This is my thought after reflecting on my experience in STO since Open Beta in Late January. When people bitch about "canon violations" or "killing immersion" by having things like Nx 01 in the game, at first i agreed. Now i do not and here is why. STO is FIRST an MMO, a game. Second, in every MMo there is the "Lore" or as we may call it, the "canon" of the IP itself. STO has a "canon within the game universe itself" and a "soft canon " as well within its own self contained "micro cosm".
Someone once made a useless argument that if we accept STO as canon to Trek, then we acccept stupid names like "captain Jerk" Or Uss Asshat" etc. Marvel online, when it was going to happen before they sold the engine to cryptic to make it champions, had a plan to hold contests where winners characters could become canon and gues star in actual marvel comics. They would NOT have allowed stupid names like "captain buttface" etc, they would have only canonised appropriate named accepted toons. So Marvel online "player experience" would be "soft canon" like fan fiction, as far as the "actual" effect on the games enviroment and "officially recognised " story lore. See where i am going with this? This is what is happening in STO. Player experience is "soft canon" its meant for US to take out of it what we put into it. It is not by defaault meant to be that our toons are "automatically" canon to the lore of sto itself, we do not automaticallye arn that lore recognition by default just because we pay for it. "uss asshat" does NOT exist to my eyes when i see it fly alongside Uss Daystar, another thing to, we cannot ALL have had the same Denoblean captain in the tutorial (name is same for everyone) so also by default, we CANNOT hold our experiences in the game as canon in of itself. When Nx 01 comes in, we as players could make excuses such as ships of that era come through a temporal rift created by over use of chroniton torpedoes/mines in the war,(a reasonable explanation IMO) or that these are pulled from mothballs de commisioned ships upgraded w shields and modern weapons (an old argument thread of if even possible) the point being in this Rant, "its a game...relax"
