Pilot’s Federation Ship Certification

[Anjin]

To encourage players to try out all the available ships in the game, the Pilot’s Federation could issue certifications per ship, and ratings per ship class if you have certifications for several ships in that class (classed by landing pad size).

Just as with a plane, you need to have a certain amount of flight hours logged in a particular ship to qualify for a certification. Of course, you don’t need a certification to fly the ship, but perhaps you could get a slightly better insurance rate...

 

[krm398]

hahaha, trying to get to fly every ship in the game without spending all that cash for one huh? I can relate.

 

[Anjin]

Never said anything about getting the ships for free (though I wish we could test fly before we buy).
It's more about being completionist-bait, incentivising owning and flying all the ships. If there was a little bar going up in the Codex showing me how many hours in each ship I've flown, with a (small) re-buy bonus if I hit a certain level, I'd want to fill them all in

 

[dm06]

I have 72 ships according to my shipyard.
I did not use yet type-7 (because amma not a trader), and none of saud kruger's ships (did not decide yet to role play Han Solo with transporting passengers).
And all those are without any encouraging efforts from the game.
If one like flying than it's worth trying, because different ships have different flying experience.

 

[Anjin]

I own a lot of the ships too, but I started playing way back from launch when there was more of a progression up the smaller ships before you can afford the bigger ones.
The game balance has changed a lot since then, new players can (and seem to) leap right over most of the smaller ships for the mid-size ones.
I guess I'm looking for a reason to make people want to check out the ships they might have missed.

 

[dm06]

more of a progression up the smaller ships before you can afford the bigger ones.

Me either, but my path was not the same. I've made wrong assumption and have focused to get big ship because I was thinking it is end game.
And thus I have not tried all small ships.
Only later I realized that flying I like more than crawling so I have turned my eyes to small ships back.

 

[Achtung-Goomba]

I guess I'm looking for a reason to make people want to check out the ships they might have missed.

Only later I realized that flying I like more than crawling so I have turned my eyes to small ships back.

@dm06 that sounds similar to my own experience, having ‘gone back down’ the progression ladder from an Anaconda to an... Adder

Engineering, love it or loathe it, enjoy or hate the grind, is what opened the doors of perception for me, because you can squeeze so much more out of the fun little ships with modding and tweaking. In fact, now that credits are pretty meaningless so everyone and their cockpit cats can afford a small flotilla of mini-frigates and bulk haulers I’m less inclined to see ship progression as a linear ladder and more like a web, based on flight profiles and capabilities than sheer size and cost.

 

[dm06]

Yet another thing which could be done

To encourage players to try out all the available ships in the game

is missions which force to use specified ship.
For example: transport this ship to destination.
The ship even could be engineered which makes cmdrs to "try" the ship.

 

[SouthernGorilla]

But I don't want to try all the ships. And I would be annoyed if I were penalized for not doing so. I'd be all for giving people another meaningless rank for spending time in multiple ships. But giving them a financial bonus just cheats the rest of us. Especially since it would only go to people who were well past any financial concerns.

I don't mind the idea of licensing for different classes of ship. That could actually stop the overnight billionaire plague. Imagine not being able to buy a Corvette until you were at least Deadly in combat. It would be genuinely fun if the choices you made in your Sidewinder impacted your options later in the game. Want a Saud Kruger ship? Then you better have 5,000ly of passenger travel under your belt. They have a reputation to uphold, they won't sell their ships to any old riff-raff with money.