does not open again until every npc is dead. There are also no longer spawns above and below the gate.
3) When fighting the end boss (Rebecca Simmons), a player in the group will be targeted with a blue circle. That player will do damage to other players in the group within a particular range regardless of what that player does. The goal is for that player to get away from the other team members.
4) Borg will no longer double-spawn in the end room of Infected. They still respawn, but the respawn timer no longer starts until the borg die (rather than when they spawn).

General Information:

1) Marks of Valor are planned to be tradeable for other badges/tokens in the game.
2) Dropping a STF mission will no longer allow you to retake it, unless the timer has reset already for that mission.
3) The first part of The Cure does not give marks.
4) Comparing Rebecca Simmons to the Borg Queen, Gozer stated “On a scale of 1-10, you guys are at a 2 right now”.
5) Khitomer Accord will explain why the borg were so weak in the tutorial (also created by Cryptic_Gozer) and hidden in the Khitomer Accord mission (not an objective) will be a way to obtain a borg bridge officer (with robotic uniform and not an engineer).