OK so again a big debate on immersion vs gameplay. I have read through a bunch of the comments and although I do tend to lean towards immersion being an old hardcore gamer, I do appreciate some more casual oriented game design decisions. I voted for non instant ship transfer and I like the way it is implemented now.
In general, I think there are options for FD to accommodate for both flavors, here is one:
1. If you want your CMDR to play multi crew, gain money, crime, rank etc. within the persistent game world, you need to board at the same station. However, for gameplay:
2. In the main menu, you have an option to jump in as crew to whatever ship is looking for members in whatever part of the galaxy. So you can have instant fun with anyone, anywhere. But you do not play your CMDR. You play a temporary avatar. You can choose to either create one with the new character generator or use a randomly generated one. In game credits are not won this way, nor is crime, since this is a temporary character. The idea here would be to facilitate instant crew play, but bot break the dynamics that makes the core came feel plausible (still).
So if you want to just enjoy crewing up whenever, wherever for the game play aspect of it, you can. But if you want to reap the payment bonuses associated with it and have them apply to your CMDR, you have to set that up in game, by finding someone to crew up with and traveling to their location.
Regarding the depth of crewing up I hadn't given the mechanic much thought before reading this post and the crew roles they included sound cool and fun, but I guess I did expect some non purely combat roles as well. So this feels like a first step to satiate the most immediate and primal desire to fight together. I would hope to see more things in the future such as advances engineering capabilities for engineer crew members, for tweaking systems to get more power or better performance. Also repairs on the go. That could be coupled with or separated from say a navigation role, with enhances sensor controls an navigation functions increasing jump range, fuel consumption, more specific search options in the galaxy map. Faster FSD charge up and cool down. Increased fighter and SRV range, increased ammo capacity, or all sorts of things an extra crew member could manage.
The main question I would like to come back to is that yes, immersion builds the base of a great game, it attracts people who want to invest time and effort in playing the game and this implies a certain human quality within the game world. It makes people care about the game, it makes it feel more alive. It makes it more attractive to more casual gamers as well because it is more than just another MMO where people leave because game play is shallow, runs its course, all about the stats, and full for griefers. But this does not leave out the possibility to have areas or modes of the game that do give instant gratification. On a technical level, there is a solution for everything and ED has to decide if and how they want to accommodate for both styles.
Finally I would like to encourage all members on this forum to be constructive in their comments and not resort to ugly stuff. Let's be friends and make the game better (we have the game itself for blowing each other out of the sky).
