Please let our SLF pilot survive destruction

[space voyager]

I went through ten pages of suggestions to revive an older thread but found none (there were several though)...

My SLF pilot finally became elite. The effort I put into this far, FAR exceeded the effort needed to fully engineer a module, yet on destruction I'll keep the modules and lose the pilot, rendering the SLF bay useless for a looooong time.

Please, let our SLF pilots survive destruction, they are too big of a time investment. Firstly to find one good looking and then to rank them up.

 

[Misty_Dark]

totally agree on this one... I do not understand why this was implemented in this way...

 

[Robert Maynard]

I haven't hired another since I lost my first.

If I were to hire one now, I'd fire them before profiting.

The expense of having them only to lose them on destruction seems to be a lose/lose proposition.

 

[comdr0303]

And why should it be win/win all the time or even a win/loose?
It's part of the game, you dont wana loose your pilot then dont fight with him/her and put yourself in the slf...your choice, right?

 

[Nadreck]

It doesn't work like that, it doesn't matter who is flying the SLF. If you have an active copilot, you will lose him/her when your ship is destroyed.

It unfairly penalises ships with SLF's, and players who wish to train up a pilot rather than hiring some random redshirt. It's about time this issue was dealt with, as MANY have suggested, MANY times.

 

[wstephenson]

I haven't hired another since I lost my first.

If I were to hire one now, I'd fire them before profiting.

The expense of having them only to lose them on destruction seems to be a lose/lose proposition.

Same here - I have no idea what the thinking behind this mechanic was. Perhaps their rank should be applied as an additional factor to the cost of the Fighter Hangar, thereby increasing your rebuy.

 

[xzanfr]

Definitely.
And also let them ride up front with the grown ups.

Currently having a pilot with no indication that they're on the ship & who dies if it is destroyed is illogical - they may as well remote control the SLF from the safety of a space station in a similar way to how multicrew works.

 

[VerticalBlank]

I completely agree. I wouldn’t mind having to pay extra insurance, or run a rescue mission to pick them up. And yes definitely let them appear on the bridge.

 

[JetsonRING]

Supposedly the SLF if piloted via telepresence so why would a crew member ever be lost if only the SLF is destroyed? Ridiculous. See my post regarding insurance for NPC crew:

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...-ship-destruction-for-those-who-can-afford-it

 

[Dad Rock]

100% agree. I've got an NPC crew member that is now permanently station locked as I won't risk losing her after all the effort to train her up from a Novice. I never understood why - A> we couldn't see the crew mate in one of the spare seats, and B> they couldn't be saved when the ship was destroyed. We should at least be given the option to pay a premium to "re-hire" them on the rebuy screen.

 

[Robert Maynard]

It would be less jarring (than all inactive NPC pilots magically being available to join ones ship in an out of the way dock that one might visit with no notice whatsoever) if NPC Pilots simply worked through the telepresence technology that already exists for multi-crew - in which case they'd never be lost (although might resign....).

 

[Denneb]

I agree for the 100th time. As I already posted on another thread, I got enough money to cover my rebuys. Crew permadeath is the ONLY reason I dont play in open, and I suspect this is the case for many others too.

 

[Nadreck]

Someone on here came up with a good rationale for why your pilot is always hanging around at every station with a crew lounge, just waiting to be assigned to any ship with an SLF...

...Because they are always with you. Even when you're in a non-SLF ship, they're hidden away in the (invisible) "crew quarters". That's how they end up at any station you visit.

But then you'd have to explain why they always manage to eject safely from the crew quarters, but always perish if they happen to be in the (similarly invisible) cupboard that they need to operate the SLF from.

 

[Sylow]

Yea. There's some gaps of logic here. I mean, our ship gets destroyed. We return to a station which doesn't even have a shipyard, but we get our complete ship replaced. Including the special one-of-a-kind engineering setup, which just was destroyed. We survive, but our crew member reliably failed to eject.
.
Outside of logic, it's just some failed game design. Rebuy costs hurt, but only up to a certain point. So somebody decided that deaths should always hurt by killing your crew. Of course, "always" is only if you have active crew.
.
Instead of the current nosense, I would suggest to actually make something useful out of this mess: gameplay. You can say that the crew members escape pod arrived somewhere else. And you need to pick your crew up again. Which can go several ways:
1. You're very lucky. Your crew was picked up by legal search and rescue operations and now is in System X at Station Y. Travel there, pay the rescue fee (costing as much as a new crew member of this experience level would cost to recruit) and you're good to go.
2. You're still lucky. Your crew was picked up by some legal operation. Same setup, travel to System X, Station Y. But the rescuer wants a service in return. Probably a cargo delivery mission, but possibly also an assassination mission of medium difficulty.
3. You're less lucky. Your crew was picked up by some shady people. But they offer to return him/her after you did a bit of work for them. Queue a chain of smuggling missions and/or assassination missions.
4. You're really unlucky. Slavers got your crew. Luckily somebody sends you a "donation" mission. If you complete that one, you get information when and where the slavers move our crew to another system. Bring your interdictor and hatch breaker.
.
For scenario 3, the snitch part of szenario 4 can also happen. So when the player is just getting into dirty stuff (maybe after the first smuggling run), he gets the above mentioned "donation" mission, followed up by the "rescue from cargo hold" mission.
.
Voilá! Gameplay! Crew would still be removed from the crew for a while, but people can recover them. By using nothing else but the already existing mission system. All it needs are some more text messages when the missions are sent to the player. It would add so much to the game while needing only little additional work, as all puzzle pieces are already implemented!
.

 

[Chaparral]

It must just be hard to code. The coded object does not reside within the module classification, so it can't be preserved through the same routine.

Where's Znort?, he usually has a handle on this coding stuff.

These threads always say the same thing and I totally agree. Losing your trained pilot is lame, and is not internally consistent with the game lore/mechanics. So it's really down to Dev effort and interest.

 

[ARIC'THEBEARD]

Damn, this makes me not want to fly an SLF. Been eyeing the Gunship, because I really like the look, and that dakka… lol But this really makes me rethink it if I'm just going to be losing it all the time.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Supposedly the SLF if piloted via telepresence so why would a crew member ever be lost if only the SLF is destroyed? Ridiculous.

Yes, that is why it doesn't happen. You know what else is ridiculous?

Damn, this makes me not want to fly an SLF. Been eyeing the Gunship, because I really like the look, and that dakka… lol But this really makes me rethink it if I'm just going to be losing it all the time.

Only if you lose the gunship itself will you lose the pilot. You can lose the little fighter itself as often as you want, that is why they give you over a dozen per bay. Just ignore people who complain without even understanding how the game works.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Yea. There's some gaps of logic here. I mean, our ship gets destroyed. We return to a station which doesn't even have a shipyard, but we get our complete ship replaced. Including the special one-of-a-kind engineering setup, which just was destroyed. We survive, but our crew member reliably failed to eject.
.
Outside of logic, it's just some failed game design. Rebuy costs hurt, but only up to a certain point. So somebody decided that deaths should always hurt by killing your crew. Of course, "always" is only if you have active crew.
.
Instead of the current nosense, I would suggest to actually make something useful out of this mess: gameplay. You can say that the crew members escape pod arrived somewhere else. And you need to pick your crew up again. Which can go several ways:
1. You're very lucky. Your crew was picked up by legal search and rescue operations and now is in System X at Station Y. Travel there, pay the rescue fee (costing as much as a new crew member of this experience level would cost to recruit) and you're good to go.
2. You're still lucky. Your crew was picked up by some legal operation. Same setup, travel to System X, Station Y. But the rescuer wants a service in return. Probably a cargo delivery mission, but possibly also an assassination mission of medium difficulty.
3. You're less lucky. Your crew was picked up by some shady people. But they offer to return him/her after you did a bit of work for them. Queue a chain of smuggling missions and/or assassination missions.
4. You're really unlucky. Slavers got your crew. Luckily somebody sends you a "donation" mission. If you complete that one, you get information when and where the slavers move our crew to another system. Bring your interdictor and hatch breaker.
.
For scenario 3, the snitch part of szenario 4 can also happen. So when the player is just getting into dirty stuff (maybe after the first smuggling run), he gets the above mentioned "donation" mission, followed up by the "rescue from cargo hold" mission.
.
Voilá! Gameplay! Crew would still be removed from the crew for a while, but people can recover them. By using nothing else but the already existing mission system. All it needs are some more text messages when the missions are sent to the player. It would add so much to the game while needing only little additional work, as all puzzle pieces are already implemented!
.

While considerably more effortful to implement than you make it sound, that would be really awesome indeed!

 

[znôrt]

It must just be hard to code. The coded object does not reside within the module classification, so it can't be preserved through the same routine.

Where's Znort?, he usually has a handle on this coding stuff.

These threads always say the same thing and I totally agree. Losing your trained pilot is lame, and is not internally consistent with the game lore/mechanics. So it's really down to Dev effort and interest.

hi! [haha]

i don't think this is a coding problem. looks like a high level decision. i personally don't see anything wrong with it (as per gameplay, risk, reward and loss balance) except it is very inconsistent with the rest: most errors in elite cost you next to nothing (a 5% of principal tops), however some particular situations are very costly and unforgiving: elite slf pilots and explo data. go figure, but this is weird. it's probably too genius(tm) for me to understand.

my gripe with slf pilots is different, i wish they were just 'crew'. it's me who wants to pilot the fighter!! they should be more versatile while dealing with the mothership. one of my projects is to get a crewmember to elite in the keelback while i'm 100% of the time in the fighter, and to sort of roleplay it. made a few attempts, didn't end well, will try again. then again, for regular gaming i think slf (used as weapons) are pretty useless. elite one's are far too expensive, so it only makes sense to contract low level ones as cannon fodder, dismiss them (with all honors, of course) if they survive. life's hard out there in the black!

 

[Kzak]

I won't hire a SLF pilot (except hire for one specific sortie, then fire the pilot immediately afterwards) for the above reasons. With the millions they rake in, they should have enough to use an escape pod, surely?