I started playing Elite Dangerous when a couple of RL friend recruited me to “give it a whirl,” and I had a crash course on the game over one weekend: I earned a quick 100 million credits bounty hunting while teamed up together. Blindly, I cluelessly bought new ships without an idea of what’s next on the horizon. “Let’s play together,” was their standing request when we could reconnect online again. That one request ended up being more complicated than other multi-player online games.
I stumbled through non-engineered ship building; learning about ship jump ranges, how jump range is a constraint traveling “long distances,” and how much real-life time is spent traveling. This was the one of the upfront complications to “Let’s play together” since we had to be on the same server and in the same system for the team invite to work. This was our experience when forming up a team/wing for missions. This forced us into exploration ship builds to have the legs to reconnect without spending 45-60 minutes jumping across the galaxy: this does not include the wait periods for transferring our combat ships. On a bad day, we would spend over an hour waiting, as we talked over discord.
Team missions, also known as wing missions, are geared towards being cooperative missions in which we did not have to be together to share mission progress. This simply boiled down to us working towards a common end prize than playing together in the traditional MMO setting. It often resulted where we played the same game while talking over discord or voice comms; NO actual player-to-player interaction. Those wing missions were, more or less, cooperative goals shared within the team for the completion “payout” than tackling a mission that may impose limited resources and teamwork to accomplish; Hence, multi-crewing appeared to fit this type of teamwork gameplay: Yes, I have 3-4 RL friends who want to play together for the traditional MMO team-oriented gameplay.
As we delved into multi-crew, we quickly learned multi-crew and teams are the same thing; for instance, player A sends a crew invite to player B. A and B form a team, which means players C who sends a crew invite to player D form a team, and neither could form a wing together e.g. multiple ships running multi-crew instances. This means 3-4 players would need a single ship specially designed to accommodate a 3-4-person multi-crew team; however, there are none currently available to host the owner plus 3 extra crew members. Not even the huge Type-10 Lego brick. Do you see where this is leading? Elite Dangerous prohibits muti-crew teams from creating wings and ship availability restricts the size of the multi-crew team.
In addition, even under ideal conditions, multi-crew teams are prohibited to disembark the ship unless specific – not documented conditions apply – that exclude multi-crew teams from doing odyssey planetary missions. Non-multi-crew teams have access to odyssey missions; but those multi-crew team are prohibited: effectively excluding an entire expansion of content play. The multi-crew instancing does not offer the interaction of the game world because their effectively held hostage onboard the ship; unless they exit the multi-crew team, which immediately taken back to their ship.
An ideal multi-crew setting would assume a ship role (pilot, gunner, SF pilot, whatnot) without restriction to disembark to pick up odyssey missions, shop the concourse, or whatever activities you would normally consider playing solo; maybe access the local mission board for missions to be added to the share pool while playing with someone. As well as, upon exiting multi-crew by disembarking from the ship to remain on any space dock; a choice to remain or be transported back to their ship.
Elite Dangerous is complicated when it comes to “Let’s play together.” This is more a solo game with a co-op BGS backdrop and wing missions are semi-solo cooperative sharing that’s completion payout focused and motivated. There is nothing wrong with the MMO interaction model except please improve the multi-crew experience where friends could play together without feeling they're a hostage to the ship. Such as being able to disembark and enter the concourse to pick up odyssey missions and disembarking on-foot on planets to jointly do odyssey missions without a Scorpion. Or allowing multi-crews to join wings since current ships don't have a crew capacity to accommodate a 4-person team on one ship.
I stumbled through non-engineered ship building; learning about ship jump ranges, how jump range is a constraint traveling “long distances,” and how much real-life time is spent traveling. This was the one of the upfront complications to “Let’s play together” since we had to be on the same server and in the same system for the team invite to work. This was our experience when forming up a team/wing for missions. This forced us into exploration ship builds to have the legs to reconnect without spending 45-60 minutes jumping across the galaxy: this does not include the wait periods for transferring our combat ships. On a bad day, we would spend over an hour waiting, as we talked over discord.
Team missions, also known as wing missions, are geared towards being cooperative missions in which we did not have to be together to share mission progress. This simply boiled down to us working towards a common end prize than playing together in the traditional MMO setting. It often resulted where we played the same game while talking over discord or voice comms; NO actual player-to-player interaction. Those wing missions were, more or less, cooperative goals shared within the team for the completion “payout” than tackling a mission that may impose limited resources and teamwork to accomplish; Hence, multi-crewing appeared to fit this type of teamwork gameplay: Yes, I have 3-4 RL friends who want to play together for the traditional MMO team-oriented gameplay.
As we delved into multi-crew, we quickly learned multi-crew and teams are the same thing; for instance, player A sends a crew invite to player B. A and B form a team, which means players C who sends a crew invite to player D form a team, and neither could form a wing together e.g. multiple ships running multi-crew instances. This means 3-4 players would need a single ship specially designed to accommodate a 3-4-person multi-crew team; however, there are none currently available to host the owner plus 3 extra crew members. Not even the huge Type-10 Lego brick. Do you see where this is leading? Elite Dangerous prohibits muti-crew teams from creating wings and ship availability restricts the size of the multi-crew team.
In addition, even under ideal conditions, multi-crew teams are prohibited to disembark the ship unless specific – not documented conditions apply – that exclude multi-crew teams from doing odyssey planetary missions. Non-multi-crew teams have access to odyssey missions; but those multi-crew team are prohibited: effectively excluding an entire expansion of content play. The multi-crew instancing does not offer the interaction of the game world because their effectively held hostage onboard the ship; unless they exit the multi-crew team, which immediately taken back to their ship.
An ideal multi-crew setting would assume a ship role (pilot, gunner, SF pilot, whatnot) without restriction to disembark to pick up odyssey missions, shop the concourse, or whatever activities you would normally consider playing solo; maybe access the local mission board for missions to be added to the share pool while playing with someone. As well as, upon exiting multi-crew by disembarking from the ship to remain on any space dock; a choice to remain or be transported back to their ship.
Elite Dangerous is complicated when it comes to “Let’s play together.” This is more a solo game with a co-op BGS backdrop and wing missions are semi-solo cooperative sharing that’s completion payout focused and motivated. There is nothing wrong with the MMO interaction model except please improve the multi-crew experience where friends could play together without feeling they're a hostage to the ship. Such as being able to disembark and enter the concourse to pick up odyssey missions and disembarking on-foot on planets to jointly do odyssey missions without a Scorpion. Or allowing multi-crews to join wings since current ships don't have a crew capacity to accommodate a 4-person team on one ship.
