-Synergy with wings, making crew and wing count toward the same total of 4 players to a crew/wing. This also allows wing missions to be rearding for crew.
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That's the highest priority for me. Some of my rarely playing friends still sometimes are around and the most enjoyable experience for them is to fly my SLFs. And i'd really take them for wing assassination missions or the likes that way, but alas... multicrew so badly collides with wings, this is no option.
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-Enhanced "idle" crew functionality (With limits set by captain) to operate power management, sensors and navigation. This allows for a dedicated first officer role.
-Replacement of the crew power pips with an engineer role, which would have access to deeper level power management, effecting the same potential power gains as the extra pip. Ideally, this role would have some prettier and more detailed holograms of the ship to look at, with internal components and weapons modelled and visible in different coloured overlays. As such an engineer would feel like they have a finer view of onboard systems and more agency over them. Also, allowing the possibility of directional shield management.
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You get points for trying, but it's really not worth it. A lot of things which would moved to the first officer or engineer is already present in the current game. Taking it away from the pilot to keep somebody else busy is not providing enough of a game.
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We've had something like this in several space games. The oldest one i played was the Jump to Lightspeed expansion in SWG. (2004) It was the one thing which nobody ever wanted to do there. Flying the ships and operating turrets were fun activities, but neither were people too happy to take small and tedious side-tasks from the pilots, nor were pilots too happy to loose control over such small but sometimes crucial features. (In ED for example, imagine your engineer moves away power from your shields while just taking a lot of fire... no fun. )
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-Overhaul of the gunner role, seperating into two parts: Remote gun operator, and turret operator.
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This is something worth considering. Currently when you have a gunner, both the pilot and the gunner feel like they have a fraction of a ship available. The actual solution really is to have additional turrets for the gunner only. Thus a gunner would actually add to the value of the ship, instead of requiring the pilot to give away part of his ship.
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Evidence that it worked:
- JTL again. We had just that there, turrets which could never be operated by the pilot. Only when you had a other players on your Krayt, Aggressor or Decimator, the turrets were operational.
- SLFs in this game. Nobody can fly his ship and both his SLFs at the same time. Even if there's an NPC pilot on board, you can easily have two SLFs. (And if you have two players flying SLFs, there's no NPC taking your money away...
) As SLFs never take anything away from the piloting experience of the mothership, but can contribute by providing additional firepower, they are usually welcome.
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So that's the line to be pursued in my eyes: anything in MC should add to the core experience, anything which requires something to be taken away from the pilot is bad.
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-Introducing a range of non-combat functions, like Science officer for exploration, or potentially the operation of advanced mining and salvage gear.
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Here we are at "something like" without knowing what and how. Yes, "something like that" would be nice, but i wouldn't know what. Anything i could come up with would require something to be taken away from the pilot. And see above, people really don't like it, when you take parts of their ships away from them.
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-Allowing the remote use of SRVs for crew (no life support, limited range from ship, or ship owner if they are in SRV, their SRV acting as a signal repeater)
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That would be helpful, but i would give it a looong range. (Enough so the SRV would only be lost if the pilot of the ship decides to completely leave the planet. Even supercruising around the planet should still be save. ) This would open up so many options. The first ones on my mind would be larger scale search and salvage, but also a combined forces attack on an outpost. I am thinking about much better defended outposts than what we have now, where the mothership first drops to SRVs a few KM away from the outpost. Then the mothership and the SLF attack airborne while the SRVs do the ground attack.
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Yes, we wouldn't see this right away, but it would at least be possible.
-Allow hiring of NPC crew or robots to man these crew stations, though likely not as effectively as a player. This would modify current NPC crew, as they would visibly take a seat onboard the ship.
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And here is a big NO! Multicrew should be there to encourage working together. If you allow NPCs to run these things, all we get is yet more power creep. People will simply bring NPCs and will soon consider them essential to their ship. And yet again they will feel that handing control of parts of their ship will be as if something was taken away from them.
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If MC functions only work when multi-crew is around and go dormant without other players, it's a whole different experience, so oppose NPCs being able to fill these slots, even at reduced efficiency.
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But that's my only real complaint. All in all i am very much for adding more content to multi-crew, i just would put emphasis on making sure that whatever is being added cleary supports to be operated by more than one olayer and can't be taken advantage of without using multi-crew.
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