Hello commanders!
But we have to accept that even with the most basic option (shooting turrets), a player who wants to misbehave still can. They could open fire at an invalid target, potentially inviting ship destruction. It has similarities to being attacked out of the blue by wingmen.
There's a very big difference here. If a wingman attacks me, I can retaliate and shoot back, and so can other wingmen. That makes it a very high risk situation for the troll. The insidious thing about multicrew trolling is that it's consequence free, and also extremely easy to do - no waiting around at a RES looking for victims to wing up with, just join a new ship and have at it.
The current implementation is just way too unbalanced in favor of the trolls. Yes, the gunner can shoot at a police ship, and that's expected. But then the gunner can also re-deploy guns to try to keep me from jumping away, making an already stressful situation even more annoying since you have to make sure to kick the troll before being able to get to safety. I know, people should "git gud" and deal with it, but I think this drives away players if there's too many unpleasant situations with too few incentives to keep doing it. If only the trolls are having fun, they'll make up a disproportionate fraction of the people using the feature.
At minimum expect the helm to have full authority for stowing and deploying hardpoints, there's really no reason to allow a gunner to deploy guns and start firing when approaching a station. Having to always manually disable weapons as a precaution is tedious. Selective control over SCBs and hardpoints would also be good, but I can see this may be harder due to needing new UI to implement.
As a suggestion, I think it would be nice to be able to choose which roles to make available when opening my ship to random crew. This would also help the people joining if they could filter based on this. Someone may be wanting to fly a fighter and not be interested in a gunner-only ship, or vice versa. This could be automatic (if there's no gunner-usable weapons or no fighters, don't advertise those roles), but a player override would be nice to avoid disappointed gunners with just a single missile launcher or something.
I think the most basic issue here is that this is yet another potentially fun multiplayer feature being undermined by player-hostile choices. I think there have been way too many of these:
Wings - let's have fun bounty hunting with friends. Oops, the bounties get split up, and in combat CGs there aren't nearly enough hostiles spawning to keep it interesting. Back to lone bounty hunting since it's more profitable, especially since there aren't really high-end opponents where you'd need backup once you've got past the starter ships. Thank you for finally addressing the payouts in the latest patch.
Powerplay - I joined a faction hoping for some organized PVP battles, but pretty much everyone just wanted to grind merits in private groups since that's most efficient. Sigh.
Ship launched fighters with NPC crew - flying a fighter is awesome, and I love being able to get some variety while bounty hunting by switching roles, especially with a high-ranked NPC pilot that actually provides useful support. However, NPC permadeath makes me unwilling to play in Open, it takes months to rank up a pilot with the game time I have available and it's just not worth the risk. I've already lost a Deadly pilot to a stupid mistake on my part once, and don't want to do so again if I can avoid it. And that's after I finally have enough money to not mind rebuys too much. On the bright side, ship transport at least lets me switch to my FAS when I do want to play in Open, but NPC permadeath makes me unwilling to casually open my main ship for multicrew, especially considering the trolling issues. I know there's workarounds, but the risk vs reward tradeoff is just wrong here.
Multicrew - Yay, a quick and low-barrier way to have fun with other players. But then we've got the obvious trolling issues, and the payout was reduced so drastically to make it not worth it for many players. I understand why it's not supposed to be a zero-risk "get rich quick" feature, but this seemed excessively stingy. Maybe consider the player's net worth in the pay scale calculation so that a newbie doesn't earn 10x their current assets in a single session, and scale it based on the effective contribution to avoid AFK income farming?
I'm trying to be constructive here. I think it's essential for a game's long term health to encourage people to have fun playing, and I feel that the incentives in the game are currently not well aligned with this.
