Kill our crew.

[VR] Goooost

[VR] Goooost
I was in the boat of letting our crewmates survive ship destruction for a long time. Big advocate. But I've changed my mind. I think that we should be going through new crewmates more often, and that means letting them die. The random NPC generation is too cool of a feature to just use three times and never again.

So kill the crew.

HOWEVER, let us unlock higher ranks for direct-hire. An elite pilot might have a 5mil onboarding fee, but if you've trained one up from scratch, it should be an unlocked option.
Percentages should probably just be changed to fixed percentages so harmless is always 2% and elite is always 10%. It's simpler and leads to less regret later on.
These unlocks should be per-slot, so you still have to train up three pilots to be able to direct-hire 3 pilots.

The current system discourages death. I saw someone's screenshot who had spent 1.6 billion on their pilot. I've spent a few hundred million on mine. These are the same investment costs as ships, but there's no way to rebuy. I'm not talking about a rebuy, but rather an equivalent to it. Pilot permadeath, equal replacement. You get the sense of loss, without the feeling that you must quit the game forever.
 

Agony_Aunt

Agony_Aunt
Hmm... no. I spent a lot of time looking for ones i liked the look of. Only if we could customize the name and appearance of our NPCs would i be interested in such a change.

I'd rather they couldn't die myself. I invest a lot of time and effort into levelling them up from zero.
 

space voyager

space voyager
Agony_Aunt said:
Hmm... no. I spent a lot of time looking for ones i liked the look of. Only if we could customize the name and appearance of our NPCs would i be interested in such a change.

I'd rather they couldn't die myself. I invest a lot of time and effort into levelling them up from zero.
Click to expand...
I too am in a camp of letting them survive, especially when comparing the functionality of SLF modules to engineering.

Though I must admit the suggestion is not bad - at least better than the current state. 5 million might be a bit excessive though and... random NPC generation? I am looking at same ugly faces from the beginning. With a few rare exceptions, just as non-random.
 

[VR] Goooost

[VR] Goooost
space voyager said:
Though I must admit the suggestion is not bad - at least better than the current state.
Click to expand...

It's a compromise. FDev seems intent on keeping crew death and having it be a meaningful experience of loss. This way everyone is at least... understanding. Again, the current system makes people want to quit the game entirely. My system will just be the feeling of loss.

space voyager said:
5 million might be a bit excessive though and... random NPC generation? I am looking at same ugly faces from the beginning. With a few rare exceptions, just as non-random.
Click to expand...

There's still something about hiring temporary crew and firing them before they can steal the profits. Currently players do this with expert pilots, which are something like 100k to onboard? My intention is to make sure people arent just randomly buying temp Elites unless they really need them.

space voyager said:
random NPC generation? I am looking at same ugly faces from the beginning. With a few rare exceptions, just as non-random.
Click to expand...

lol. I too have spent millions on pilot tinder, hiring and firing to shuffle the board. I think they could probably turn it into a bit of a journey, where different traits are found in different places. If you want a tattooed mean looking guy, you need to go to a pirate station, for instance. Dont know how that would work, but I feel like there's something there. Like maybe we could have user-submitted pilots in the holome editor and you could browse those, the creator will have placed them at a specific station, and you can trade them for Arx. Something like that.
 
Last edited:

Morbad

Morbad
Until they fix the instance wide latency/rubberbanding issue with NPC controlled SLFs, this is all rather moot. My CMDR has three Elite rank NPC crew on retainer that I cannot, in good conscience, utilize due to the negative effect they'll have on gameplay. If credits meant anything, that 30% hit to income would be annoying as well.

Anyway, I like consequences and NPC crew that die, as well as the incentive to rank them up that not being able to hire higher rank crew provides, are both positive things from my point of view. I use them, to my CMDR's tangible advantage, and I pay the price when I get him shot down with crew on board. The harshness of these consequences are rather incogrouous, relative to the lack of consequence elsewhere, but I don't see this as any reason to soften them...if anything the rest of the game should become harsher.
 

Kissamies

Kissamies
I'd rather have the option to promote them to some cushy managerial position once I've done enhancing their pilot rating enough. For example, being the chief of security for my carrier SLF fleet.
 

RamirezKurita

R
Rather than killing the crew, why not give us reason to hire more than 3 in the first place? Give them their own loyalties and personalities so that an Elite pilot isn't functionally identical to every other Elite pilot. Personality clashes could result in pay rise demands or endless micromanagement, while a well synchronised team could reduce player micromanagement

Simply making our crew members completely fungible and replaceable removes any actual character from them and likely precludes development of character. On this note, I do feel that one of the big issues facing Elite's world is a lack of personality as everything is reduced to the bare minimum mechanical details without any variables added for personality.
 

myothershipisacobraiv

myothershipisacobraiv
yes this is why it never get fixed.

but it's total . so I strongly disagree. I do not want to spend god knows how long levelling up a character to lose them in some random crap or because I was flying a weak ship.

"fly a better ship" Maybe I want to the fly that imaginary spaceship because it's a videogame. Maybe Elite should get better balance so all ships have things to do. Maybe we should remove all ships except Krait MkII so there's no problem. This is not a valid counter point.

SLF pilot deletion is too much and should be fixed. I agree with you that it's probably because they want to showcase the random generation that it's not considered needing fixing ASAP but I don't think it's worth it in the least. That is all before you consider that Elite's random generation is like 80% pizza faces 10% bland, 10% interesting or good looking.

Why would I want to trade my badass or hot SLF pilot for a mutant pizza face?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom