Star Trek Online is under new management

Does this affect the original intended free-to-play gameplay mode?

LOL Where did you hear that horrid rumor?

Any plans for the game have essentially at this point been scrapped its starting over.

Ain't rumor but fact. Google for it.

my first reaction was "awww crap".

Then I realized that every single aspect of the game they'd been talking about so far seemed like a heaping pile of crap in the first place...

So maybe this is good! Maybe they'll re-think the idea to have a bland "terrans vs klingons OH WAIT YOU CAN ONLY BE TERRANS" game and go ahead and open up some brand new universal war scenario, where you can be Federation, Klingon, Romulan, Cardassian or maaaaaybe even Borg.

I hope there's actual PVP in the game and I hope to hell that the "missions" don't end up being amazingly boring semi-tactical ship to ship combat. In the entire history of the Trek Series, I don't think there were more than a dozen real ship to ship fights and very few of them were anything to write home about. (the only exciting ones I can remember were the Enterprise-D vs Borg battles, and even then it was more of a mind problem over tactical maneuvers). We've got two (3?) pretty awful ship vs ship combat simulators, and none of them are very much fun at all.

However, i'd really loooooove to see an epic ground war of Federation vs Romulans. Maybe they're fighting over some massive cache of Dilithium, i dunno. Maybe there's some prehistoric artifact of amazing power, hopefully they'll hire a top notch story guy to flesh it all out and make it interesting and able to work with the existing Trek lore.

All I know, is that if the game is "you can only be part of the Federation, and that's it" the game is going to be a total failure. Good for them if they have to start from scratch, that at least means they can get it right this time. Don't pull a Star Wars. Please?