This is a bit of history for me; perhaps someone who has actually seen it can chime in.

There were a number of Star Trek themed computer war games with basically the same concept: fly the Enterprise around blowing up Klingons and other enemies of the Federation. If I understand correctly, xtrek was somewhat different — a multiplayer space combat game set in Star Trek with factions from that setting and using X11 for display, thus the "x" in the name. I believe that Xpilot is a similar game that should be less obscure.

Administrators, of course, sometimes considered such things wastes of "valuable computing resources" and did what would be expected, leading to a cat-and-mouse metagame of playing the game without getting caught by the system operators. :-)

You understand correctly. I played xtrek a few times in the early 90s, but never really got into it. (I was much more enthralled with the even more obscure Galactic Bloodshed - in modern terms, a multiplayer 4X space game with simultaneous turns passing in real time. (e.g., every six hours, the previous turn is processed and a new turn starts))

In my case, both the xtrek and gb servers were being run by sysadmin friends at the local university, so at least we didn't have to deal with the metagame you mentioned.

in my quest for historical xtrek knowledge, I must have played the wrong one cause the x definitely did not stand for X11. I can never look at sweet mind reading matriarchal Counselor Troi the same way again.

[with laughter] Yes, very wrong — 1995 is much later than the xtrek I spoke of...