I'm fully behind the "easy to get into a crew" mechanic... no sense in making this one aspect a challenge... I love the idea I can just sit there and play "crew roulette". I can use my imagination to figure out how people would get there (it would be cool if a shuttle delivered the new player to the instance, but whatever). This is a good call in my books.
I also think the crime/payout choice is fine... yeah people might abuse it, but hey, life is full of abuse- call it immersion. Sounds like a good compromise there.
That said, my BIGGEST hope is that they re-jig these roles a bit - it feels very much like combat is the focus. I'd love to see 4 "positions" always available, though a 2-man crew might need to role-swap on the fly.
I'd love to see these roles:
Captain - Helm, Steering, firing main weapons - basically the same gameplay as now.
Weapons - 3rd person, can fire all turreted/secondary weapons and perform scans, use modules- looks like this was nailed down well... but maybe, also can chose to "increase damage %" on a target and give the main helm a damage boost to primary weapons, so if you don't have turrets/missiles, you can still be in this role and help by buffing the helm's weapons.
Systems - Basically micro-manages power during combat with a chance to damage some systems if they fail with some kind of power-balancing mechanic (spinning plates mini game basically). Out of combat, person in this role gets a 10x scanning range, so this is the spot to scan from.
Engineer - fixes system problems by playing little mini-games and puzzles to boost different ship systems... so could play a quick 10 second round of tetris on his screen and restore 25% of the shield. Or play a small game of minesweeper to boost FSD range. Cut the right wire in the sequence and instantly get a new fighter remade.
The Engineer role might be fun as a "anyone can jump down there and solve a quick puzzle-game to get a specific boost and then jump back"... and while you could maybe scan planets from the gunner seat, you might want to switch to Systems to get that range boost. The point being that the 4 roles are always available on ALL ships, but you might have a 2-crew sidewinder and need to jump between the positions.
Would also be great to see an assignable "Navigator" designation that would allow whoever was designated to plot routes. Everyone should be able to access the galaxy map otherwise, but have no route plotting ability.
I'm a bit worried that outside of combat, the crew positions may feel very "observational" and not very active. I NEED this update to get some friends back playing the game! It's such an important update! Thank you, by the way, Frontier. I love this game.
