NPC's should be payed a flat wage.

[Tri Velo]

If they were actual multi-crew NPC (not just telepresent SLF pilots) that actually sat in an unused chair and gave an extra pip similar to player multi-crew, they would be worth their pay. Maybe not even just give extra pips but having an NPC that can take the gunnery role and would give the equivalent of grade-A sensors or just better tracking on turrets. Or NPC crew giving longer range or quicker scanning for explorers. Or NPC crew who could auto-dock for you without the need of a docking computer (ok, maybe not that one). There are so many ways NPC crew could actually be useful and *earn* that pay.

Sadly, as per my previous recent thread, NPC crew are not worth it. Active NPC die (or leave or whatever lore Frontier uses) when the mothership is destroyed and not really worth keeping to level up or pay them the crazy fees. Especially that inactive crew just eats up your profits by doing nothing. With Frontier's current implementation, the best tactic is just to hire an expert NPC, use them and fire them before cashing out on bounties, bonds, exploration, trade, etc.

 

[Kaocraft]

Jesus christ people in this thread are idiots. For all of you so ready to jump to FDs defence on this- so stations should charge 2% of income per week for each ship they're housing, right? And there should be a docking fee every time you land, right? And the Pilots Federation should bill you monthly for your flight permit, and you should regulary be charged 10% of your ship's rebuy cost by the insurance company covering you, yes?"

YOU DON'T GET INSURANCE FOR FREE IN REAL LIFE. PARKING ISN'T FREE IN REAL LIFE. If FD's gonna heap absurd "realism" punishments on players that enjoy having a long term npc companion, I demand they aggressively tax all playstyles out of existance.

Gosh when you put it that way, it almost makes it seem like we shouldn't be using real-world comparisons when arguing for or against different kinds of fees, because it's entirely Frontier's prerogative to decide how to balance costs and incentives around whichever activities they want. It almost sounds like you're suggesting we should just accept it and move on.

 

[MottiKhan]

Jesus christ people in this thread are idiots. For all of you so ready to jump to FDs defence on this- so stations should charge 2% of income per week for each ship they're housing, right? And there should be a docking fee every time you land, right? And the Pilots Federation should bill you monthly for your flight permit, and you should regulary be charged 10% of your ship's rebuy cost by the insurance company covering you, yes?"

YOU DON'T GET INSURANCE FOR FREE IN REAL LIFE. PARKING ISN'T FREE IN REAL LIFE. If FD's gonna heap absurd "realism" punishments on players that enjoy having a long term npc companion, I demand they aggressively tax all playstyles out of existance.

I'd agree to these fees if they only applied to you. So, counting yours, that's two votes so far.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I agree with the OP on this one, in my industry, which is oil and gas exploration, specialists employed by a company, they are paid a small salary as a retainer for being on stand by and a large day rate when deployed to an oil rig, and back in the good days before the oil price collapsed a few years ago we used to get a bonus for bringing oil wells in ahead of target under cost and without incident. I reckon this is the best model for these wannabe hotshots we call npc fighter pilots, pay them a flat rate salary based on their skill for being available, pay them a larger amount of credits for being onboard your ship, and pay them a percentage of combat bonds and bounties they help you earn.


You have to remember we are often flying warships worth hundreds of millions of credits that we earned, the NPC's do not contribute towards that capital expenditure yet the cheeky little blighters expect to rock off with significant percentages of the profit we earn regardless of whether they are actually contributing to the missions we earn those credits from. If they lose the fighter you print a new one, if you lose the mother ship you pick up a multi million credit rebuy if they lose it you are still out of pocket. This is still better than dieing like hey do though, but why can't I sue their estate and get my insurance excess back? Prime example, my elite NPC lit up a cop in a high res while she was at the helm of my cutter and I was flying the fighter, her actions signed our death warrants, and effectively put my signature on a 37M cheque to the Pilots Federation (Insurance Dept.), ok she died, but I'd like to reclaim the 37M rebuy from the 140M I paid her?


If we could issue "Standing Orders" to them to grab my trade ship and run this trade loop buying Consumer Technology from A_Starport and sell it to B_StarPort or patrol this RES or support that faciton in that CZ over there or even "heres a loan of this ship, go make something for yourself and I'll take a tythe of your profits" they would make sense. But but as they are currently implemented they are just significant fixed costs that often times add little value to a commander. What with telepresence multicrew effectively meaning we can summon a real life human being to jump into the fray at short notice as a sport hire they get paid a cut of the earnings from that session only, why would anyone want to pay NPC's an ever increasing, as they rise from lame to mediocre to decent, percentage of their total earnings?

 

[Pyrobee]

I agree with the OP on this one, in my industry, which is oil and gas exploration, specialists employed by a company, they are paid a small salary as a retainer for being on stand by and a large day rate when deployed to an oil rig, and back in the good days before the oil price collapsed a few years ago we used to get a bonus for bringing oil wells in ahead of target under cost and without incident. I reckon this is the best model for these wannabe hotshots we call npc fighter pilots, pay them a flat rate salary based on their skill for being available, pay them a larger amount of credits for being onboard your ship, and pay them a percentage of combat bonds and bounties they help you earn.


You have to remember we are often flying warships worth hundreds of millions of credits that we earned, the NPC's do not contribute towards that capital expenditure yet the cheeky little blighters expect to rock off with significant percentages of the profit we earn regardless of whether they are actually contributing to the missions we earn those credits from. If they lose the fighter you print a new one, if you lose the mother ship you pick up a multi million credit rebuy if they lose it you are still out of pocket. This is still better than dieing like hey do though, but why can't I sue their estate and get my insurance excess back? Prime example, my elite NPC lit up a cop in a high res while she was at the helm of my cutter and I was flying the fighter, her actions signed our death warrants, and effectively put my signature on a 37M cheque to the Pilots Federation (Insurance Dept.), ok she died, but I'd like to reclaim the 37M rebuy from the 140M I paid her?


If we could issue "Standing Orders" to them to grab my trade ship and run this trade loop buying Consumer Technology from A_Starport and sell it to B_StarPort or patrol this RES or support that faciton in that CZ over there or even "heres a loan of this ship, go make something for yourself and I'll take a tythe of your profits" they would make sense. But but as they are currently implemented they are just significant fixed costs that often times add little value to a commander. What with telepresence multicrew effectively meaning we can summon a real life human being to jump into the fray at short notice as a sport hire they get paid a cut of the earnings from that session only, why would anyone want to pay NPC's an ever increasing, as they rise from lame to mediocre to decent, percentage of their total earnings?

Lol glad you and OP don't run game design companies because you'd both be begging on the street. Neither of you have any concept of balance and just want a to be able to have I WIN mapped to your controller.

 

[Lucian667]

Lol glad you and OP don't run game design companies because you'd both be begging on the street. Neither of you have any concept of balance and just want a to be able to have I WIN mapped to your controller.

There always seems to be one in every thread, are you guys part of a troll union or something? If you disagree with somebody's position, then just disagree, dont strain your brain trying to imagine what sort of 'concepts' we're lacking in or what we really want from the game because frankly you dont have a clue and it shows.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

Away and take a long walk pal - I've over two thousand hours sunk in elite - I run a couple of small businesses IRL, and in those enterprises there is no way am I going to take on a pleb with a remuneration package in the form of my percentage of profits - they will get a salary and a performance related bonus measured against metrics defined in their contract, or incentives.

Sure, sycophant to sandro all you want, I continue to be abhorred with the gameplay design of this game. Powergrind, C-Queue-C, multicrew gunner are all whiskey tango foxtrot.

If you read my posts I don't want the game to be dumbed down and made iWin easy/easier I want it to be more challenging and more rewarding, bigger risks and bigger rewards when those risks pay off. I don't want a new button press triangle to kill enemy. I want more fire buttons so I can have a bit more control of which weapons discharge when I pull a trigger so I can manage my power distributors charge capacity better because I need that very last N-th of performance out of my ship to survive the engagement with the very challenging npc who is giving me a real run for my money.

 

[Crank Larson]

I would argue that a fixed, hourly rate of pay is the situation experienced by 99% of all employees in the entire world. Usually the only ones who get a % of company profits are partners or share holders. And even in your example, that percentage is of sales the SALESMAN makes while actually doing his job, not a percentage of what his entire company makes while the salesman is at home watching TV.

It depends how good the salesman is. I know salesmen that are on company profit share (because they drive that much profit that the company really doesn't want to lose them) - admittedly their title isn't salesman (according to them ), but that is what they do.

But it doesn't really matter, as your spaceship is not a business, and should not be compared to one. You have hired a pilot, and have specified that they are not allowed to work for anyone else (because that's how the game works, and you want them to be available to you at your whim). You have to pay them for that, and the cost is a percentage of the money you make. If you don't want to pay for one, don't hire one.

Your argument that 99% of people have a fixed hourly wage is absolute rubbish. It's a wild assumption on your part.

 

[Lucian667]

your spaceship is not a business

Yes my spaceship is indeed a business, If I'm employing one or more employees and paying them a wage then by definition its a business, there's really no other way of looking at it. The only question up for debate is exactly how the employees in my little business will be paid, you seem to be happy with how it currently works, I'm not.

It depends how good the salesman is. I know salesmen that are on company profit share (because they drive that much profit that the company really doesn't want to lose them) - admittedly their title isn't salesman (according to them ), but that is what they do.

I find it very hard to believe your claim that there are salesmen who earn a percentage of their entire company's gross profits whether they are working or not. Salesmen normally earn a commission on what THEY sell which means if they dont work, then they earn zip and I would have absolutely no problem if NPC's in ED operated that way, but sadly they dont. I think you are likely making up these hypothetical company profit sharing salesmen, either that or they are actually part owners or shareholders in their company, which is so incredibly rare that it sounds a lot like you are desperately grasping at straws for anything - no matter how atypical or unusual - to support your desire to see the broken system in ED remain unchanged. Arguing about exact percentages is pointless but by far the most common employer / employee relationship is a fixed hourly rate, the fact that you dont seem to believe that concerns me not even slightly, to most people it will be very, very obvious from personal experience in their daily lives.

If you don't want to pay for one, don't hire one.

Orrrr, I can hire an NPC pilot only for combat or bounty hunting and then fire them just before I cash in any bounties / missions. That way they're not draining my profits when they're sitting around doing nothing. I never had a problem with paying for them to actually work, just with paying them 12% of all my profits to sit around in the crew lounge and watch TV while I work. It actually ends up exactly like paying them a flat wage, $150,000 for an expert to help with a bounty hunt and that's all they get no matter how much I earn, win, win. So that's what I'm going to do until its changed to be more reasonable and less of a blatantly obvious rip off. Its good to know that there are always other options available besides not using it if you dont like it.

 

[krylite]

I've been thinking, perhaps these npc pilots are part of the long term plan after all. Frontier has been sneaky before. Before engineers, the ships were balanced with each other, but felt frustratingly limited. Then after engineers launched there was so much that could be done to fiddle with the ships even improving their fsd ranges and thruster performance. Like they had planned these limitations all long from the beginning. So looking at multicrew and the npc fighters in a similar light, yes, some elements are very much placeholder, although they've made forays into the framework to segue into spacelegs in the future "long way off" dates. The last trailer had the first tease of walking in the cockpit although it could be contrued also to represent the holo-me avatar generator where your pilot character is seen standing up at least in the bridge floor of your ship while you mold the avatar.
Then comparing to Elite III: FFE, the npc text pilots (besides their .avi clips) were hired at fixed rates far below the shareholder like percentages of what ED currently has. Besides what was mentioned that there could have been a mishap of not implementing lower percentage pay of lounging npc pilots, perhaps this is all preliminary to the npc and spacelegs gameplay in the future.
Where I could envision:
Player characters with spacelegs and the npc pilots, and a complete MMORPG/RPG gameplay setup where your character has stats, skills and experience. The npcs could escort the player character around the stations. You would have in a sense an older bioware or neverwinter nights like game setup with npcs supporting your main player.
And the skryim like radiant quests or the famous tavern "board" missions addon.
And certain skills that can help with the ship piloting of ED. NPC's at a certain rank or skill can add a pip or a half-pip., or can serve as the pilot(in an autopilot to destination feature). Or the npc or pilot himself has a skill for a "semi-FlightAssist off" where they are skilled enough they can do a maneuver coupled with an intimate knowledge of ship controls that can improve the yaw movement of the ship for a while, such as 10 seconds similar to the temporary effect features of dropping heat sinks, ecm's and activating shield boosters. Its a big dream in the most optimistic conjecture of what FDev is doing with all their dev man-hours. For now, perhaps they could just do the simple fixes to hiring npc's who are not quite shareholders or businesses parters but perhaps some could optionally be destined to be in a future spacelegs ED world. "Spacelegs will come". - pax 2017.

 

[Strangepork]

We hire mercenaries, and they're on a retainer.

edit... I don't like them earning a % on transactions or events they're not involved with, either. If they're not onboard my active ship, they shouldn't be paid.

Hire an expert per job and ditch them, if you're strapped for cash.

 

[DNA-Decay]

If I get a job assembling cars at a factory or flipping burgers at McDonalds, does the manager take me aside and tell me that I'll be earning X% of the entire company's gross profits, even on days when I'm not actually working? Or do I just earn a fixed, flat wage based on the number of hours I actually do work?

Why the hell does my fighter pilot earn 12% of everything I ever make, even when I'm cruising around in a Cobra III with no fighter? It makes zero sense. They should be earning a flat salary and only then when they're actually flying that fighter. Exactly who thought this would be a good idea and why were they not laughed out of the brain-storming session at FD that spawned it?

I don't think being a combat pilot is the same skill level or pay expectations as a McJob.

More like a fireman. Paid to be on duty.


And you have a reasonable expectation that your income will increase.
Your business costs need to scale with your business.

Not because the game is a model of our late capitalist economy.
Just for game balance.

 

[Lucian667]

I don't think being a combat pilot is the same skill level or pay expectations as a McJob.

Neither do I, but while far more highly skilled than a burger flipper, a combat pilot is still only an employee who can be hired or fired at a whim, not a shareholder or part owner of the business. They really shouldn't be entitled to a % share of whatever profits the business makes, especially when they aren't piloting. Just a steady wage like most employees get.

 

[Susanna]

You're probably right about the reasoning, but unfortunately knowing the reason doesn't make me feel any less like I'm being mugged and robbed at gunpoint by horrible game design decisions, if anything it makes it worse knowing that its likely premeditated and not some sort of dumb design error that was never caught.

I'm likely going to end up getting rid of my NPC pilot. I dont really want to, but honestly I feel like I'm being played for a massive sucker by FD with being forced to pay them literally millions for doing absolutely nothing most of the time.

Do the same as me then... Don't use them. Vote with your feet [yesnod] SLF are only of use for pvp players. Every npc in the game can be easily beaten without a SLF. The Thargoids may prove to be another matter, but I'll deal with that one once 2.4 drops.

 

[Susanna]

lol.. think urself lucky, ive 3 x Elite npc crew members each slicing 16% of what i make. thats 48% - almost half of everything ^_^ No sweat when youve made the bigtime from being a kickstarter and bought almost everything with 3+billion in cash.

I won't pay that much on principle. I've 2.7billion credits so, like you, it's not a case of not being able to afford them. Like Lucian, I just feel mugged. I don't see the point in using SLFs either, other than surface recon vehicles. If I get into pvp it may be another story but for now.... Nah.

 

[space voyager]

IMO NPC crew should get a reasonably high % of bounties and... what are the payouts when you choose a faction in res... well, THOSE payouts. Also, a multiplier of bounties on you head.

What is left? Oh, there is killing in anarchy where there is no money involved... So pehaps a flat pay per kill in general + the previously mentioned payouts.

Other than that, there is no pay and we're not firing them each time we do anything else but killing.

 

[ocflyer]

Wow, the OP sure is stingy. Only pay a flat fee in return for risking hours life? And don't pay a retainer? You wouldn't get a single pilot in real life to fly for such cheap wages.

 

[Cmnd Fulsom]

#commissionisextortion



Stay Frosty


Cmnd Fulsom

 

[Lucian667]

Do the same as me then... Don't use them. Vote with your feet [yesnod] SLF are only of use for pvp players. Every npc in the game can be easily beaten without a SLF. The Thargoids may prove to be another matter, but I'll deal with that one once 2.4 drops.

Good advice but I've decided to do what several other fed-up players in this thread have already suggested, just hire an expert npc pilot for a single bounty hunt or mission and then fire them before cashing in any bounties or missions. That way they only get a single $150,000 flat payment for the work they do (which is what I wanted anyway) whether FD like it or not and best of all they dont sit around in the crew lounge afterwards sipping pina coladas while I make literally millions of credits for them.....

Wow, the OP sure is stingy. Only pay a flat fee in return for risking hours life? And don't pay a retainer? You wouldn't get a single pilot in real life to fly for such cheap wages.

I have no problem with paying them for actually working, flat fees are not inherently bad and can range from extremely generous to - as you say - stingy. I'm happy with paying a generous flat fee (based on skill) for them risking their lives, just not a percentage of my entire profits. I wouldn't have a problem with paying them a much less generous flat, regular wage for waiting around in the crew lounge either. I just draw the line at handing over 12+ % of everything I make while they're sitting there doing absolutely nothing.

As Susanna says, its not about the money, I have plenty of money, its about NOT feeling like you're being mugged and played for a complete sucker by a broken game rule that makes no sense.

 

[Crank Larson]

If they're working for me, they're doing a dangerous job and get paid for that. If they're screwing around in a station it makes a lot of sense that they don't get paid their full wage!!

And besides that, it is just not FUN to hire NPC pilots that are more like a -12(?)% debuff, even when you're not using them. FD please reconsider!

Now I think of it... It might be a bug. Let's file some bug reports

A lower percentage retainer for inactive crew members seems reasonable. But zero is not, unless you're in Imperial space and your crew member is actually a slave.