Playing Devils Advocate for Monetization: Arx Crew

[EWanderer]

Hello, it took a bit longer than expected but here we are again as promised.
Today I want to talk about Crew Mates for Hire. Your trusty NPCs you can take onto your ship in lieu of another player.

Now I love my little rapscallion always talking off my ear during combat and allowing me to use fighters. When will multi crew players and maybe even odyssey teams get this please?
Anyway eventually might some fresh voice, where we run into issues with crew members:

1. There are only so many personalities/voices to be found here.
2. They either take a big cut or it takes forever to train them.

This is where I could see crew members unlocked with ARX coming in. Much like ARX Ships these would just hang out in any Lounge for deployment after purchase. (Can be rehired upon dismissing them) They are like ship voice packs in that they are functionally using the same voice line triggers, only bringing a distinct personality and voice to the lines used. Some examples:

• Space Cowboy with Southern Accent
• Cyborg Combat Veteran (broken voice, thirsty for blood)
• Some foreign language speaking ones (I don't mind corvas talking in french, despite having no idea what I am listening to, its just nice)

Now the point of contention are rank and pay share. I can see five models here:

1. Elite at 12% pay share.
2. Novice at 2% which is ranked up and grows in profit share.
3. Elite at the pay share as if ranked up from novice.
4. Novice at 0% share, which doesn't increase as you rank up.
5. Elite at 0% share.

While I would prefer 2+4, seeing how there is a limit on crew you can have retained, you should never bother with more than 1 crew on standby anyway and you want people to buy multiple, you should encourage/make swapping out Arx crew, so while fair and most defensible against p2w accusations, we need to compromise here for the sake of marketability. 1 and 3 are essentially 5, given you can always swap them in and out before heading out for combat, I would argue to just use 5, since then you have 3 up to 3 ARX Crew on standby, reducing overall menu use.
Sure you could just make ARX crew hire cost credits, which is how swapping in and out elite pilots on a need to do basis is discouraged partially, but again, we pay for convenience as much as the actual product.

That's really all for today. Just again something where FDev could find a market. Argueably even more straigthforward and easier to design than my previous idea.