Wow, what a thread. More than once I've suggested that FD are blind or naive when it comes to metagaming but I never thought I'd see it laid out in black and white like this. It's almost embarrassing.
The concept of Multi-crew, at its core, is about cooperation, and trust. If folk are going to troll each other, there's a limit to how much protection we can (or should) put in place.
The thing is, if you look back at what your CEO was saying during the early promotion for this project, cooperation and trust was supposed to be core to most activities within the game, with direct PVP a rare and contextual event. In the absence of any in-game mechanisms to modulate those activities it very quickly became evident just how off the mark that vision was. You were warned of this pre-launch, then you saw it with your own eyes post. Did you learn nothing about gamer behaviour in the years since?
One of gunner's abilities is to be able to fire countermeasures. Gunner can be effective at this, poor at this, or deliberately bad. Anyone who would want to go down the last track is, in my opinion, someone I would not want to Multi-crew with, or wing with.
Well obviously, but since the only tool you've given MC CMDRs is a switch that says "Randoms off / Randoms on" it makes it pretty difficult to determine which track those joining crewmembers are going to go down until they start firing off all your munitions or launching your own fighter against you.
Was that really a core part of the Multi-crew design? Assume trust but wait for the attempted knife in the back? And what of the possible in-universe responses? Report them to the EFP for transgression? Inform the local faction so they get a reputation hit? Treat self-inflicted ship damage as a reportable crime? No, just another out-of-universe Kick/Block function. Sad.
To some degree, folk have to take responsibility for their own actions.
Which "folk" are these? If it's the folk doing the "trolling" then you and I both know that's a meaningless statement. Whereas if it's the folk being trolled then what you're effectively asking is for
them to take responsibility for the potential actions of
others, while not giving them sufficient tools to do so in a selective way. Turning off SCBs in the middle of combat in case a Random decides to fry your ship is ridiculous.
Firing shield cells repeatedly for no good reason is just an unpleasant thing to do. And I'm fairly certain it is more likely to be detrimental to the community than helpful.
Well duh. Honestly, I can't tell at this point whether you are astonishingly naive or actually trolling us yourself. If anyone else on these forums had posted that last sentence there would have been a dozen follow-ups encouraging the poster to "man up", "grow a pair", "git gud" and a whole bunch of other choice clichés.
I don't normally stoop to dissecting developer posts like this but I almost can't believe I'm seeing this weasel-wordy stuff coming from the Lead Designer.
At least the later posts talk about the possibility of further options, and integration with the mythical karma system which I guess is something. Maybe. Still, in the immediate future I'd expect your telemetry to show a rapid fall-off in Open MC, as players realise their only choice is to risk sabotage or to lock down so much of their ship's systems as to make MC increasingly pointless for both commander and crew. It may find a home in Private Groups, but as a game element designed to bring people together it'll be hard to spin it as a major success if that's what happens.
I literally don't know how to end this with a pithy comment. I'm still shaking my head at the bizarreness of the whole thing.
