Immersion is not realism. And there has to be a trade off between realism and gameplay. No one wants to wait for hours, days or weeks to be rescued from an escape pod. That's just bad gameplay. Or to stare at your navigation screen for 10 hours to find unknown artifacts for some engineer. Or to sit in front of your mission board and do board hopping for 3 hours to get a permit mission. All that would make for terrible gameplay. And some of it does.
Realism is fine. Realism makes a simulator. This is NOT a simulator. If you want a space sim, you go for rogue system.
Immersion is this: Consistency with the own rules. Even in a fantasy setting, you can be Immersed. It's not only consistency though. It's setting up a complete ruleset, and then think about how people would use it.
If you say, it is possible to control systems via holopresence, instantly and with no signal delay, then you have to wonder, where else would this be applied? And if it is not, then that breaks immersion. If you say, you can magically increase the charge rate of the power distributor by having holographic people join you, then that breaks immersion, because everybody would have thousands of holoconnections. Again, there needs to be a tradeoff.
That said, I'm still disappointed, realism and immersion aside. It's quite easy to say why:
They offer cheap and artificial benefits that make no sense, even in elite's own universe to coax players to use this new feature. Such as to wipe bounties on leaving the group, extra pips out of nowhere, scanners and missiles firing backwards.
This is a reward oriented approach. People 'want' to do this, because it gives them benefits. Nothing wrong with benefits, of course.
What would actually make sense to put in?
For the pilot: Actual benefits, reduced workload, more efficient ship without breaking rules.
For the crew: Fun and useful things to do. Not point a guncross at someone and press the mouse button, but to handle ship systems such as module power, distributor distribution, navigation, trading comparison*, damage control, shield control, perhaps, scanning stuff. of course shooting stuff and flying fighters is still okay, but limiting it to that is just cheap and lazy.
Letting someone on your ship is a risky thing to do. and you have to take responsibility for it. you should not allow some random stranger on board and allow them access, of course. That would be reckless and utterly dumb. he could just take out one 'personal defense weapon', point it at your head and have a new ship. the whole drop in drop out thing is fundamentally flawed. if you have only 15 minutes to play, just go play counterstrike or something.
Edit: A record system would be nice. When inviting commanders/joining someone you get an overview of their performance in general and as a crewmen/captain. Then griefers can have their few friends that they have give them psositive ratings, but after griefing for 10 times or so, they'll just have a bad track, and no one would allow them on anymore.
If you're planing on playing with a friend, then you should be with your friend in the first place. If you're wanting to do a wing, you have to be together too. No teleport, holothing where you can rent a ship someplace else that magically has the same loadout, including engineering items, as you. and no infinite jump rage.
Then again, those ships which do feature multicrew have a very decent jump range anyway.
But what annoys me most of all, there is 150 pages of rant about what a sorry excuse for multicrew this is. And I know for a fact, nothing will change.
An example how multicrew is done right is pulsar:lost colony. Not a perfect game by far, not complete yet either. But the concept is there. Fun, useful and semi-realistic things to do for the whole crew. I would like more realism, more systems that can be damaged, more modules, more everything and complexity, but the concept is good.
And all those people who say: "Just dock at a station before joining the crew, there is your immersion", I say this:
"Frontier, add infinite jump range. People who want immersion can just take 10ly at a time. Everything would be more accessible, players can play together whenever they want."
Perhaps now you see how stupid your argument is.
*(needs an actual in game trading system, not some stupid lines on the map that say nothing at all. frankly it's a shame that you need 3rd party tools to do decent or even the most basic trading. I've had those lines show me routes making a loss. after buying the trading data you can't even check the prices. what kind of stupid crap is that?)
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