Do NPC crew still die for good if your ship is destroyed?

Miko

M
As per the title, do NPC still die for good when the mothership is destroyed? I'm in two minds bothering to train up a harmless crew member all the way to Elite on my PS4 save as I had done with my Xbox save, but after recently dying to a glitch at a CG I'm 50/50 since they're not exactly a cheap investment when they take profits regardless of being active or not - another thing that I would argue should be adjusted.

Have any of the previous suggestions to improve the mechanic been considered or any feedback from FD if they will ever look at changing things?

I like the concept of your crew not dying but perhaps having a cooldown period where they are unavailable following ship destruction, and a PowerPlay style weekly wage for crew, which could also allow for the profit share rate currently set only if active and deployed for combat only. Wages must be paid or crew can suffer from "jitter" and other reduced performance penalties. Much like ship maintainance ;).

Anyways, what's the story. Are they still perma-death?
 

Miko

M
It doesn't make sense to me why they would persist with this mechanic. Yes, it adds an element of danger and risk, but it also upsets the player base who invest a lot of time and money into said pilot. Worst of all, it makes absolutely no sense considering everything else survives, albeit at the cost of insurance.
 

Riverside

Riverside
Miko said:
It doesn't make sense to me why they would persist with this mechanic. Yes, it adds an element of danger and risk, but it also upsets the player base who invest a lot of time and money into said pilot. Worst of all, it makes absolutely no sense considering everything else survives, albeit at the cost of insurance.
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It gives more consequence to ship destruction, which is compensated for by being less likely to get destroyed because your NPC buddy is helping you. I understand people disagree but the logic is there :)
 

V'larr

V'larr
Not only that but while they are alive they are stealing at *minimum* 50% of your combat XP.

Riverside said:
It gives more consequence to ship destruction, which is compensated for by being less likely to get destroyed because your NPC buddy is helping you. I understand people disagree but the logic is there :)
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If anything it's *more* likely since taking said NPC carries the risk of drawing more aggro and the risk of your NPC committing friendly fire/ramming penalties....
 

[VR] Goooost

[VR] Goooost
I would propose a change to how crew are hired that would fix my phobia of losing them.
Currently we can hire from harmless to expert, but nothing beyond. What I'm proposing is that this is a limitation set by the pilots federation, which is a rank you can improve.

So you'd still have 3 seats (for now), and if you train a pilot to master, you can from that point on hire master ranked pilots for say, $500,000 initial signing bonus. If you train one up to elite, you can lose them and hire another one for $10,000,000. This would be on a per-seat basis, so if you wanted 3 elite pilots you would initially have to train them all up before you could hire them from the get-go.

I'd also change the way the pay percentage is calculated, so that each rank is only a 1% pay increase, but there is an overall pilots insurance which is adjustable based on how long you keep your pilots alive. Eventually it goes down to 1% and never increases.

The end result of this system is that pilots would work the same way that they do now, but if you died it wouldn't mean that that you lost hours and hours of work and a quarter-billion dollar investment. It would just mean you pay another 10mil and feel sad if your new pilot isn't as cute. It would also mean that you can occasionally switch out crew if you find someone better and have the money. (currently you can't even look at other crew without firing one first)

I'd also like to see our store-purchased cosmetics appearing sporadically in the pilot selections. It would give me a reason to pay for them on the frontier store. Currently, I've made my pilot and it looks like me so I'm not changing him. But if it meant that I could hire crew with tattoos or whatever, then I'd be all for dropping a few bucks on those cosmetics to liven up the offerings. But that would ONLY work with the aforementioned changes to crew, and it would HAVE to be a setting we can turn off in the settings.

Making crew something that can be traded out and refreshed or killed off means that if frontier decided to make them more interesting and varied, it wouldn't be a wasted effort because we'd all have the chance to go through the combinations. You could have more variables to them, like as you train them you might get a message that they developed a new flight maneuver or something, such as a high-speed docking procedure which they could then use to request resupply docking independently. Maybe you could tweak their ships the way we could in CQC.

Fighters are my favorite part of this game. I hope they let us launch three of them at once someday.
 

GraXXoR

GraXXoR
This is one of my least favourite “handwaviums” in the game.
If you lost everything (cargo, data, materials, engineered mods) then I’d understand it, but you don’t.
Somehow micro materials follow you along and yet star discovery data and crew are lost.

Utter tripe
 

Miko

M
How many people who haven't engineered their ships have fallen victim to a ganker squad whilst sadly mass locked by asteroids and struck by boost killing and fsd disabling special effects? I myself have not, but I'd imagine victims of this sort who lose their NPC crew member would be more likely to go solo or private to avoid the risk because of all the hard work and time investment poured into the NPC they hired.
 

GraXXoR

GraXXoR
Miko said:
How many people who haven't engineered their ships have fallen victim to a ganker squad whilst sadly mass locked by asteroids and struck by boost killing and fsd disabling special effects? I myself have not, but I'd imagine victims of this sort who lose their NPC crew member would be more likely to go solo or private to avoid the risk because of all the hard work and time investment poured into the NPC they hired.
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I’ve managed to get Graxxor’s crew up to Deadly 60%
Would not like to lose her now. Even though she looks like an extra for “In The Flesh”
 

insanephoton

insanephoton
GraXXoR said:
This is one of my least favourite “handwaviums” in the game.
If you lost everything (cargo, data, materials, engineered mods) then I’d understand it, but you don’t.
Somehow micro materials follow you along and yet star discovery data and crew are lost.

Utter tripe
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It makes even less sense in the context that even economy passengers get an escape pod and those 'unique' engineered modules get replaced with identical copies. I get that they are trying too inject a sense of loss, but I don't think it's really worked out that way. If you aren't RPing the most logical way of using them is to hire them on an ad hoc basis and fire them before you turn in any missions etc. That way there is no attachment to them and the costs are minimised.

If the aim was to have a 'Maverick and Goose' type emotional bonds then it fails. Instead our NPC pilots will always remain 'the FNG'
 

MickyG1982

M
Miko said:
It doesn't make sense to me why they would persist with this mechanic. Yes, it adds an element of danger and risk, but it also upsets the player base who invest a lot of time and money into said pilot. Worst of all, it makes absolutely no sense considering everything else survives, albeit at the cost of insurance.
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Well, your passengers, cargo & exploration data don't, they never do...
 

777Driver

777Driver
GraXXoR said:
I’ve managed to get Graxxor’s crew up to Deadly 60%
Would not like to lose her now. Even though she looks like an extra for “In The Flesh”
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Had being training a female fighter pilot for quite some time now, completely forgot she was on the ship whilst doing some suicidal tests in a T-10. RIP fighter pilot.. Would have helped if I could see her on the bridge, as opposed to her living in a cupboard down near the fighter bay.
 
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Aashenfox

Aashenfox
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Urbanski101

Urbanski101
Well I had my crew member die in front of my eyes in their SLF at the hands of a Fed Gunship.

Killed the gunship - headed to the station to hire a new crew member and there she was still alive and all smiles in the crew panel?

Bug?
 

insanephoton

insanephoton
Jukelo said:
I hope they don't, it's the only significant consequence of losing a ship.
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The trouble with the current binary choice is that it either discourages players from using SLFs at all or just switching to hire and fire disposable redshirts. What exactly is the consequence of losing an npc that you were going to fire anyway? As for being the only significant consequence, it rather depends. For an explorer the loss of data may represent weeks of gameplay being lost and when 3.0 finally rolls out, there are negative consequences for mission failure.

I'm not saying that they should be immortal, but there is no immediate sign of a deeper, more nuanced system appearing anytime soon. Until such a system finally appears it would make more sense for the sake of internal consistency that they survive.
 
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