Seeing as we now have a Mega-thread I wanted to sum up everything I feel about so far about Multi-Crew, what I think it should be, what it seems to be and what it might do in an ideal situations. It’s a huge read as this is essentially ideas I’ve had and would have put into separate threads.
Clarification: I like Multi-crew and will use it I am sure, but from what we’ve seen so far…
1) Instant Ship access.
I personally think this is fine. Yes, it breaks “Immersion” of the game, but realistically any kind of wit mechanics for gameplay is a terrible idea. Now I do not want to confuse things here, but I am fine and like the slow transit times for Ships and Modules, to me those things are a convenience that the game replicates and it all feeds into the presence of the universe in that it takes time for those items to be shipped to you.
Having said that, I in no way feel that my CMDR needs to spend time twiddling their thumbs until a timer is up, just to catch up with a friend back in the bubble who is just starting out and I am off in the Black thousands of LY away and otherwise without the opportunity to just spend some time with them. I do not see how any sort of time-sink between play and not-play is worth it to a game company and I am fine with instant teleportation despite all its possible abuse of fictional physics and game lore.
In fact, I think that Frontier needs to be clear on this mechanic, that it should only be accessed via a lobby through the Main menu and not something you switch to on the fly while in the game. Nor should they EVER use the word Telepresence to describe what’s happening with Multi-crew. No explanation is better in this case I think, I would rather just assume that this function is a game function and not otherwise try to describe how it all happens until we get some form of walking around where I can transfer from my ship manually and into a friends vessel.
At the same time I think that for everyone who says that’s all they will ever want to see, given the option I would want to walk between 2 ships on occasion to enjoy the sites, but realistically 99% of the time I will be in a rush and click the “take me straight there button” just because I can’t be bothered. (To be clear I play this game for Hours every day and I do have the time to walk from A to B, but I’d rather be doing something else)
I believe that is what Frontier are looking at here, they need to cater to people wanting to PLAY THE GAME right now and have gone for the simple transition and maybe someday down the line we can walk the long way around. I assume this also applies to someday being able to walk down to my SRV to launch it from it’s bay or to rush to my SLF and deploy… these are nice pieces of “fluff” to experience once or twice, but I can’t say I want to be running to my fighter bay, 6 decks down and to the aft of my Anaconda every time I was to launch manually in my SLF every time im interdicted.
2) Gunner Multi-Crew Combat
Here I am a bit disappointed, honestly the mechanics right now do seem that they will work. Become a gunner and use “Some” of a ships guns, Great! Except on a Cobra with fixed weapons all the gunner does is use a KWS dump the occasional Heat-Sink and assign a Pip… Huzzah… all the other time they are useless unless the Cobra gimps itself by taking turrets.
Now having said that, if the Gunner can shoot those turrets like you can in an SRV and some sort of Buff is applied to Turrets being used in “direct mode” is applied so that they become as effective as CQC-style gambled weaponry then that would be cool… the small and mediums on my Anaconda suddenly when operated by a person become much more effective, the trade-off as I see it would be traverse time and the fact that turrets go from a 100% lock-on chance to point-and-shoot-and-miss-because-I-suck weapons which means that the usual downside to turrets will need to be offset
Personally I also hope that we get Large and Huge Turrets so that on a MC vessel we can give out Gunners more to shoot with… heck I even want to be able to fill a Corvette with Turrets and have a pair of gunners 1 fighting the Starboard Weapons and the other Fighting the Port weapons… but only if Im not seeing a reduction in the effectiveness of what I have by swapping out My Class 4’s for some tiny Class 2’s
3) Multi-Crew and Multiple SLF
Ok, so as I mentioned elsewhere I actually though that this might be a fun thing, Bigger vessels start hauling Dual Fighter bays, the extra Crewman can deploy the main fighter as an NPC and then just in one themselves…
…except the main post says that the NPC fighter remains in the Helmsman’s purview… , seriously? What else will the Flight Conn crewman do? All they can is launch in a fighter? Guess that assumes you carried the right sized bay with access to a second fighter. Can they even jump into a Fighter if the ship only carries a single hanger? If they can, then why is the launching of said fighter apparently limited to Helm only?
Surely with this station all Fighter Control should be the focus of this station. Personally I want Flight Conn to let us launch 2 NPC fighters, then let the Flight-Conn use the same sort of targeting that a Gunner will hopefully have to direct those two NPC ships, let them also be capable of designating Sub-targets to those fighters so they can take out Weapons or Shields. This level of added functionality should keep a Fighter Crewman busy, otherwise I can foresee things going like this…
… Hey, Helmsman are we there yet? No. Ok wait. Now? Yay! Launching… and Im dead, Switching to Fighter 2… nope its dead… now what do I do while the fighter bay is rebuilding things? Nothing? Ok guess I will play with my PIP.
Obviously that could still happen even if you could have Flight-Conn be some kind over Oversight on Fighter Combat Operations, but at the very least they should be able to use any downtime to look at nearby potential targets and sub-targets to prepare ahead of time for how they will deploy the fighters when they are ready.
Oh and really if all I can do as a Flight-Conn in MC is control a single fighter, outside of being able to instantly jump in a MC vessel regardless of distance away from me, I am better off going and getting my own Carrier Ship and just doing a regular Wing as that gives me a Fighter plus my Ship one of which is piloted by an NPC and bringing extra Pew-Pew to the battle…
4) Multi-crew SRV
This one is simple, I can see some potential issues with ownership of a vessels SRV’s being a reason for why this wasn’t mentioned but really, this needs to be a thing… I want to be able to go exploring with 2 other friends, park my ship and have all 3 of us zip out across a world to explore.
5) Non-combat Multi-crew
Ok so this is my biggest issue with what we know so far. What do Multi-crew do when you are not in combat? At best they play with a Pip, Huzzah.. it’s a thing that is generally ONLY useful in a fight. Maybe a Gunner with their super-targeting array can scan a few vessels for bounties or something when you are approaching a Dock and harvest you some Wake Scans or something… but beyond this? Can they Plot a Jump-Route ahead of time? Can they help to somehow promote repairs or shield regeneration? Can they initiate a scan on a planet that I just flew past rather than needing to loop-of-shame?
This is a Huge turn-off for me, so much of the last 2 updates 2.1 and 2.2 was based around bettering Combat and while that was in the past a huge part of my game… I got bored of it, now im an Explorer and a Mission taker and a trader… we need more things that are not the easy fix you get from Combat, things that entice people to stick around as Multi-crew for more than the duration of a RES Hunt and instead will encourage people to focus on the other possibilities of this game.
6) A Feeling of Ownership
To me, I perceive that part of what might be going on behind the scene for Multi-crew is the idea that people could end up being Griefed and that “ownership” of a vessel is somehow difficult to separate out. I can see situations where Crewman Bob shoots a station or runs Owner Sam’s ship into a sun and FDev not wanting to have to sort out whose fault it was or who is truly responsible (or their Support stuff wanting to try to work out if the complaint they received is justified) but I think that if this is the thought process behind why a Helmsman is always the Owner then it need another look.
Yes. Griefing Will Happen. It doesn’t matter how you swing it, people will abused things. But from what I expect a great many people don’t want to use Multi-crew for random crew. They want it to team up with friends, people they hope they can trust to feel like they and their friends can be the “bridge crew of the enterprise” or <insert other space ship crew scifi show here>.
I plan to only Multi-crew with friend I know and specifically invite who I hope will do the same with me and we can all be special and trust each other enough to know that you don’t fly stupid in an A-rated Anaconda.
Trust in people a little more and let them work as small teams, people seem to want to be able to experience a sense of cooperation which requires a degree of trust but also freedom and if you are worried about people doing dodgy things, just give the Ship’s owner a “kill-switch” a hotkey they can press that instantly reverts control to them and disables all the other seats… and as for that pesky self-destruct option a pop-up for confirmation for the owner should be the way to go… though really I think the entire right-hand panel and all its options such as Landing gear and silent running might be best off left in the hands of the Owner.
7) Bounties and Crimes
Ok, this seems to be a point of some contention, but for me I feel that sharing bounties across players should be fine. Maybe I wouldn’t triple the bounty for a Crew of 3, maybe I would just give a third to each. Whatever you do decide though needs to be replicated into the normal Wing Mechanic. Winging up in any form should split the mission rewards be it from Bounties, Trade goods or Exploration Data sales. I’d personally say each person in a wing gets 50% of the total… less than full but more than you could have earned in anything over a group of 2.
Crimes are a different matter, this should be purely based on a “Who Done It” Situation. Accidentally shoot an Authority Ship? 400 Cr Bounty to the Gunner. For immersion it makes sense for a Ship to have a Bounty Placed on it, as it would be difficult to identify who actually committed a Crime, but for gameplay I think that this level of hand-wavy-magic-identification is necessary to cut down on potential abuse. Have that Bounty remain inactive or something unless said Criminal was flying the ship or until they had left the vessel and switched to their own or perhaps make it a threshold of Bounty that they have to have racked up in another’s ship before that to becomes a target.
As for giving up on taking a fine in exchange for the loss of a day’s split of the profits? I’d rather take the case earned and then pay off the bounty… its most likely the more profitable route.
8) Keeping Thing Simple
It seems to me that much of Multi-crew right now is aimed at keeping as much control in the hands of the Single helmsman as they currently have. But at the same time they have tried to add some things to more than one player being on a ship that can do without compromising that intial goal.
That is a noble idea and I applaud the concept that you should not take anything away from a player just because they want to team up. After all if you did then most multi-crew sessions would be a loss of efficiency and thus a debuff.
What I wanted/hoped to see with Multi-Crew though was rather than dividing the resources of the CMDR to instead present a series of systems that would enhance or add complexity to what they could do. I wanted to see an Engineer being able to prioritise repair efforts, how cool would it have been for the Engineering station to make use of an AFM that didn’t disable a module while it was being repaired. Or a SysOp who could buff Shield Arcs say they realise that the enemy vessel is attacking them with Particle Weapons they could somehow tune the shields to be more thermal resistant in exchange for a loss of Kinetic protection. Or a gunner who could designate weapons in fire groups to attack a primary, secondary and tertiary enemies at a single time with turrets.
None of these take anything from a CMDR as right now, they don’t have those options. Sure we can mod out shields for better Resists, but we can’t do it on the fly, dynamically. All it should have taken was a slider/pip system of some description with one end reading thermal and the other reading kinetic, if that had also then been based on Shield Arc, Fore/Aft/Port/Starboard based on ships size then they will be busy constantly trying to shift those pips back and forth as the enemy attacks from different angles and with different weapons.
There have to be plenty of things you can ADD on top of what we can do right now without needing to reduce what every CMDR can do, but things that would provide a benefit to a multi-crew ship but also entertainment to said crew. You can even let the Helmsman access these sorts of advanced systems, though the trade-off there would be while they are looking at one of these sub-systems their Ship is otherwise not performing optimally. Would these things be difficult to develop? Probably, but just because something is isn’t easy doesn’t mean you shouldn’t strive to see it happen.
CONCLUSION
So much of what Multi-crew feels like right now is that it is catering to the Combat side of gameplay and I really hope that I am reading too much into what little we do know. But the one thing that seems clear to me right now is that this system is not designed in any form to make a small group of players feel like they are going to be invested in staying together as a Multi-Crewman group for any real length of time.
Without options for Multi-crew outside of combat, the ability to equally share roles in a ship and the division of proper responsibility that that will entail people will drop-in/out of being a crewman on a whim. If we could pool Cred resources, share rebuy costs and fine, help pay off bounties by everyone putting in a bit of money and perhaps being able to buy shares in a vessel so that you can afford bigger ships with better equipment it might all contribute to that sense of being a real Crew.
Right now though it’s just seems like a single CMDR saying to some mates “Hey, want to come over a game with me for bit?” (the key part of that is GAME) rather than approaching this like it will be something you would want to have the same group of people participate in regularly nor is this system seeming like a way for new and infrequent players being able to band together to access some of the more Credit Expensive content that Elite has.
TL : DR
1) Teleporting is fine, Gameplay needs to trump boredom in this case
2) Gunnery could be great but like so much of this it feels like catering to Multi-crew will be a debuff in small ships.
3) Flight Conn needs something to do when they’re not in a fight or you run out of SLF’s, something that adds more than just going and bringing my own ship with an SLF to the fight.
4) Multi-crew/Multiple Deployment of SRV’s needs to be a thing
5) Multi-crew needs to be a function for more than just combat, we want other things that they can do as we fly around the Cosmos.
6) If FDev are thinking they can somehow limit Griefing by limiting what Multi-crew can access their fighting a losing battle
7) Sharing Bounties and Crimes needs a rethink and whatever they decide they should implement these sorts of things to the usual Wing Mechanics not just for combat but for Trade and Exploration and other activities a group can perform.
8) Multi-crew should be looking to add complexity to a vessel, not trying to see what it can take away from what we currently have and underuse.
Conclusion: This mechanic feels like its adding Play to a Game but not Content.
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