Multicrew Issues bugs and suggestions...

[Caseck]

Handing weapons to other crewmembers (gunner) is still buggy. Every time you land or make a jump you have to toggle the weapons control for your gunner from LIMITED to FULL in order to give him weapons you have removed from your firing group. It's a workaround, but it'd be nice if it was smoother.

FSS is very twitchy in the same way. Really needs someone to run a few missions and see.

Still a lot of rubberbanding on other ships when you fly around stations multicrew.

Suggestions:

Ships:

TYPE-7 Q-Boat: Based on the Type-7 in the same spirit as the KEELBACK and TYPE-10, a Type-7 Q-Boat with a 2 fighter hangar and gunner capabilities. I would sell it as the smallest ship that supports 3 crewmembers.

Mechanics:

Shares: "We need to talk about the BONUS situation..."
Under crew management, the Captain should be able to assign shares to his crew as far as dividing profits. Crewmen can accept or reject. The low end should be what it is right now, but Captains should be able to divide more evenly if they wish.

 

[gorankar]

I believe the reason shares are what they are now is to reduce "gold" selling.

If all one had to do was join another's crew while they were mining, and they split the revenue as they liked, (or were paid IRL money to), a new player could have a billion credits and become Trade Elite in a day without ever setting foot in their own ship. It would be easier to sell that than giving a paid grinder money and your log on credentials.

I do think rewards should be tweaked upwards a bit though. I also think I should be able to dock the pay of multi crew cmdr's that manage to lose 6 fighters in 20 minutes.

 

[Azmuth Divarchchron]

While we are at it lets get rid of magic pips

 

[Drelthar]

I believe the reason shares are what they are now is to reduce "gold" selling.

If all one had to do was join another's crew while they were mining, and they split the revenue as they liked, (or were paid IRL money to), a new player could have a billion credits and become Trade Elite in a day without ever setting foot in their own ship. It would be easier to sell that than giving a paid grinder money and your log on credentials.

I do think rewards should be tweaked upwards a bit though. I also think I should be able to dock the pay of multi crew cmdr's that manage to lose 6 fighters in 20 minutes.

You can still jump into multicrew ships that are shooting thargoids and get quite a bit of cash for "nothing"

So it's kinda moot.

 

[gorankar]

While we are at it lets get rid of magic pips

If they do that, I will not be able to multi crew with myself from my other account. j/k
I would prefer a +10 to 15% reputation and/or credit based reward boost for the ship owner over the extra pip myself. Others will likely disagree. There does need to be some benefit to multi crew for the ship owner though. Already very little reason to use it for many.

 

[Morbad]

Aside from networking, instancing, and performance improvements, some bugs and what I view as flaws surrounding functionality should be addressed...

- The gunner needs their own set of weapon groups that are not persistent for the helm. I believe this is a bug that was solved at one point, but reintroduced recently. Currently, a gunner can mangle the fire groups of any turret equipped ship, and instead of restoring the changes when that crew member leaves, the helm has to reconfigure their firegroups.

- Missiles fired by the gunner currently do not automatically track their targets; they are more like laser guided munitions where they follow the current target. This is a major limiting factor that makes the gunner role less useful than it should be. Missiles should be able to be loosed and track by themselves, as they normally do, so the gunner can more easily engage multiple targets.

- Helm should always retain full control over the deployment and retraction of hardpoints.

- Prefered crew members, either by specific designation, or a higher permission level, should be able to control the mothership's modules and perhaps even utilize synthesis (as long as synthesis exists), drawing from the ship owner's material pool.

- Multicrew should not interfere with anything the helm could normally do. Leaving multi-crew to outfit, or even swap ships, should not be required. SRV use should also be possible without breaking multi-crew.

- The roles should be more flexible, namely with regard to the roles the helm can assume. Others should be able to pilot the vessel, or the helm should be able to take command of a fighter or assume the gunner position. Any seat should be able to take any role and there shouldn't be a limit of one CMDR per role. Even the helm should be able to be set to follow, or given to an NPC, while three CMDRs all man turrets, or two fly fighters, while a third drives an SRV. Or all three could deploy SRVs from the same ship. Flighter limit should probably remain at two, at least without further balancing.

- The gunner should be able to target subsystems the same way as the helm...with a reduction in the level of aim assist applied.

- Some sort of first-person gunner camera, much like the SRV's, should be implemented, with the option to switch views to any turret and slave other turrets to that hardpoint, or revert them to their standard, auto-tracking, behavior.

- Multi-crew and wings should not be mutually exclusive. The limit should probably remain at four CMDRs, but any combination of four should be able to wing up.

Not sure how many of those are practical to implement, but the goal should ultimately be to make multicrew feel like a ship with multiple actual crew members who can replace each other at a moment's notice, rather than the extremely limited mechanisms we have now.

There does need to be some benefit to multi crew for the ship owner though. Already very little reason to use it for many.

Having it work correctly would be incentive enough for many, but I think there are rational uses for extra human crew that could make a multi-crewed ship more viable and more manageable, without requiring any highly abstract or inflationary additional incentives, like pips.

 

[Drelthar]

I would prefer it if the Helm could select directly which items can be used by the gunner - simply by using the fire groups system - click once, sets it to group 1, click again, group 2, click again, and it get's assigned to gunner(s) allowing them to put this into their fire groups.

This would mean you could allow a gunner to have control over hatch breakers, say, but not decontamination limpets - or have control over turreted lasers, but not missiles.

 

[Caseck]

Played somewhere around 4-5 hours of full 3 member Multi-crew in my LAKON-9 yesterday. (PC OPEN play.) Out of the times we got interdicted, 2 of 3 times I lost both of my crew-members when I dropped from frameshift into the "Combat Instance." Extrapolating on that, it's NOT working more often than it is... And that's not good.

This is just something that needs to be rock-solid. The level of frustration when crew-members get dropped and can't participate and they know you're getting shot to pieces is extremely high. Most multi-crew players would be happy to contribute their network info, (I forget how to access the logger I used to run for Frontier to watch what was going wrong.)

In the realm of bug-fixes, this is just something that has to be right! Along with the fire-group and FSS problems this is game breaking.

Especially the LAKON-9 you're just a giant target without your crew members.

 

[Caseck]

I would prefer it if the Helm could select directly which items can be used by the gunner - simply by using the fire groups system - click once, sets it to group 1, click again, group 2, click again, and it get's assigned to gunner(s) allowing them to put this into their fire groups.

This would mean you could allow a gunner to have control over hatch breakers, say, but not decontamination limpets - or have control over turreted lasers, but not missiles.

Agree, but it has to remain persistent between landings and jumps. Right now it seems to reset regularly in flight, between system jumps and landing at stations. Seems like it isn't staying set between "Instances." With the changes to FSS it seems like Multi-crew got Set Back to the "Bad old days."