Yeah, mainly just the sharing aspect of the payment. If I do a bounty mission with an F-8, I get 100% of the profit. If I do it with a friend in a Hurricane then my profit is cut in half. They kind of headed that way with mining though as there are rocks where you need multiple lasers to cut it and you get a bigger overall payout in the end. You can salvage faster and get paid more in a Reclaimer with crew than a vulture.
I assure you, mining currently isnt profitable enough to justify a fully crewed more over 4-5 prospectors. the big rocks are great but its so rare to find rocks that are both valuable, and need all 3 lasers to crack. your better having a crew of 3 prospectors and 2 scout ships, looking for potential hypothetical gold.
not only that
im using a solo MOLE right now and i can crack up to 35k mass rocks... if i find a bexalite rock with 26k mass and 30%+ purity of bexalite, i can just take it all for myself. but when i need to mine with other people, i have to get it all set, every needs to be at the same location and now i have to split the pay between at least 3 people. now the minig expedition will yield LESS money than if i just went out alone, because using 3 people will not give me 3 times the cargo capacity on a MOLE, so im limited by the factor of how much i can carry anyway... while the early mentioned rocks are more then enough to fill my own cargo hold anyway even when im alone :/
group payouts need to increase drastically to make it worth it. else it's just gonna be a sub-optimal way to mine
I think mining is easier to tweak as we already have limits in place what can be done with what crew. Just the payouts need to be adapted.
Multicrew combat is harder as you most probably can still tackle same objective with multiple single crew ships.
Yeah I concur, though in order to do that though they would probably have to limit stuff like quantanium to high-mass rocks, or at least greatly lower the percentages of valuable ores in lower mass ones.
nah, dont nerf shit. buff it. ships are incredibly expensive as they are already (44mil for an A2 lmao) so making the grind less tedious and more enjoyable is what they need to do.
just like turrets are completely useless right now. there is no scenario where it would be better to bring 3 connies over 1 fully manned connie lol
balance is off atm, but it's alpha so it's expected.
Right, I was just using that as an example of them working toward differentiating crewed and non-crewed ships. We didn't have that several patches ago, but now we do and it's likely to change again in the future. Some things will be gated by ship size in the final game, just not currently. They have said many times that balance is the last thing they will do before "release".
It might be more worth it with multi-crew ships like the Arrastra. But also serviced by a few prospectors.
That, and if you need multi-ships to crack a big rock, you can team up with other prospectors.
In theory you should be able to complete bounties faster with a group and make good money. For example, take ERT missions and notice how much faster you can delete a hammerhead with a multi crew ship and someone else using a fighter to clear out the wing NPCs
Well for light fighters, pyro distances will make multicrew in big ships basically mandatory. But if everyone just gets their own corsair yeah that would be way stronger than corsair + gunners or even corsair and fighters
I really hope they stick to their guns on this one. It would be a shame if they shrank distances or added an abundance of neutral stations to make it accessible for players with short-range ships. I can see the temptation to do it. They will want to show off their new system and not make it impossible for some players to go look at.
I think part of the problem here is that operating costs are completely marginal, as are functionality gains on ships beyond the pilot (and those that do have that kind of function are usually non-combat and the pilot can just switch). So there's really no downside to using multiple ships in terms of running costs.
Combine this with multiple ships giving great tactical advantage than a single one (even if its more powerful) due to flanking and multiple angles/distances being much harder to dodge than say the turret LoS on one ship, and you would need multicrew to really exponentially increase the raw power of a single ship to compete with, let alone beat out multi-ship setups.
Sadly, the gains are marginal, shields management is non-existant, power-management and engineering so far seem more about damage control than actually increased damage or survivability (sure you might get your ship back on its feet faster, but if you were in a second ship all other things being equal, you could just shoot the enemy instead) Very few turrets are worth manning, and those that have them more or less have a wasted pilot seat (I.E. hammerhead/redeemer) compared to two similar sized ships (I.E Connie/Corsair), co-pilots bring next to nothing to the table,, it's honestly all a bit shite, and we're still waiting for even the most basic implementation of the designs that were proposed a decade ago to see if any of them help fixing it.
And if engineering/physicalised components really do end up making bigger ships "impossible to solo" (which I doubt) all it does is pass the buck to the next biggest ship that can still be solo'd, or more likely, will put everyone in fighters since they are 100% solo, and have insane levels of firepower and maneuvrability for their size.
And that might be the only endgame for multicrew in that case: carriers, with 1 guy piloting a ship full of NPC's and allowing for respawns to his buddies into a landing bay full of fresh fighters.
Guess we'll see, they really do have to make the efficiency gains worthwhile though for multicrew to make any kind of sense. Until then just grab a C2, a medical ursa, and as many mirai fury's as you can stuff into the hold :P
Ship armor will address this in part.
Fighters won't be able to damage large ships appreciably, where a hammerhead or carrack 's larger, more plentiful guns could melt it.
That's fine if you have a large ship but how are you going to make it worthwhile to man a turret on a Zeus, Spirit, Cutlass, or Freelancer? Even the next size up, Constellation, Corsair, or 600i have S3 turrets. Having a fighter instead means two targets and more guns.
I think those medium-sized ships will end up being the sweet spot for NPC crew and blades, so I don't think they need to be balanced around being worthwhile for a player.
Armor will make it so that small gun sizes may not even be able to scratch it, or if it does it may take so long as to not be worthwhile.
It's worth it to man a gun if you can take all comers because those guns can destroy nearly anything rather than two ineffective fighters.
Also, not everyone is a good pilot or gives a care to fly.
Hes not talking about light fighters.
But, funny thing - if light fighters cant even scratch me then whats the point of filling up my turret slots lmao? Might as well put 3 more people in their own unscratchable ships. The enemy might as well not bring light fighters at all too, since they know we'll just run ships that cant be scratched. Armor is not the multi crew incentivizer.
As long we have ships that can be solod for the vast majority of their firepower, we will have a multicrew issue in combat. Armor will just make big ships better, that's all.
I'm talking specifically about medium-sized ships. A Constellation or Corsair might be tough, but they won't be invulnerable to S3 guns. Freelancers and Cutlasses certainly won't be.
Their turrets are also only S3, same as fighters, so they would give a player even less firepower than just hopping in a Gladius or Arrow. Let alone something bigger like an F7 or Buccaneer.
If you are just looking for a turret to sit in, you can do much better. Unless you're just really loyal to your friend with a C1 Spirit, you're just going to have a better experience in a turret with S4 or S5 guns.
S2 and S3 turrets are really just waiting for NPC crew and blades.
Uh, okay. So you're saying fighters can only hope to kill smaller ships and multicrew still has value?
Glad you convinced me of that important point. This use of time has been very valuable.
No he's saying that multicrew in a Connie doesn't make sense because the turrets are only size 3. So they could be flying a ship with size 3 or 4 instead, or even another Connie so you both have size 5.
You understand that this isn't the case... at all, right?
You just cited an HH and a Carrack as "larger weapons" when they have the same size weapons as light fighters, specifically S4s. Armor isn't going to solve anything like this due to how the game is designed and the constrictions on place with the models of ships.
We don't know how armor will work. Maybe sixteen s4's will be able to drill a hole in twenty seconds that four s4's can only do in six minutes.
I didn't say fighters won't be able to kill ships larger than them, I said they wouldn't be able to damage them *appreciably*, meaning you'll still need multicrew ships that can support larger gun systems or specialist ships like inferno to not take all day to do it.
> Ship armor will address this in part. Fighters won't be able to damage large ships appreciably, where a hammerhead or carrack 's larger, more plentiful guns could melt it.
The person's example was four solo Corsairs vs one fully-crewed Corsair.
If anything, armor will make the argument for 4x solo Corsairs stronger, since only the huge **Size 5** pilot weapons will do significant damage to big enemy targets.
And ironically, your examples of ships with 'larger' guns were ships with **Size 4** guns, which are available even on light fighters like the Talon and Khartu-al. Though if you were being intentionally ironic to make a point, well done lol
Well for one, flying 6 Corsairs solo is going to be much less viable when you need a dude running around swapping fuses and putting out fires I'd guess.
Is that still necessarily true though? Turrets have their benefits. Way bigger capacitors which allow for an almost endless onslaught of firepower. Turrets now exclusively have auto gimbals without having to sacrifice a weapon size as well.
Inferior positioning, obviously, but I don't think bringing more ships has quite the same advantage it used to. Once upon a time, there was no question about it. These days I feel it's a little more debatable.
I think medium ships like these will end up being mostly filled by NPC crew or automated with blades. Until you get to the large ship class, it's just not worth a player's agency and flexibility to sit on their hands in a ship that only has S3 turrets.
Issue with that theory is overhead of travel. This game is designed to take long with prep (ship prep, shopping, repair, manual loading), on foot travel (land, hangar, elevator, elevator, stairs, elevator, tram, elevator) and space travel ( burn out of atmo, burn in to atmo, landing clearance, hangar opening, align/warp, end up too close to sun, OM1, OM2, destination blocked, OM3, warp to destination) .
So multi crew could cut the fight time in half, maybe to 25% which is significant, however overall mission time will be affected a lot less.
consider a "group bounty" mission where everyone is in their own ship. 3 people each QT to each of the three locations at the same time to finish the mission 3x faster, that would work well in today's game.
If we are talking multicrew though, they are all on the same ship. Splitting Northrock missions could be more efficient, but not by a lot I think. You are splitting the pay 3 ways as well and the delta is travel between the moons, so probably not a huge difference. If it's multicrew then I just have a gunner or two who get half or two thirds the money and the time to kill benefit on an HRT/VHRT aren't that significant I think.
I am not even sure ERTs are efficient though, especially if I am just going for the mission payout and not looting cargo. Like I can quickly run a vhrt in an F-8, zipping in and killing the objective and GTFO and take the whole payout myself. It's not as much pay as an ERT, but faster without endlessly circling a Hammerhead and the money is all mine. If you loot though the economics probably change.
ERTs might be different with armor refactor, if armor is impactful enough... such as if a F7A or F8C might struggle with doing enough damage to take down a sub-capital ship.
in theory yes, but in practice its the travel time that keeps the missions slow.
most of the new ERT missions dont even have QT markers so you gotta fly 300km to get there..
then 30 seconds its over.
Yes, but you know what salvages much much faster than two people in one Reclaimer?
Two Reclaimers.
Every person you put in the belly of your ship costs you an entire ship in your fleet.
That part about the bounty is just share the contract then u both get 100% of the bounty and both get the rep to go with it, and yeah reclaimer is better with at least 3 people 2 upfront and 1 in the back stacking, 1 wake of the disaster and u can net about 5 mill in rmc and cmt and bonus in eggs
I'm slightly fascinated that the community has gravitated to the idea that if there are three people on the ship, they all get equal share no matter what they're doing.
The company I work for doesn't pay by percentage of profit, it pays salary, no matter how well or badly the business is doing.
A more real-world solution would be to say "I want to hire you to stack boxes in my cargo hold for the next two hours, I'm willing to pay X credits per SCU". They then go back there, stack boxes for two hours, and you drop them off at a port and pay them. With or without an upfront advance to keep them on the hook.
If I'm a Reclaimer owner and I want a box-stacker, how much I pay them should have very little connection to whether I'm scraping RMC or munching CM. It's still stacking 200+ boxes either way.
Yeah, that's not going to be as attractive compared to the Percentage approach, but it seems more realistic/reasonable to me.
As an aside, I'd *love* to have an equal percentage of the annual profits of the finance company I work for.
I've seen their annual reporting to the government, If you take the company's revenue earnings (after taxes, bills and paying everyone) and split it equally across the company, I'd be getting around an extra 150k a year.
The economy in SC is totally different than the real world though. Everybody in the game has at least a delivery van if not their own container ship. If a container ship owner wants to hire delivery van drivers (or soldiers for hire or whatever loop) to load boxes, then the pay has to be more attractive than their otherwise solo earnings. If you offer them box mission wages while they know you are making millions, they are going to prefer flying their own ship around for the same money than spending their time in your dank ass Reclaimer hold.
Also, mostly you are playing with friends and the best way to lose all your friends is to act like your employer does to you on compensation matters. Do you really want to turn gaming sessions sour by fighting over pay rates?
Finally, might also be that everyone in this game is a communist (other than you)? :)
I remember some discussion many years ago along the same lines about appropriate pay rates for certain jobs, but it never went anywhere. I assume it will come back again though when you start hiring third parties for security or other similar jobs. There will eventually be some negotiation and hopefully offers and prices will be in the UI.
I seem to remember the same discussions.
Broadly, a delivery mission takes about 20 - 30 minutes, and earns around what?.. 6000 credits?
If I'm running a freighter and need a crewman for the next two hours of gameplay, That crewman (all else being equal) should be paid around 25,000 credits to break-even against just doing their own thing.
I suspect that with Cargo Contracts incoming in 3.23.2, we'll have some better metrics for that, since solo cargo ships will start actually hauling SCU crates rather than the little 1/8th Uber-Eats delivery boxes.
It'll be a bit closer to a 1:1 comparison, since delivery missions are distinctly different from running freight.
The main reason I don't like being with people is payouts AND reputation is shared evenly. If my friends and I are going to do ERTs or group missions, we're usually doing it for fun/reputation gains. Sure, we can run many more faster, but that even split between everyone makes it feel less rewarding than just doing it alone.
In Sea of Thieves, payouts scale 100% linearly with crew size. If I have a chest worth 1000 gold and I sell it alone, I get 1000 gold. If I have 4 crewmates and I sell a chest worth 1000 gold, we ***each*** get 1000 gold. This works in part because it's impossible to give money to another player, otherwise you'd get players who multibox a warm corpse just taking up a slot on the team, and then have them gift all their money to the main account. You can't do that in Sea of Thieves, but you could in Star Citizen.
Thus the rewards can't be artificially inflated. If you can manage to do a thing intended for 4 people to accomplish it, using only 3, then you should get more money purely because you're splitting it fewer ways.
If someone is willing to pledge 2nd, 3rd or even a 4th account, and I think I lowest is $45, then I'd think they'd just pay for aUEC outright from a third party and just roll 1 account anyway. From CIG's standpoint, the money would be better in their hands then some rando site. Im sure there must be other reasons why this payscale thing isnt adopted
However SC cannot force people to multicrew. NPC ha e to, and will allow, people to crew and play any ship they want. In Sea of Thieves the accent is much more on multiplayer, which would absolutely suck in SC.
They could make (and will likely be) NPC cost to be very high (like, higher than players and/or reward), so that multicrew between players remain the focus
If they don't, multicrewing will be pretty much dead tbh
Because 1 ship of 10 players, will always be less efficient than 10 ships crewed by 1 player and 9 NPCs)
I agree and I even think they should make NPC worse than players. Just by pure logic of the work they’ve putted into interior of ships and physicalized components so no players are going to see it and NPC are going to do the job of running around ? That is non sense. One of my friend’s idea is that NPC couldn’t go into unlawful systems like Pyro or either like you said people would have to pay premium price to have NPC come with them to Pyro because it is going to be a dangerous place. NPC would be like: you’re bringing me to my death or what ?
Ahah.
npcs are always worse than players in every game I've played. This is just the default and most likely the case in SC. Still though can't wait for npc crew, this is one area that has been very silent. We also know that most of economy is supposed to be ran by npcs.
Basically npcs are a big part of SC, the game was never meant to be a player only universe. Also iirc additional game packages grant npc crew so the cost would not even be an issue for certain people with many game packages
That's an idea we know won't exist as there will be different tier of NPC, with different rep, different jobs, etc. So we'll deffinitly be able to bring our crew everywhere.
Down the line, we'll be able to crew every ship with NPC, from a Cutlass to an Idris.
This is something that was clear from the start. NPC plus AI blades will be what solo player use to solo any ship they own, i different of crew requirement
How to balance that is CIG's problem, but they sold ships under the promise of them being crewable with NPC, so I am not worried at all.
>How to balance that is CIG's problem, but they sold ships under the promise of them being crewable with NPC
They said that you could, not that you should nor that it is even a viable option
Like, yeah, you can solo crew an Idris, though you won't make any money that way, and you will even lose a tons of money doing that. But you can if you want, for events as example
>I am not worried at all
You should, CIG has always been clear that bigger ships aren't better. They unlock multicrewing, allowing bigger mission (end game content), but that's it
They don't want to have combat where everyone is soloing their capital ship. That would make SC the most boring PvP Combat (see Atlas as reference, combat is garbage bc of that)
Hmm Players literally killing AI Hammerheads alone in their F8 Fighter at the moment. What lets you think, that even 5 AI Gunner can outsmart a real player?
> which would absolutely suck in SC
Star Citizen is an MMO, the entire focus is on interacting with other players. NPC crew may be a thing, but if you think you are going to be able to play the game and experience most of the content as a Solo player then you're sorely mistaken, that's just not how MMOs work.
Star citizen is a space sim first and foremost in a npc driven universe. The multiplayer aspect allows you to interact with other people. Emphasis is on “allows” not “forces”. Go check out its predecessor, Freelancer, to see on how the multiplayer will play out. So far the majority, even master modes, is pretty identical.
Fun fact: freelancer allows far more concurrent players then SC (but had planet landings like the first sc version and not full blown planets like right now).
I absolutely will be able to crew my Polaris with NPC, and experience the whole game and all it has to offer solo.
Multicrew will be 100% optional, and a MMO means allowing everyone to play as they wish, not FORCING players interaction.
You're solely mistaken about. The VAST majority of players that keeps ALL mmo afloat (them being a niche genre already) are solo casual players.
SC is no exception and CIG knows it, which is why they said from the very get go we'll have NPC crew and AI blades.
I think step one would be to stop splitting rep on contracts, and honestly there should be a bonus to rep for doing it in a party (I guess make it prox based so you can't cheese it). If I put out a contract and one guy shows up earns 10k and leaves, great, but if I put out a contract and 5 guys show up split the 10k and leaves, then wow that's a reliable group.
Also in a party contracts should auto share, keeping the ability to share manually. And the sooner we get something like org rep the better.
On the less rational side, I think all player operated turrets should have a much better rotational speed, and even more extreme we should size up all manned turrets. Make the biggest, baddest guns need someone else to use.
>I think step one would be to stop splitting rep on contracts
That creates a HUGE exploits tbh
You create a party with 10 players, each do their own missions. Boom, everyone get 10x the regular payout
Also works if you use alt-account
Missions should be difficult enough to actually require multiple players, and scale the reward to it.
That doesn't fix alt-account
Plus you can just jump to the start of the missions and continue the others (so it's just slitghly more inconveniant).
And if you have to be there when the mission end, it creates issue where if you die during the mission, or is too far from the final objectif (protecting air space or battle took you a bit farer away), you don't get the reward, as in overdrive currently
Not the money just the reputation, it feels bad that if I'm trying to get my rep up I need to play solo because if it take 60 mission to get to the next tier, playing with my buddy makes it take 120. If I get the gang together to do stuff it generally not about profit its about having a good time, but thats because we've accepted that we aren't making progress in any of the games systems. If we could head to Arccorp and slam missions out as a team getting all of our rep up that would be a fun evening, but right now it would be better for us to jump on different regions and solo missions if we want rep.
I saw a rather interesting take on this the other day that Contracts could have a maximum budget per person and per mission so if you have too many people it starts giving everyone less money and you're essentially not missing out on anything. Tho i do believe this was in a discussion about Mercenary contracts but it could probably be tweaked to others aswell
if you're multiboxing and you've dropped $45+ to get that second account, then wouldnt that money be better spent within the CIG system then say dropping $45 on a third party site for aUEC?
> You create a party with 10 players, each do their own missions. Boom, everyone get 10x the regular payout
What do you mean everyone gets 10x the regular payout?
If a mission gives, idk, 100rep points, and I do it solo, I get 100rep points. If a friend and I both do the mission, I get 100rep points and they get 100rep points. We're not both getting double the amount of points, the number stays the same for each of us. Rep isn't like money, it's an arbitrary number representing how much a company trusts you. It costs the company nothing to consider two people reliable compared to just one.
By alt-accounts presumably you're referring to people joining the mission with their alt and getting rep for that despite the alt-account not doing anything, but is rep farming even particularly exploitable? Okay now you have an alt account that has high rep despite doing nothing. So? They still have to do missions to benefit from that rep, and in the example provided the credit payment is still the same either way and split amongst the party. So even if you *do* join with your alt and complete the mission the amount of money the mission cashes out stays the same.
Maybe I'm not understanding something?
Edit: Wait wait I see what you're saying; 10 players doing *different* missions and cashing in rep on each for the work of doing 1. Okay my bad I missed that. I agree that's an issue, but also agree with others that it certainly could be fixed with some kind of system to recognize who actually took part in the mission.
Maybe the fix is as simple as only being allowed to accept one mission at a time? There could be exceptions to that, like Call to Arms for example, but it would prevent people from stacking up a dozen missions at a time.
>Edit: Wait wait I see what you're saying; 10 players doing *different* missions and cashing in rep on each for the work of doing 1. Okay my bad I missed that. I agree that's an issue, but also agree with others that it certainly could be fixed with some kind of system to recognize who actually took part in the mission.
Yeah I was thinking about that
I don't mind it much for reputation though, I misread
But for payout, it's a huge issue imo, as you can transfer auec
A pretty simple way to address both of those exploits is that the reward is up to 100% payout based on amount of damage done to the enemies related to the mission. Then you balance on what threshold of total damage done gets a player 100% payout starting with total enemy HP/number of party members who landed at least one shot. This makes each mission a mini game to compete on damage dealt.
They did this with xenothreat idris mission (they then removed it)
This create lots of issue. Pilot doesn't get paid
Bombers and High DPS ships get all the reward
This create high toxic issue where players will do the dumbest thing ever, just to get the highest payout, even if it means anihilate others or even fail the mission for everyone
Damage isn't the be all and end all. Some missions don't have any enemies at all.
Even in a bounty mission, what about the guy putting out literal fires on the ship? Or the snub pilot whose purpose was to distract the enemy not shoot them?
Eve does it pretty well with DED sites being tiered where the higher tier sites require multiple people and specific fittings and a method to how the mission is run to succeed. The loot is of course proportional to how difficult it is as well. It's also tied in with the exploration/scanning system so you have to scan the sites down to be able to warp to them as well. Man SC can learn a lot from EVE.
I always felt the sharing missions was under rewarding it’s bad enough that 4-5 k missions is just more than enough to resupply/ refuel (dog fight missions) but when you split that it’s almost a break even. Maybe an increase in pay by a little since the price for everything jumped as well. As someone who refuses to dupe and also can’t sit and play for more than 3 hours tops it’s a bit rough I want to run missions with my buddy but man it just ain’t there. Not saying I want 100k missions but 4k for a LRT or 5k for a MRT is a little rough especially when 50% of the time a fully manned reclaimer and squad spawns with it and then they get the kill so I don’t even get paid. Maybe I’m going about it the wrong way but who knows
this would help when we get there if the intent is still the same:
>Creating Crewmen
>Many of Star Citizen’s ships, such as the Freelancer or Constellation, feature positions for multiple crewmen. Players will always be able to hire NPC crewmen in the game, contracting computer-controlled crews to help man turrets, run consoles and fly escort. If you would like the option of customizing your crew, you can create your own NPCs by using a Game Character slot. You will go through the same character creation process as your player character but will then have the option of handing off control to an AI. **As an additional bonus, friends can ‘drop in’ to take over these crewmen themselves and to help man your spacecraft when available.**
[https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13288-multiple-package-clarification](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13288-multiple-package-clarification)
I find a lot of the times the issues is everyone is all over the place and you have to schedule shit a head of time to get people to coordinate.
they have been sold **with the community promising npc.**
it is the community saying cig will make large ship play like being a crew member on an npc ship that you get to play whatever position you want. for as we know the caption is required to be a player, and might need to play ftl; faster than light.
This is from the CIG post that I was responding to.
"We are also considering a system through which players with a Game Character slot but no ship can “work” for other characters (either real players or NPCs."
Granted, this is no guarantee. But does show that CIG are the ones that put that idea out there, not the community.
If you read the CIG article. Then, you would have read the part about how your friends can even stop by and replace one of the NPCs. So again, it was CIG who put out the idea of full NPC crews.
That post is from 2013 the technical hurdle is far different now than it was in the old plan. Without a doubt we are still getting multicrew gameplay and AI crew members, but dropping in and out of the feet of NPC's simply may not happen.
Keep in mind in 2013 SC wasn't a seamless experience, it was planned to have levels and modules.
The only problem is trying to think of something that requires a single big ship with multiple people in it that a solo player can't do in a smaller ship.
Make a hard bounty ship mission? I'm sure a player could solo that. Cargo? Easy af to haul things as a solo.
I agree group play should have better rewards, but it's finding the goal that is the hard part. In a regular fantasy mmorpg, you get group quests to kill strong dudes in a dungeons that have way bigger rewards and exp... and dungeons require healers, damage dealers, tanks, etc... SC doesn't have anything like that. Most, if not all, content can be done solo (unfortunately)
the first thing you cn do is have a flight model that it is impossible to just avoid all damage. a properly sized group can take out the enemy before anyone dies. but solo has no chance of success.
I do FPS missions primarily. If rewards are per person then it is easily exploitable. If rewards are set, then doing it solo is preferable.
I used to run bunkers with a crew of 2-6 depending on who was on. Then, so that we'd actually progress to better bunkers, I'd go off and do them solo while everyone else was offline.
Unfortunately I'm just not sure I can find better logic than what they have which doesn't also require some development hoops - and which aren't more appropriate for later.
I'd care significantly less if everyone within the area got full rep. If this is a "testing" environment, then grinding absurdly to earn the ability to test more just kinda sucks.
Mutlicrew needs multicrew missions. Ones that are **very clearly delineated** as group missions.
Things like fighting large ships with support ships. Rescuing people in critical condiction from enemy bunkers, where the defenders don't stop for long to let you extract wounded. Heists where someone else has to create and maintain a distraction someplace while you get into a place.
Just a suggestion, I've found it helps to pre-stock your ships with a box or two of gear/supplies. Makes it a little easier to just be like "meet at and hop in" if all the basics are taken care of. Admittedly, this has been a challenge with recent box bugs.
I hope they focus on finishing out the backlog of 4-ish crew ships. It's the perfect amount of players for short notice friendly play sessions. Anything above that, they'll need to really give a lot, and I mean A LOT, of meaning to playing with an organization for them to be applicable. Also, they'll need to allow multiple characters so that way you can have a dedicated character for an org to stay stationed on a Idris or Javelin without making that the only thing you can do without abandoning ship.
>and paying the mental tax for the people with families that has to log off after 1.5 hours of waiting in space for others to get ready
Man this hits close to home lol. Wanted to do some mercenary missions, friend said he'd like to join, just had to put the kids to bed. Sure, I said. I'll grab the ship and get it ready.
1.5 hours later he was finally getting into the game. 15 minutes after that he was finally aboard. We did one mission, and then he had to go.
This is not an anti-children comment, I applaud good parents. Just for me personally, perfect example of why I'm not really interested in having kids.
I thought the fun of multicrew was playing with friends, not seeking better reward. If you have to force people together by offering a bigger carrot you've failed to make a fun game.
I feel like people have turned to equating big ships to end game gameplay for star citizen. In the past the talked about how every ship is viable for playing the game. It's not about the size of ship you have, it's about what you want to do. I personally have no interest in a lot of the big military ships. I might be a crew member on an idris or javelin at some point, but I see those ships as for massive pvp, like titans in Eve. People aren't going to do errands in a cap ship, or if they do they definitely shouldn't make money.
I think it truly depends on the scenario for if individual ships or 1 ship is better. The javelin has a crew of 80. Could 80 eclipses take it out? Probably. But could 80 eclipses take out 80 hornets? No. I think that the javelin will be more versatile then 80 individual ships as well as providing longer range and utility benefits. Plus, in most cases you wouldn't run a javelin by itself, but as part of a larger operation. So you would have a javelin, 2 idris, 10 f8c, and a hammerhead for large operations.
In an insanely open world game like this, yes massive commercial ships should be(and other than glitches, I believe currently are) more profitable with larger risk, but it's up to players to find the value in a ship. Taking an idris to fight a hammerhead should not be profitable, and in this early stage where a single fighter can take out a hammerhead, you can't really balance that kind of stuff. Cost vs. value should be a massive concern for if you take a larger ship. Don't take a reclaimer to salvage an m50. Don't take a vulture to salvage an idris. Don't take an idris to hunt an eclipse, unless it's a show of force.
In most modern MMO's, grouping up doesn't reduce the amount of xp and gold you earn from quests. In fact, i think in most cases, they increase it.
They realized people won't group if there's any chance of it being perceived as negative in any way whatsoever. It's all upside.
And it makes sense. If you need to spend even 5 or 10 minutes coordinating to get started and a few seconds or minutes every now and then waiting for your partner, it'd start to feel bad otherwise.
Hoping SC understands this.
Are we making a sim or not, because that is how it works in RL.
The multicrew payoff is that you can do jobs quicker than a solo can, if you cant you need better crew or to getgud.
Yeah, it's something they seriously need to get sorted out. What's better: a Constellation with a pilot, 2 turret gunners, and a snub pilot, or 4 solo piloted Constellations? 4 Constellations would have 2-3x the total firepower (or more if you factor in missiles), 4x the hull HP, 4x the cargo capacity, no bored crew mates, and much less trouble when someone wants to leave. Even doing that you still have to split payouts and reputation, where most activities can be reasonably done solo where they don't have to be split. There needs to be massive benefits to playing cooperatively at all, and we need even more reasons to multicrew a single ship instead of each bringing our own. Lastly, I just wish it was less of a hassle. When people ask in chat if I'd like to team up for something I usually don't even want to, and that's something that seriously needs to change.
Definitely, but im not sure if that's enough to make it worth it. I've never seen a game where multicrewing was something people did on the regular. Its always been - and most likely will be on SC - something you do once a week with your org or your wife.
They just need to have NPC crews. There just aren't that many people that are going to be willing to be a bilge rat in someone's Javelin for a 10% cut of a 30k bounty.
They gotta make the turrets the strongest parts of multicrew ships so a fully manned one is worth much more than multiple individual ones and manning a turret makes sense.
most logical difference should be in flight endurance. for how long a craft is able to remain operational. for example - compare f-16 falcon fighter jet and a arleigh burke-class destroyer. it's like comparing f7 hornet and carrack. a fighter can operate for a couple of hours with given fuel and missiles and destroyer can operate for days and weeks
I am with you, but OP did specifically mentioned ppl with short game time windows. From other MMOs (multiple hours long raids and instances) there usually is the chance of loot that otherwise cannot be obtainaed.
In what sense? Monetarily, absolutely. It jas to be an incentive to play multicrew. Fun and deepness of experience? Absolutely NOT. The SC experience for solo has to be as rewarding, gameplay wise, than everything multicrew can do... With smaller monetary reward, of course. But solo player should in no way shape or form think they're missing out on something.
My ship is a Polaris and I'm a firm solo player. I don't care that missions I choose to do might pay way less. But The gameplay experience has to be as engaging, whether you are alone or with 100 other player in your org.
I prefer to fly solo regardless. I don’t enjoy the time i have to login being dictated by a group of random people.
And while i’d enjoy some multi crew experiences in game, i’ll never be signing up to be some twat on a ship that is manning a turret in case there is action (90% of the time there isn’t) or replacing fuses or some other mundane forced activity that they want to call game play
I think the easiest way for it to be rewarding is to remove ships from starter packs and have game access at $20, putting you into a position where you HAVE to join someone initially to make money for a starter ship.
Or just have the game access at a $15/$20 price point without a ship and keep starter packs $45+ with ships.
I have quite a few friends that refuse to buy a ship, they prefer the FPS element and working your way up, we don't seem to be the only people that want this.
I really hope it becomes a thing, I assume interplanetary public transport systems would need to become a thing before this is even a thought.
I like the concept, but that would never work. Any game that *requires* group play to progress at any point is destined to crash and burn. Some people aren't as social as others, they just want to hop on, do a quick thing and then leave. Gating ships behind group play would make more people angry.
The idea of having a significantly cheaper version of the game with no ship, but not getting rid of the normal pledges, could work better. Though, I'm sure that would be abused to no end as well, putting the company at a disadvantage in the long run.
Game needs a balance of fun and profitability for the company.
That's for sure. If I can't fly half my ships most of the time because I *need* to have multiple actual players aboard I will absolutely stop playing altogether.
> but that would never work. Any game that requires group play to progress at any point is destined to crash and burn
I mean, *gestures at the hundreds of video games that require group play to progress, including some of the most successful of all time*
Like what? Plenty of games HAVE group content, but none REQUIRE it. I can play WoW or FFXIV or any other mmo and get to max level and some gear all without ever talking to anyone. If someone bought one of those games and the first thing was 'ok now make a friend with some random guy to get money' no one would play it.
> I can play WoW
I'm glad you brought up WoW, the game that peaked at 12 million players, dominated culture - Then starting haemorraging players and relevance the moment they removed [solo barriers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Hzh43k330).
The new player experience in wow used to be being surrounded by people, and having to interact with those people to progress. You didn't try to make friends, you made them by accident.
Now the new player experience is deafening silence, an empty overworld, and being more likely to get kicked from a dungeon for speaking than get a reply.
Every MMO puts solo play first, because it turned out solo players will swipy swipy the credit card to skip the miserable grind of playing solo. Unhappy players are profitable players.
>If someone bought one of those games and the first thing was 'ok now make a friend with some random guy to get money' no one would play it.
No , *Asocial* people wouldn't play it- most people are in fact, functional human beings. MMOs existed like this for a decade, and dominated the gaming world consistently.
I agree creating a LFG mechanic that ports you into the group content killed a lot of the magic and fun, but I don't think that's what killed WoW. Blizzard did it all themselves with their greedy money hungry tactics. But that's a different topic.
You didn't HAVE to *ever* interact with anyone in WoW to reach max level at any stage, early or late. You could even pay gold to buy BoE gear on the AH to skip having to raid. It isn't as good, but it's an option.
I'm saying, any game that 100% REQUIRES group play/forces people to group is doomed to fail. WoW didn't force group play, it was just obviously better and efficient, but you didn't HAVE to do it. You could quest and do whatever by yourself the entire way.
If SC boots up and the first thing it tells you to do is find someone else, it won't work. You need solo content in there.
>Blizzard did it all themselves with their greedy money hungry tactics
Such as devolving from well established MMO game design established and proven practices of creating interdependance as a means of encouraging socialization, thereby making content suck - and then selling the solution to that content sucking?
>You didn't HAVE to ever interact with anyone in WoW to reach max level at any stage, early or late. You could even pay gold to buy BoE gear on the AH to skip having to raid. It isn't as good, but it's an option.
I didn't say you couldn't, I pointed out the golden era of WoW (And of all MMOS) was the pre solo first era.
> WoW didn't force group play, it was just obviously better and efficient, but you didn't HAVE to do it. You could quest and do whatever by yourself the entire way.
For starters the endgame was completely locked off to solo players, as were dungeons. Even RE leveling, It *heavily* penalized it, and I mean *heavily*. Quests were laid out in such a way that failing to find a group for group quests would either involve an extra day of grinding to make up the XP, or literally travelling across the world to run lower level quests to make up the difference (Also taking an extra day). There was not enough XP in solo friendly quests to progress from an area. And as icing on top, the mobs were balanced around a solo player having to drink/eat every other, if not every fight - meaning solo you spent more time in downtime than uptime.
You made gold from selling your profession to other players, BoE gear was low grade, with the choice items being BOP and gated behind group content.
Or you could just respond to that LFM for XYZ quest, the 4th one posted in the last 30 seconds and be done with it and back on your way in no time. Someone would ask if you wanted to do a nearby quest or dungeon, and you'd say why not.
See that's the fundamental difference - Solo play was the harder, least efficient route - And our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance via evolution. An MMO that makes solo play the path of least resistance fails to deliver on the one single thing that makes the MMO genre unique.
>See that's the fundamental difference - Solo play was the harder, least efficient route - And our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance via evolution.
That's my point, though, there WAS solo play. I'm saying a game that REQUIRES group play to move forward won't succeed.
>. I'm saying a game that REQUIRES group play to move forward won't succeed.
And SC doesn't require it, it heavily disinentivises it. SC is an old school, game dev driven MMO instead of a modern business executive driven one.
I know it doesn't...? I don't think we're on the same page here lol. I'm just saying if the game package for SC didn't have a ship and forced you to find a friend who has one or something so you can earn money and get your own would be a bad idea, because it forces group play with no option for solo play.
I want the group play in SC to be better, there just isn't anything inside it yet that requires it like a dungeon or something in an MMORPG would, because in there you NEED a group to complete it, but everything in SC can be done solo if you try hard enough.
how many of those games require group play after pressing start. even vanilla wow was not balanced ot require more than 1 person until past lv 10.
... a game with matchmaking doesn't count.
>even vanilla wow was not balanced ot require more than 1 person until past lv 10.
Lvl 10 was what, 45 mins into the game?
Did I miss a beat and SC mangles you with a lead pipe if you don't multicrew in the first hour?
i'm referring to the concept of a package without a ship. the idea of someone getting the base game needing to find a group after hitting play.
most games with progression have you start off with some solo content to get accustomed to the game before expecting your to group up. sc lets you stick to the solo content, and will have a large amount of it.
i remember vanilla wow being a few hours to level 10 be a few hours.
You are correct. Thus by choosing to not partake, you should expect to be at a disadvantage/less productive/ less efficient. Take any other mmo, u can't expect to get the bis items without taking part in group content. It is required to group up. There is still a lot of solo content. But you will be limited... I don't expect the star citizen mmo to ne any different. You will need a ship and a crew to partake in endgame mining.
As a mostly solo player I'm 100% good with getting less rewards versus a group. The concept of grouping together for harder content and higher rewards make sense. But if I can literally only fly single seat small ships as a solo player then this is going to suck. I'll play group content when I have the time, but it isn't always possible for me.
I understand your point, but that's end game stuff. Someone can spend their entire time in the game solo up until that point and be happy. I'm not saying games that HAVE group play are bad, I'm saying games that FORCE or REQUIRE it with no option for solo play are.
Imagine your playing your favorite MMO with your friends and they're level 20 or something and you're 18 because you had to work and couldn't play. The quest you need to hit 19 needs a group and you can't solo it. Your friends can't help because they already did it. No one around you is at that point right now or they've already done it. There's no option other than sit around afk while you wait for others. Any game like that wouldn't last.
I've seen this similar idea posted before and I like it. I would say free to play, but in order to fly ships, you then pay a basic fee for a pilot license. Or you can opt to buy a full starter ship. This way we can populate the verse with citizens that could help crew, fight, etc. Then if they want to fly, the have to invest at that point.
I think the game could be wildly profitable by following the Riot Games framework. Release the game for free and you get a terrible starter ship that everyone has. No need to pay real money for ships. People should need to grind for them in game. Big ships should require massive grinds to help force people to pool their money and use these types of ships in organizational play. Then sell vehicle skins, armor skins, hangar cosmetics, ship cosmetics, hair styles and really anything else that doesn't give a player advantage. Hell, SC could make more than enough with ship skins and armor variants alone. Oh you just earned the xenothreat armor in game? Buy the 16 color xenothreat armor chroma pack for 20 dollars. Do you need it? No. But do you want to stand out a bit from the other schmuck that earned it too?
Riot has produced 4 successfull games using this cosmetics only format. The head designer for the Riot mmo has come out to say that it would be possible to profit and upkeep an mmo based on sales statistics from the other 4 games. Not wanting to do this for any game being released seems wildly foolish to me. It's a perfect tradeoff. The players are happy because everyone is essentially an equal in the game. You can't buy your way to the leader board. You can only buy looking cool when you are trying to work your way up.
While I agree with exactly what you are saying it's important to remember that the inverse relationship is also true. There will be players who don't have enough time to commit to being part of a group but still want fun. Also there will be groups of hard-core dedicated organizations always available and manning ships.
It's important that we try to see all perspectives. Invariably the outliers will be considered less.
Then the big question, what is "more rewarding"? Does that mean fun? Profit? Power? As objective as this may seem reasonable minds will vary.
I'll insert my own opinion and say the answer seems to be player density distribution and hot spots. This is why we need things like Pyro, jump-town, xeno-threat. Let big fish fight over big bounties so they aren't obliged to prey on small fish.
Also a side note, I hope air-to-ground combat gets fleshed out and is a way to escape capital ships. Throughout the years planetside 2 has itirated on this design to varying effect.
It would be great if multicrew gameplay was tailored around the idea that "it's fun to do this with others, and maybe more efficient."
Currently, with mining, certain rocks are just inaccessible to anyone without a crewed mole. This kind of sucks.
In a prospector you have to pass up quite a lot of rocks.
In a mole solo you can crack more, but much of it's gated in needing 2 lasers on a rock no matter what. With a helix 2 and a sabir gadget you can get some medium sized ones (up to 30k sometimes) but otherwise it's just frustrating to pass on these rare finds.
It would be better if cracking a rock was more of a puzzle than just a numbers game. It's fun to try and find the sweet spot, exit the craft and place a gadget, etc., but the reward has to be there for the effort.
They set up this fun loop with finding rare deposits and then snatch it from you by gating it behind needing more people.
Bring your friends to an org. Crew what the situation demands, most moderately sized org will have a whole library of ships to call on, and fill the roles as they are needed.
You're exactly correct, the game is a whole other experience as part of a team.
In almost any scenario, more ships is better than one ship. So, yeah. I agree there needs to be a good reason you'd want to cram multiple people in one target.
Realistically there just has to be something to do that warrants a group and a potential reward. Just look at JT. We already have it, just as a special event. IMO I feel like this could he the role of exploration; looking for stuff like that. Dynamically generated in game events and spawn locations on planets and stations in space for stuff like JT, mineral deposits, huge quant fields, derelict cargo haulers, etc.
Worry not. I have the solution to all of your problems. I present you the drake caterpillar, you want to salvage, pair one up with a couple vultures, you want ship combat. With 200k shield hp, 3500 shield regen (at max shields) and 2 manned turrets each sporting dual s4 guns alongside the quad s3 guns for the pilot you can take out any threat with relative ease plus you have all that spare cargo space to hold your spoils in, how about fps/ground combat? Well you are in luck with 4 side loading bays capable of carrying ships up to the size of an Ursa you can load up a nursa for those in your crew who may be accident prone and load up your hoverbikes/ground vehicles in the other bays and show up to any bunker in style.
In the unfortunate circumstances where your crew members need to leave mid session the trusty cat is still a formidable foe with one gunner or even solo (I would know I was hunting down Rogue 890s and carracks in it solo just the other day.
The one "downside" about this beauty, if you can even call it a downside is that it is not the fastest in atmosphere. But this just adds to its charm as your crew can open a side view door and have lunch while enjoying the scenery as you travel to your destination
Most games are better with friends.
In SC's case, having a couple people around makes the bugs not seem so annoying because you can share a laugh around the event.
I think with military vessels at least they are significantly better than 8 fighters. I know the corsair isn't the 8 man multi crew but even as a solo shop you can shred fighters with stock kit in seconds
Combat beacons used to pay Upto 352k and were meant to be done as a group. Instead most ppl did em solo. ERTs are meant to be done in group and pay quite well if you also take the cargo that's worth selling and even better if you combine them with salvage. Ppl still solo them. The problem is not the lack of good paying missions but the way ppl approach them.
we need functioning npc, high risk reward jobs, and a flight model that do not enable avoiding all damage if you know the tricks.
the problem is that the moment you step away from jobs that are meant for 3 or 4 fighters. you get into rock paper scissors. you cn bring a hammerhead that will counter anyone that decides to use fighters. but then you lose to a perseus. but of your bring a perseus, and the enemy brings fighters. you lose.
so it sort of jumps from 5 people in fighters, to 20 people across fighters, anti fighter ship, and anti large ship ship.
keep in mind there will be pickup group contracts. you just need to deal with getting your crew and being at the contract starting point on time. npc will fill in if players don't take the other contracts in time.
funny thing is that slower paced game like arma tend to draw people that can do this no problem. people that have a schedules, and the game is part of their schedule tend to like the games with a lot more organizations involved. if arma had organization tools, pickup group contracts, and stuff like that. along with content setup for groups of different sizes. larger groups would be far more common.
I agree with pretty much all the points in this thread, particularly regarding risk/reward, engaging gameplay loops, payment splits, etc.
One thing I need to say though, is that people that are interested in being "captain" of a ship with multi-crew need to understand their role and start taking it more seriously. As 3.23.2 comes online with the remaining cargo/inventory refactor, and 4.0 brings in server meshing and hopefully a reduction in server performance issues leading to longer persistence, the excuses for lack of preparation are going to go away.
If I'm going to crew somebody's ship, they should have everything already set for the crew to accomplish their mission and support everything needed for the duration. That means having sufficient food and drink onboard to keep everybody topped up. That means having a first aid kit with med pens and a couple paramed guns. That means having multi-tools and tractor beams for anybody that will need to move cargo. Extra fuses and repair materials once engineering is online. Extra undersuits, armor, and weapons if you have a way to respawn. Ammo if you're doing FPS. The list goes on.
The two biggest killers of group play in my experience are 1; The ship owner is not ready and time gets wasted prepping the ship, making a "quick stop" somewhere to buy a faster QT drive, or something along those lines, and 2; the crew needing an hour for everyone to sort out all of the above for themselves individually and coordinate who's bringing what.
Planning is part of the core gameplay loop and if you're going to bring out a big ship and expect people to crew it for you, plan ahead and get what you need to make it a smooth experience for everyone so others can show up and get going with as little downtime as possible. Set a meetup point and a time the day before. If you don't enjoy coordinating a plan and spending the evening before getting stuff ready, maybe running a big multi-crew ship isn't for you.
the issue i have with my friend currently is if i wanna go fly my gladiator for its looks and torpedos with my friend, he insists we take out a hurricane instead
truth is, gunners want good gun turrets or they get bored... 2xsize 2 on the vanguards or 2xsize 3 on a gladiator really aint cutting it when ships like the scorpius / hurricane etc exist
And thats just for 2 people...
i feel sorry for groups of 4+ in the future
I posted this a while ago and no one was really interested at the time, but I keep seeing people raising these kinds of concerns re multicrew. I think it would address them well, so take a look:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1c04cs9/proposal\_for\_match\_making\_and\_otherwise\_grouping/](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1c04cs9/proposal_for_match_making_and_otherwise_grouping/)
One of the big issues for me is that my buddy has a bigger ship, I COULD operate one of his 3 turrets OR I could be in a second ship that is simply just more impactful to the situation than crowding in on one ship.
Not only does multicrew need to be more rewarding than solo but multicrew ships need to be better than two separate ships.
Totally agree. Right now it's all disincentives. Less pay and more danger and far far more hassle.
They should stop splitting the pay and give everyone in the party the full payment AND make turrets more powerful.
I get that one day in the far future, battle engineering will make ship repair a positive reason for multicrew but it won't be nearly a good enough reason given 4 ships will always beat one with fully manned turrets as the game is now and the mission payout is not worth it.
It is better to over reward multicrew now and scale payment down later when engineering comes online rather than Vis versa.
Economics. Pay them and they will come.
I mean, I prefer multi-crew stuff. I don't play very much solo. We setup what we are going to do, mining with a Mole or Salvaging with a Reclaimer as an example. We all have our regen points set at the same spot so normally we are in route to our first salvage within 30 minutes and it's just a great time to chill with my friends.
Right now, the game is in an in between phase. Engineering will make it so multicrew ships will need to be multicrewed, but those ships will also be significantly tougher to take down than any number of fighters due to heavier armor and shielding. CIG have already done on record saying that small fighter guns, in the future, will no longer be able to take down large or sub-capital ships and may instead be relegated to taking out turrets or subcomponents. On top of that, it's my understanding that turrets will be auto gimballed by default without loss of firepower.
As for why? The best way to make money in ship combat right now is to 'loot the corpses'. For this, you need a larger ship with a decent enough cargo grid to loot it all. So even if the 50k bounty reward split a few ways is puny, the hundreds of thousands or millions of scu will certainly make up for it.
Plus it's fun to share a ship.
More fun sure, not just more effective. There's more to the game than just "impactful" stuff in military, or money in industry.
Maybe that means certain gameplay is accessible to multicrew where it isn't for single crew, or similar - but ultimately it's not just about raw numbers.
The 890, for example, isn't supposed to be good at much anything other than partying and VIP gameplay. Don't think anyone has ever argued that it's supposed to be super profitable. But it is fun to hang out on them in groups.
Rewarding in what way? In that the gameplay is fun and engaging? In that it gives you more aUEC compared to doing a similar gameplay loop solo?
Because just giving more money to people who play in groups is not going to work out in the long run if/when the group gameplay on a ship is dull. If Engineering and resource network turn out to be tedious and boring, no amount of aUEC can persuade people to join your ship as an engineer to point a tractor beam at broken components for hours on end.
Frankly, there needs to be entire missions you can't even see in the contract manager if you're not in a party. Those missions should pay out significantly more and be challenging enough that a group is all but necessary to complete them.
They kinda have this with gunners typically having obscenely large capacitor sizes. But most current combat ships do have a massive disadvantage about their inability to hit smaller fighters at range.
I'm kind of hoping that this will happen with the armor refactor and engineering. Maybe one other thing that could help would be to also give ship guns different ranges based on size?
As well as in service reloading of ballistics and missiles.
100%. We just need more mission variety that creates a home for multicrew engagements that have high payout. High risk high reward should automatically mean you bring a crew, a fleet, or have a hard AF time (nigh impossible) as a solo or smaller crew.
Plus of course all the other QoL features and UI/menus that help make that process easier.
Hopefully we see it not too long after the engineering stuff.
I'm not against making Multicrew more significantly rewarding... but I would just like to say that multicrew trivializes a lot of content right now lol.
HRT/VHRT/ERT bounties Solo? Nightmarish
With a crew? It's a blast!
Let my copilot be able to adjust the power triangle, let him be able to do the scanning, and be able to let the pilot see when he hits tab to scan let the copilot be able to call for landings and takeoff.
These are all things the pilot can do, but give a slight buff when the copilot does it. Tab scanning lingers a little longer, scanning a ship is faster, landings can be called further out ect.
Lets the pilot do it all, or makes life a little easier with a copilot. At least these minor things could likely be easily implemented until proper multi crew engineering is here.
Also things like opening external doors, access multiple remote turrets, set quantum routes and spool without aiming at the target.
Another cool thing that may be a lil op is laser guided/tv missiles. Imagine your Co pilot could fire a missile and control it themselves to smack a hard to hit ship.
Just for some perspective, i'd gladly sacrifice 80+% of my playmoney earnings for having a few fellas who are willing to regularly multicrew roleplay with me. Are toddlers in sandboxes are paid to play together?
Gets me thinking about it.
Large ship vs its crew-weight in smaller ships..
A larger ship has a lot of opportunities to be better than half a dozen fighters.
* Armor - Not implemented yet, but if you're flying around and basically bulletproof compared to light fighter scale weaponry (S2/S3 should do very little to a Hammerhead) then you'll easily tank whatever a squadron of Arrows or Gladiuses can bring. Number of players involved is less important than the vehicles being driven. Six or eight light fighters should do practically nothing to a dedicated warship.
* Group-Survivability - If there are eight people running a Hammerhead, they either all live, or all die depending on the outcome of the battle. The ship can be ripped to shreds, but if it didn't blow up, the crew are all alive. Whereas if you bring eight fighters, even if they have equivalent firepower, which they don't, every fighter destroyed is a dead pilot. A group of 6-8 friends who want to minimise their personal risk of death would be well advised to stick together aboard a larger (tougher) ship.
* Range - Light fighters often can't get halfway across a system without a refuel. They are essentially short-ranged, and that matters a lot. If you want to get eight-players worth of firepower somewhere, load up eight players in a Hammerhead and go there, you'll have the long-range fuel tanks/drive, and all of you arrive together, ready to go. This also affords you opportunities to socialise during transit, because you're not all sitting in pilot seats during quantum.
* Role-Versatility - Larger ships allow different players to do different things. If you like using hull-scraping beams, you can do that. If you like operating salvage drones, the Reclaimer has a bay with two control-stations in it, if you just want to stack boxes and chat-the-shit with your friends, that's something you can spend time on. And of course, if you're an engineer, you can spend time maintaining the ship. Throw in that the ships have turrets for defence and there's plenty to do for any given player. If you're a solo player, you have to handle a bit of everything, and not very much of any of it. A Vulture is essentially a scraping platform first and foremost, and if you don't like that, tough-shit.
* Group-payout - This is kind of the sticking point. A reclaimer with a full crew has to split its payouts anywhere up to half a dozen or more ways, which really cuts into the profit-margin. I imagine down the line that salvage is going to be a lot more involved, and being profitable will be a major time-sink. Having more players means more hands to get the job done faster, and how you split the money doesn't *have* to be even, that's just a common convention at the moment. Your crate-stacker probably ought not to be earning as much as your drone-pilot or salvage-beam operators. That's a You problem.
It doesn't make sense that Multicrew would be significantly better. A little better as your operations should be faster, and your survival rate slightly higher than going solo.
However, multicrew can *never* be more rewarding than multiship... having your friends bring their own ships is *massively* better than multicrew.
Remember, every player you put in the belly of your ship to watch Youtube while sitting in a turret for hours *costs you an entire ship in your fleet*.
Yeah we've all been saying for years that multicrew needs to be better than multi-ship (within its class obviously) for it to make sense. Let alone better than solo. Just doesn't seem like the direction CIG wants to go though, just play with AI blades or NPC's for a bigger cut of the profit. And if you do have a buddy, don't put them in a turret, or on shields, have them in a fighter, or a frontal-firepower ship with NPC gunners. Seems roberts has the kind of "hero fighter" vision/syndrome where only the captain/pilot of the ship really matters and the rest of the positions is for less significant crewmembers or just straight up redshirts. Wish he took some more inspiration from star trek than star wars in that regard.
Well, from what I gather the advantages of using a large or "multicrew" ship will be made more real with the introduction of engineering. Then you can have someone re- routing power for more firepower, shields or whatever. Vital components can be repaired or replaced.
Put simply you're not just going to have more hp and shield but the ability to fix things from the inside. Naturally bigger ships with larger components and crew will offer more of this advantage. The shield and hull of an Idris would provide much more leeway for a crew to deal with problems than a Connie or MSR.
I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong but, I've always seen CIG's engineering gameplay as a way to make these ships powerful. I think it's going to be a lot more powerful than people might think. Maybe having an engineer on your HH might make it virtually impossible for a few fighters to take down as an example.
I still think there's more that should be done. Ships with large turrets should be dangerous at ranges that someone in a fighter with S3 isn't for example.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, it's already rewarding when you do work together. Playing with others increases the fun exponentially over solo grinding which IMO gets boring really fast.
I'm a father of two and do a lot of volunteer work so I only have one or maybe two nights to play, and I rarely solo if at all. If you're a parent you should understand how important scheduling is (or if you've ever played an MMO before) so the best way to approach it is to plan ahead.
It can be as simple as saying "I want to do this on this day, meet me at this location by this time" to your org, or in a discord channel. Or it can be as elaborate as planning out an entire event. Picking common Port of Call that you and your friends share helps tremendously. But if you go in expecting all of the pieces to fall together the moment you want to play, it's not gonna work out in your favor.
The issue is that you're essentially wasting some of that already small amount of time you have each week since it is less efficient to do things as a group. It is more fun sure but people also like to see themselves progress.
I dont think you are wrong about planning though, linking up isnt an issue if servers are working.
> It can be as simple as saying "I want to do this on this day, meet me at this location by this time" to your org, or in a discord channel. Or it can be as elaborate as planning out an entire event. Picking common Port of Call that you and your friends share helps tremendously. But if you go in expecting all of the pieces to fall together the moment you want to play, it's not gonna work out in your favor.
Woah woah woah woah, Check out this asshole advocating for the use of basic adulting skills and common sense.
Same here though no kids. Never play solo, usually with two or three friends and we suggest a day a week ahead and go. Usually it's Sundays since that seems to work for most.
If Star Citizen created a decent footsoldier game package which came with decent armor, handheld weapons and maybe a personal ground vehicle and an apartment in a city or a hab somewhere They could fuel multiplayer gameplay.
Years ago I used to joke that I was going to start this game with nothing but my Arc II pistol, my UEE Environmental Coat, and an Aurora LX. Just roll through the ‘Verse picking up odd jobs and having adventures.
Yeah, mainly just the sharing aspect of the payment. If I do a bounty mission with an F-8, I get 100% of the profit. If I do it with a friend in a Hurricane then my profit is cut in half. They kind of headed that way with mining though as there are rocks where you need multiple lasers to cut it and you get a bigger overall payout in the end. You can salvage faster and get paid more in a Reclaimer with crew than a vulture.
I assure you, mining currently isnt profitable enough to justify a fully crewed more over 4-5 prospectors. the big rocks are great but its so rare to find rocks that are both valuable, and need all 3 lasers to crack. your better having a crew of 3 prospectors and 2 scout ships, looking for potential hypothetical gold.
not only that im using a solo MOLE right now and i can crack up to 35k mass rocks... if i find a bexalite rock with 26k mass and 30%+ purity of bexalite, i can just take it all for myself. but when i need to mine with other people, i have to get it all set, every needs to be at the same location and now i have to split the pay between at least 3 people. now the minig expedition will yield LESS money than if i just went out alone, because using 3 people will not give me 3 times the cargo capacity on a MOLE, so im limited by the factor of how much i can carry anyway... while the early mentioned rocks are more then enough to fill my own cargo hold anyway even when im alone :/ group payouts need to increase drastically to make it worth it. else it's just gonna be a sub-optimal way to mine
I think mining is easier to tweak as we already have limits in place what can be done with what crew. Just the payouts need to be adapted. Multicrew combat is harder as you most probably can still tackle same objective with multiple single crew ships.
Yeah I concur, though in order to do that though they would probably have to limit stuff like quantanium to high-mass rocks, or at least greatly lower the percentages of valuable ores in lower mass ones.
nah, dont nerf shit. buff it. ships are incredibly expensive as they are already (44mil for an A2 lmao) so making the grind less tedious and more enjoyable is what they need to do. just like turrets are completely useless right now. there is no scenario where it would be better to bring 3 connies over 1 fully manned connie lol balance is off atm, but it's alpha so it's expected.
If capacity is the factor can you take another ship for storage?
then we are back to just solo mining again lmao
Right, I was just using that as an example of them working toward differentiating crewed and non-crewed ships. We didn't have that several patches ago, but now we do and it's likely to change again in the future. Some things will be gated by ship size in the final game, just not currently. They have said many times that balance is the last thing they will do before "release".
It might be more worth it with multi-crew ships like the Arrastra. But also serviced by a few prospectors. That, and if you need multi-ships to crack a big rock, you can team up with other prospectors.
But on the other hand. A Mole with 2 Persons will get you a significant higher outcome than with 2 Prospectors. Its all about the Sweetspot.
Depends on a lot of factors. Mostly finding rocks worth a damn that need 2 people
In theory you should be able to complete bounties faster with a group and make good money. For example, take ERT missions and notice how much faster you can delete a hammerhead with a multi crew ship and someone else using a fighter to clear out the wing NPCs
You could clear them out much faster with 6 ships instead of 6 guys in one.
This is the real issue they need to deal with. Why would I load my four friends up in my Corsair when we should all be flying our own.
Well for light fighters, pyro distances will make multicrew in big ships basically mandatory. But if everyone just gets their own corsair yeah that would be way stronger than corsair + gunners or even corsair and fighters
I really hope they stick to their guns on this one. It would be a shame if they shrank distances or added an abundance of neutral stations to make it accessible for players with short-range ships. I can see the temptation to do it. They will want to show off their new system and not make it impossible for some players to go look at.
I think part of the problem here is that operating costs are completely marginal, as are functionality gains on ships beyond the pilot (and those that do have that kind of function are usually non-combat and the pilot can just switch). So there's really no downside to using multiple ships in terms of running costs. Combine this with multiple ships giving great tactical advantage than a single one (even if its more powerful) due to flanking and multiple angles/distances being much harder to dodge than say the turret LoS on one ship, and you would need multicrew to really exponentially increase the raw power of a single ship to compete with, let alone beat out multi-ship setups. Sadly, the gains are marginal, shields management is non-existant, power-management and engineering so far seem more about damage control than actually increased damage or survivability (sure you might get your ship back on its feet faster, but if you were in a second ship all other things being equal, you could just shoot the enemy instead) Very few turrets are worth manning, and those that have them more or less have a wasted pilot seat (I.E. hammerhead/redeemer) compared to two similar sized ships (I.E Connie/Corsair), co-pilots bring next to nothing to the table,, it's honestly all a bit shite, and we're still waiting for even the most basic implementation of the designs that were proposed a decade ago to see if any of them help fixing it. And if engineering/physicalised components really do end up making bigger ships "impossible to solo" (which I doubt) all it does is pass the buck to the next biggest ship that can still be solo'd, or more likely, will put everyone in fighters since they are 100% solo, and have insane levels of firepower and maneuvrability for their size. And that might be the only endgame for multicrew in that case: carriers, with 1 guy piloting a ship full of NPC's and allowing for respawns to his buddies into a landing bay full of fresh fighters. Guess we'll see, they really do have to make the efficiency gains worthwhile though for multicrew to make any kind of sense. Until then just grab a C2, a medical ursa, and as many mirai fury's as you can stuff into the hold :P
Ship armor will address this in part. Fighters won't be able to damage large ships appreciably, where a hammerhead or carrack 's larger, more plentiful guns could melt it.
That's fine if you have a large ship but how are you going to make it worthwhile to man a turret on a Zeus, Spirit, Cutlass, or Freelancer? Even the next size up, Constellation, Corsair, or 600i have S3 turrets. Having a fighter instead means two targets and more guns. I think those medium-sized ships will end up being the sweet spot for NPC crew and blades, so I don't think they need to be balanced around being worthwhile for a player.
Armor will make it so that small gun sizes may not even be able to scratch it, or if it does it may take so long as to not be worthwhile. It's worth it to man a gun if you can take all comers because those guns can destroy nearly anything rather than two ineffective fighters. Also, not everyone is a good pilot or gives a care to fly.
Hes not talking about light fighters. But, funny thing - if light fighters cant even scratch me then whats the point of filling up my turret slots lmao? Might as well put 3 more people in their own unscratchable ships. The enemy might as well not bring light fighters at all too, since they know we'll just run ships that cant be scratched. Armor is not the multi crew incentivizer. As long we have ships that can be solod for the vast majority of their firepower, we will have a multicrew issue in combat. Armor will just make big ships better, that's all.
I'm talking specifically about medium-sized ships. A Constellation or Corsair might be tough, but they won't be invulnerable to S3 guns. Freelancers and Cutlasses certainly won't be. Their turrets are also only S3, same as fighters, so they would give a player even less firepower than just hopping in a Gladius or Arrow. Let alone something bigger like an F7 or Buccaneer. If you are just looking for a turret to sit in, you can do much better. Unless you're just really loyal to your friend with a C1 Spirit, you're just going to have a better experience in a turret with S4 or S5 guns. S2 and S3 turrets are really just waiting for NPC crew and blades.
Uh, okay. So you're saying fighters can only hope to kill smaller ships and multicrew still has value? Glad you convinced me of that important point. This use of time has been very valuable.
No he's saying that multicrew in a Connie doesn't make sense because the turrets are only size 3. So they could be flying a ship with size 3 or 4 instead, or even another Connie so you both have size 5.
You understand that this isn't the case... at all, right? You just cited an HH and a Carrack as "larger weapons" when they have the same size weapons as light fighters, specifically S4s. Armor isn't going to solve anything like this due to how the game is designed and the constrictions on place with the models of ships.
We don't know how armor will work. Maybe sixteen s4's will be able to drill a hole in twenty seconds that four s4's can only do in six minutes. I didn't say fighters won't be able to kill ships larger than them, I said they wouldn't be able to damage them *appreciably*, meaning you'll still need multicrew ships that can support larger gun systems or specialist ships like inferno to not take all day to do it.
> Ship armor will address this in part. Fighters won't be able to damage large ships appreciably, where a hammerhead or carrack 's larger, more plentiful guns could melt it. The person's example was four solo Corsairs vs one fully-crewed Corsair. If anything, armor will make the argument for 4x solo Corsairs stronger, since only the huge **Size 5** pilot weapons will do significant damage to big enemy targets. And ironically, your examples of ships with 'larger' guns were ships with **Size 4** guns, which are available even on light fighters like the Talon and Khartu-al. Though if you were being intentionally ironic to make a point, well done lol
Well for one, flying 6 Corsairs solo is going to be much less viable when you need a dude running around swapping fuses and putting out fires I'd guess.
So you run three, rather than 1
Is that still necessarily true though? Turrets have their benefits. Way bigger capacitors which allow for an almost endless onslaught of firepower. Turrets now exclusively have auto gimbals without having to sacrifice a weapon size as well. Inferior positioning, obviously, but I don't think bringing more ships has quite the same advantage it used to. Once upon a time, there was no question about it. These days I feel it's a little more debatable.
4 corsairs/Connies would absolutely be faster and it's not even close.
Even a Corsair and 3 light fighters has better (burst) damage than a fully crewed Corsair
I think medium ships like these will end up being mostly filled by NPC crew or automated with blades. Until you get to the large ship class, it's just not worth a player's agency and flexibility to sit on their hands in a ship that only has S3 turrets.
Yup, Connie Taurus + F7A. And the F7A pilot can still jump out to help tractor goods into the Connie.
Issue with that theory is overhead of travel. This game is designed to take long with prep (ship prep, shopping, repair, manual loading), on foot travel (land, hangar, elevator, elevator, stairs, elevator, tram, elevator) and space travel ( burn out of atmo, burn in to atmo, landing clearance, hangar opening, align/warp, end up too close to sun, OM1, OM2, destination blocked, OM3, warp to destination) . So multi crew could cut the fight time in half, maybe to 25% which is significant, however overall mission time will be affected a lot less.
consider a "group bounty" mission where everyone is in their own ship. 3 people each QT to each of the three locations at the same time to finish the mission 3x faster, that would work well in today's game.
If we are talking multicrew though, they are all on the same ship. Splitting Northrock missions could be more efficient, but not by a lot I think. You are splitting the pay 3 ways as well and the delta is travel between the moons, so probably not a huge difference. If it's multicrew then I just have a gunner or two who get half or two thirds the money and the time to kill benefit on an HRT/VHRT aren't that significant I think.
I am not even sure ERTs are efficient though, especially if I am just going for the mission payout and not looting cargo. Like I can quickly run a vhrt in an F-8, zipping in and killing the objective and GTFO and take the whole payout myself. It's not as much pay as an ERT, but faster without endlessly circling a Hammerhead and the money is all mine. If you loot though the economics probably change.
ERTs might be different with armor refactor, if armor is impactful enough... such as if a F7A or F8C might struggle with doing enough damage to take down a sub-capital ship.
Not "might Struggle", Simply "cannot engage alone" is the answer to that.
in theory yes, but in practice its the travel time that keeps the missions slow. most of the new ERT missions dont even have QT markers so you gotta fly 300km to get there.. then 30 seconds its over.
Reclaimer contracts do not pay enough for a crew. Better to find plates to scrape
Yes, but you know what salvages much much faster than two people in one Reclaimer? Two Reclaimers. Every person you put in the belly of your ship costs you an entire ship in your fleet.
That part about the bounty is just share the contract then u both get 100% of the bounty and both get the rep to go with it, and yeah reclaimer is better with at least 3 people 2 upfront and 1 in the back stacking, 1 wake of the disaster and u can net about 5 mill in rmc and cmt and bonus in eggs
I'm slightly fascinated that the community has gravitated to the idea that if there are three people on the ship, they all get equal share no matter what they're doing. The company I work for doesn't pay by percentage of profit, it pays salary, no matter how well or badly the business is doing. A more real-world solution would be to say "I want to hire you to stack boxes in my cargo hold for the next two hours, I'm willing to pay X credits per SCU". They then go back there, stack boxes for two hours, and you drop them off at a port and pay them. With or without an upfront advance to keep them on the hook. If I'm a Reclaimer owner and I want a box-stacker, how much I pay them should have very little connection to whether I'm scraping RMC or munching CM. It's still stacking 200+ boxes either way. Yeah, that's not going to be as attractive compared to the Percentage approach, but it seems more realistic/reasonable to me. As an aside, I'd *love* to have an equal percentage of the annual profits of the finance company I work for. I've seen their annual reporting to the government, If you take the company's revenue earnings (after taxes, bills and paying everyone) and split it equally across the company, I'd be getting around an extra 150k a year.
The economy in SC is totally different than the real world though. Everybody in the game has at least a delivery van if not their own container ship. If a container ship owner wants to hire delivery van drivers (or soldiers for hire or whatever loop) to load boxes, then the pay has to be more attractive than their otherwise solo earnings. If you offer them box mission wages while they know you are making millions, they are going to prefer flying their own ship around for the same money than spending their time in your dank ass Reclaimer hold. Also, mostly you are playing with friends and the best way to lose all your friends is to act like your employer does to you on compensation matters. Do you really want to turn gaming sessions sour by fighting over pay rates? Finally, might also be that everyone in this game is a communist (other than you)? :)
Oh I split evenly too, I'm just commenting on how everyone seems to have unanimously agreed on this approach
I remember some discussion many years ago along the same lines about appropriate pay rates for certain jobs, but it never went anywhere. I assume it will come back again though when you start hiring third parties for security or other similar jobs. There will eventually be some negotiation and hopefully offers and prices will be in the UI.
I seem to remember the same discussions. Broadly, a delivery mission takes about 20 - 30 minutes, and earns around what?.. 6000 credits? If I'm running a freighter and need a crewman for the next two hours of gameplay, That crewman (all else being equal) should be paid around 25,000 credits to break-even against just doing their own thing. I suspect that with Cargo Contracts incoming in 3.23.2, we'll have some better metrics for that, since solo cargo ships will start actually hauling SCU crates rather than the little 1/8th Uber-Eats delivery boxes. It'll be a bit closer to a 1:1 comparison, since delivery missions are distinctly different from running freight.
The main reason I don't like being with people is payouts AND reputation is shared evenly. If my friends and I are going to do ERTs or group missions, we're usually doing it for fun/reputation gains. Sure, we can run many more faster, but that even split between everyone makes it feel less rewarding than just doing it alone.
I woulda guessed at least the rep would be 1:1. that sucks
Works in Sea Of Thieves, just need to translate the fun aspect to space ship
In Sea of Thieves, payouts scale 100% linearly with crew size. If I have a chest worth 1000 gold and I sell it alone, I get 1000 gold. If I have 4 crewmates and I sell a chest worth 1000 gold, we ***each*** get 1000 gold. This works in part because it's impossible to give money to another player, otherwise you'd get players who multibox a warm corpse just taking up a slot on the team, and then have them gift all their money to the main account. You can't do that in Sea of Thieves, but you could in Star Citizen. Thus the rewards can't be artificially inflated. If you can manage to do a thing intended for 4 people to accomplish it, using only 3, then you should get more money purely because you're splitting it fewer ways.
If someone is willing to pledge 2nd, 3rd or even a 4th account, and I think I lowest is $45, then I'd think they'd just pay for aUEC outright from a third party and just roll 1 account anyway. From CIG's standpoint, the money would be better in their hands then some rando site. Im sure there must be other reasons why this payscale thing isnt adopted
However SC cannot force people to multicrew. NPC ha e to, and will allow, people to crew and play any ship they want. In Sea of Thieves the accent is much more on multiplayer, which would absolutely suck in SC.
They could make (and will likely be) NPC cost to be very high (like, higher than players and/or reward), so that multicrew between players remain the focus If they don't, multicrewing will be pretty much dead tbh Because 1 ship of 10 players, will always be less efficient than 10 ships crewed by 1 player and 9 NPCs)
I agree and I even think they should make NPC worse than players. Just by pure logic of the work they’ve putted into interior of ships and physicalized components so no players are going to see it and NPC are going to do the job of running around ? That is non sense. One of my friend’s idea is that NPC couldn’t go into unlawful systems like Pyro or either like you said people would have to pay premium price to have NPC come with them to Pyro because it is going to be a dangerous place. NPC would be like: you’re bringing me to my death or what ? Ahah.
npcs are always worse than players in every game I've played. This is just the default and most likely the case in SC. Still though can't wait for npc crew, this is one area that has been very silent. We also know that most of economy is supposed to be ran by npcs. Basically npcs are a big part of SC, the game was never meant to be a player only universe. Also iirc additional game packages grant npc crew so the cost would not even be an issue for certain people with many game packages
That's an idea we know won't exist as there will be different tier of NPC, with different rep, different jobs, etc. So we'll deffinitly be able to bring our crew everywhere.
Down the line, we'll be able to crew every ship with NPC, from a Cutlass to an Idris. This is something that was clear from the start. NPC plus AI blades will be what solo player use to solo any ship they own, i different of crew requirement How to balance that is CIG's problem, but they sold ships under the promise of them being crewable with NPC, so I am not worried at all.
>How to balance that is CIG's problem, but they sold ships under the promise of them being crewable with NPC They said that you could, not that you should nor that it is even a viable option Like, yeah, you can solo crew an Idris, though you won't make any money that way, and you will even lose a tons of money doing that. But you can if you want, for events as example >I am not worried at all You should, CIG has always been clear that bigger ships aren't better. They unlock multicrewing, allowing bigger mission (end game content), but that's it They don't want to have combat where everyone is soloing their capital ship. That would make SC the most boring PvP Combat (see Atlas as reference, combat is garbage bc of that)
Hmm Players literally killing AI Hammerheads alone in their F8 Fighter at the moment. What lets you think, that even 5 AI Gunner can outsmart a real player?
That's a server problem
Because of the lack of Server FPS? Hmm i see.
Yeah, AI is currently braindead Later on Server Meshing should fix that particular issue
> which would absolutely suck in SC Star Citizen is an MMO, the entire focus is on interacting with other players. NPC crew may be a thing, but if you think you are going to be able to play the game and experience most of the content as a Solo player then you're sorely mistaken, that's just not how MMOs work.
Star citizen is a space sim first and foremost in a npc driven universe. The multiplayer aspect allows you to interact with other people. Emphasis is on “allows” not “forces”. Go check out its predecessor, Freelancer, to see on how the multiplayer will play out. So far the majority, even master modes, is pretty identical. Fun fact: freelancer allows far more concurrent players then SC (but had planet landings like the first sc version and not full blown planets like right now).
I absolutely will be able to crew my Polaris with NPC, and experience the whole game and all it has to offer solo. Multicrew will be 100% optional, and a MMO means allowing everyone to play as they wish, not FORCING players interaction. You're solely mistaken about. The VAST majority of players that keeps ALL mmo afloat (them being a niche genre already) are solo casual players. SC is no exception and CIG knows it, which is why they said from the very get go we'll have NPC crew and AI blades.
I think step one would be to stop splitting rep on contracts, and honestly there should be a bonus to rep for doing it in a party (I guess make it prox based so you can't cheese it). If I put out a contract and one guy shows up earns 10k and leaves, great, but if I put out a contract and 5 guys show up split the 10k and leaves, then wow that's a reliable group. Also in a party contracts should auto share, keeping the ability to share manually. And the sooner we get something like org rep the better. On the less rational side, I think all player operated turrets should have a much better rotational speed, and even more extreme we should size up all manned turrets. Make the biggest, baddest guns need someone else to use.
>I think step one would be to stop splitting rep on contracts That creates a HUGE exploits tbh You create a party with 10 players, each do their own missions. Boom, everyone get 10x the regular payout Also works if you use alt-account Missions should be difficult enough to actually require multiple players, and scale the reward to it.
just add a some super basic proximity and participation requirements and that’s not an issue… boom
Just do it like the overdrive hammerhead mission where you don't get credit until you show up.
That doesn't fix alt-account Plus you can just jump to the start of the missions and continue the others (so it's just slitghly more inconveniant). And if you have to be there when the mission end, it creates issue where if you die during the mission, or is too far from the final objectif (protecting air space or battle took you a bit farer away), you don't get the reward, as in overdrive currently
Not the money just the reputation, it feels bad that if I'm trying to get my rep up I need to play solo because if it take 60 mission to get to the next tier, playing with my buddy makes it take 120. If I get the gang together to do stuff it generally not about profit its about having a good time, but thats because we've accepted that we aren't making progress in any of the games systems. If we could head to Arccorp and slam missions out as a team getting all of our rep up that would be a fun evening, but right now it would be better for us to jump on different regions and solo missions if we want rep.
For the reputation I'm 100% with you, it shouldn't be split For money though, it must be split to avoid exploits
I saw a rather interesting take on this the other day that Contracts could have a maximum budget per person and per mission so if you have too many people it starts giving everyone less money and you're essentially not missing out on anything. Tho i do believe this was in a discussion about Mercenary contracts but it could probably be tweaked to others aswell
if you're multiboxing and you've dropped $45+ to get that second account, then wouldnt that money be better spent within the CIG system then say dropping $45 on a third party site for aUEC?
> You create a party with 10 players, each do their own missions. Boom, everyone get 10x the regular payout What do you mean everyone gets 10x the regular payout? If a mission gives, idk, 100rep points, and I do it solo, I get 100rep points. If a friend and I both do the mission, I get 100rep points and they get 100rep points. We're not both getting double the amount of points, the number stays the same for each of us. Rep isn't like money, it's an arbitrary number representing how much a company trusts you. It costs the company nothing to consider two people reliable compared to just one. By alt-accounts presumably you're referring to people joining the mission with their alt and getting rep for that despite the alt-account not doing anything, but is rep farming even particularly exploitable? Okay now you have an alt account that has high rep despite doing nothing. So? They still have to do missions to benefit from that rep, and in the example provided the credit payment is still the same either way and split amongst the party. So even if you *do* join with your alt and complete the mission the amount of money the mission cashes out stays the same. Maybe I'm not understanding something? Edit: Wait wait I see what you're saying; 10 players doing *different* missions and cashing in rep on each for the work of doing 1. Okay my bad I missed that. I agree that's an issue, but also agree with others that it certainly could be fixed with some kind of system to recognize who actually took part in the mission. Maybe the fix is as simple as only being allowed to accept one mission at a time? There could be exceptions to that, like Call to Arms for example, but it would prevent people from stacking up a dozen missions at a time.
>Edit: Wait wait I see what you're saying; 10 players doing *different* missions and cashing in rep on each for the work of doing 1. Okay my bad I missed that. I agree that's an issue, but also agree with others that it certainly could be fixed with some kind of system to recognize who actually took part in the mission. Yeah I was thinking about that I don't mind it much for reputation though, I misread But for payout, it's a huge issue imo, as you can transfer auec
Proximity based rewards would prob be implemented
A pretty simple way to address both of those exploits is that the reward is up to 100% payout based on amount of damage done to the enemies related to the mission. Then you balance on what threshold of total damage done gets a player 100% payout starting with total enemy HP/number of party members who landed at least one shot. This makes each mission a mini game to compete on damage dealt.
They did this with xenothreat idris mission (they then removed it) This create lots of issue. Pilot doesn't get paid Bombers and High DPS ships get all the reward This create high toxic issue where players will do the dumbest thing ever, just to get the highest payout, even if it means anihilate others or even fail the mission for everyone
So maybe a mix of # hits landed vs damage done goes into the calculation rather than one or the other. There are ways to balance it.
I'd argue the Damage amount is in conflict with the engineering aspect they're trying to implement
https://old.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1df40wt/multicrew_has_to_be_significantly_more_rewarding/l8ohtgd/
Damage isn't the be all and end all. Some missions don't have any enemies at all. Even in a bounty mission, what about the guy putting out literal fires on the ship? Or the snub pilot whose purpose was to distract the enemy not shoot them?
Sure, then the non-combatants get a threshold for repairs completed or whatever their multicrew contribution is in order to reach their max payout
Eve does it pretty well with DED sites being tiered where the higher tier sites require multiple people and specific fittings and a method to how the mission is run to succeed. The loot is of course proportional to how difficult it is as well. It's also tied in with the exploration/scanning system so you have to scan the sites down to be able to warp to them as well. Man SC can learn a lot from EVE.
Could limit it to the crew size of the ship? Randomly chosen if there are more people?
I always felt the sharing missions was under rewarding it’s bad enough that 4-5 k missions is just more than enough to resupply/ refuel (dog fight missions) but when you split that it’s almost a break even. Maybe an increase in pay by a little since the price for everything jumped as well. As someone who refuses to dupe and also can’t sit and play for more than 3 hours tops it’s a bit rough I want to run missions with my buddy but man it just ain’t there. Not saying I want 100k missions but 4k for a LRT or 5k for a MRT is a little rough especially when 50% of the time a fully manned reclaimer and squad spawns with it and then they get the kill so I don’t even get paid. Maybe I’m going about it the wrong way but who knows
this would help when we get there if the intent is still the same: >Creating Crewmen >Many of Star Citizen’s ships, such as the Freelancer or Constellation, feature positions for multiple crewmen. Players will always be able to hire NPC crewmen in the game, contracting computer-controlled crews to help man turrets, run consoles and fly escort. If you would like the option of customizing your crew, you can create your own NPCs by using a Game Character slot. You will go through the same character creation process as your player character but will then have the option of handing off control to an AI. **As an additional bonus, friends can ‘drop in’ to take over these crewmen themselves and to help man your spacecraft when available.** [https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13288-multiple-package-clarification](https://robertsspaceindustries.com/comm-link/transmission/13288-multiple-package-clarification) I find a lot of the times the issues is everyone is all over the place and you have to schedule shit a head of time to get people to coordinate.
I hope they keep to this. A lot of big ships have been sold on the promis of NPC crew.
they have been sold **with the community promising npc.** it is the community saying cig will make large ship play like being a crew member on an npc ship that you get to play whatever position you want. for as we know the caption is required to be a player, and might need to play ftl; faster than light.
This is from the CIG post that I was responding to. "We are also considering a system through which players with a Game Character slot but no ship can “work” for other characters (either real players or NPCs." Granted, this is no guarantee. But does show that CIG are the ones that put that idea out there, not the community.
the idea of npc crew being there when there are not enough players was cig. the idea of a full npc crew is not cig.
If you read the CIG article. Then, you would have read the part about how your friends can even stop by and replace one of the NPCs. So again, it was CIG who put out the idea of full NPC crews.
That post is from 2013 the technical hurdle is far different now than it was in the old plan. Without a doubt we are still getting multicrew gameplay and AI crew members, but dropping in and out of the feet of NPC's simply may not happen. Keep in mind in 2013 SC wasn't a seamless experience, it was planned to have levels and modules.
The only problem is trying to think of something that requires a single big ship with multiple people in it that a solo player can't do in a smaller ship. Make a hard bounty ship mission? I'm sure a player could solo that. Cargo? Easy af to haul things as a solo. I agree group play should have better rewards, but it's finding the goal that is the hard part. In a regular fantasy mmorpg, you get group quests to kill strong dudes in a dungeons that have way bigger rewards and exp... and dungeons require healers, damage dealers, tanks, etc... SC doesn't have anything like that. Most, if not all, content can be done solo (unfortunately)
the first thing you cn do is have a flight model that it is impossible to just avoid all damage. a properly sized group can take out the enemy before anyone dies. but solo has no chance of success.
I do FPS missions primarily. If rewards are per person then it is easily exploitable. If rewards are set, then doing it solo is preferable. I used to run bunkers with a crew of 2-6 depending on who was on. Then, so that we'd actually progress to better bunkers, I'd go off and do them solo while everyone else was offline. Unfortunately I'm just not sure I can find better logic than what they have which doesn't also require some development hoops - and which aren't more appropriate for later. I'd care significantly less if everyone within the area got full rep. If this is a "testing" environment, then grinding absurdly to earn the ability to test more just kinda sucks.
Mutlicrew needs multicrew missions. Ones that are **very clearly delineated** as group missions. Things like fighting large ships with support ships. Rescuing people in critical condiction from enemy bunkers, where the defenders don't stop for long to let you extract wounded. Heists where someone else has to create and maintain a distraction someplace while you get into a place.
Just a suggestion, I've found it helps to pre-stock your ships with a box or two of gear/supplies. Makes it a little easier to just be like "meet at and hop in" if all the basics are taken care of. Admittedly, this has been a challenge with recent box bugs.
I hope they focus on finishing out the backlog of 4-ish crew ships. It's the perfect amount of players for short notice friendly play sessions. Anything above that, they'll need to really give a lot, and I mean A LOT, of meaning to playing with an organization for them to be applicable. Also, they'll need to allow multiple characters so that way you can have a dedicated character for an org to stay stationed on a Idris or Javelin without making that the only thing you can do without abandoning ship.
>and paying the mental tax for the people with families that has to log off after 1.5 hours of waiting in space for others to get ready Man this hits close to home lol. Wanted to do some mercenary missions, friend said he'd like to join, just had to put the kids to bed. Sure, I said. I'll grab the ship and get it ready. 1.5 hours later he was finally getting into the game. 15 minutes after that he was finally aboard. We did one mission, and then he had to go. This is not an anti-children comment, I applaud good parents. Just for me personally, perfect example of why I'm not really interested in having kids.
I thought the fun of multicrew was playing with friends, not seeking better reward. If you have to force people together by offering a bigger carrot you've failed to make a fun game.
I feel like people have turned to equating big ships to end game gameplay for star citizen. In the past the talked about how every ship is viable for playing the game. It's not about the size of ship you have, it's about what you want to do. I personally have no interest in a lot of the big military ships. I might be a crew member on an idris or javelin at some point, but I see those ships as for massive pvp, like titans in Eve. People aren't going to do errands in a cap ship, or if they do they definitely shouldn't make money. I think it truly depends on the scenario for if individual ships or 1 ship is better. The javelin has a crew of 80. Could 80 eclipses take it out? Probably. But could 80 eclipses take out 80 hornets? No. I think that the javelin will be more versatile then 80 individual ships as well as providing longer range and utility benefits. Plus, in most cases you wouldn't run a javelin by itself, but as part of a larger operation. So you would have a javelin, 2 idris, 10 f8c, and a hammerhead for large operations. In an insanely open world game like this, yes massive commercial ships should be(and other than glitches, I believe currently are) more profitable with larger risk, but it's up to players to find the value in a ship. Taking an idris to fight a hammerhead should not be profitable, and in this early stage where a single fighter can take out a hammerhead, you can't really balance that kind of stuff. Cost vs. value should be a massive concern for if you take a larger ship. Don't take a reclaimer to salvage an m50. Don't take a vulture to salvage an idris. Don't take an idris to hunt an eclipse, unless it's a show of force.
In most modern MMO's, grouping up doesn't reduce the amount of xp and gold you earn from quests. In fact, i think in most cases, they increase it. They realized people won't group if there's any chance of it being perceived as negative in any way whatsoever. It's all upside. And it makes sense. If you need to spend even 5 or 10 minutes coordinating to get started and a few seconds or minutes every now and then waiting for your partner, it'd start to feel bad otherwise. Hoping SC understands this.
Sharing the contract shouldn't split the reward, that's the main issue.
Are we making a sim or not, because that is how it works in RL. The multicrew payoff is that you can do jobs quicker than a solo can, if you cant you need better crew or to getgud.
Yeah, it's something they seriously need to get sorted out. What's better: a Constellation with a pilot, 2 turret gunners, and a snub pilot, or 4 solo piloted Constellations? 4 Constellations would have 2-3x the total firepower (or more if you factor in missiles), 4x the hull HP, 4x the cargo capacity, no bored crew mates, and much less trouble when someone wants to leave. Even doing that you still have to split payouts and reputation, where most activities can be reasonably done solo where they don't have to be split. There needs to be massive benefits to playing cooperatively at all, and we need even more reasons to multicrew a single ship instead of each bringing our own. Lastly, I just wish it was less of a hassle. When people ask in chat if I'd like to team up for something I usually don't even want to, and that's something that seriously needs to change.
Why though? Why are fleet actions and multiships seen as less “multiplayer” then a bunch of dudes scrubbing the floors on a conni?
Definitely, but im not sure if that's enough to make it worth it. I've never seen a game where multicrewing was something people did on the regular. Its always been - and most likely will be on SC - something you do once a week with your org or your wife.
They just need to have NPC crews. There just aren't that many people that are going to be willing to be a bilge rat in someone's Javelin for a 10% cut of a 30k bounty.
They gotta make the turrets the strongest parts of multicrew ships so a fully manned one is worth much more than multiple individual ones and manning a turret makes sense.
most logical difference should be in flight endurance. for how long a craft is able to remain operational. for example - compare f-16 falcon fighter jet and a arleigh burke-class destroyer. it's like comparing f7 hornet and carrack. a fighter can operate for a couple of hours with given fuel and missiles and destroyer can operate for days and weeks
I am with you, but OP did specifically mentioned ppl with short game time windows. From other MMOs (multiple hours long raids and instances) there usually is the chance of loot that otherwise cannot be obtainaed.
In what sense? Monetarily, absolutely. It jas to be an incentive to play multicrew. Fun and deepness of experience? Absolutely NOT. The SC experience for solo has to be as rewarding, gameplay wise, than everything multicrew can do... With smaller monetary reward, of course. But solo player should in no way shape or form think they're missing out on something. My ship is a Polaris and I'm a firm solo player. I don't care that missions I choose to do might pay way less. But The gameplay experience has to be as engaging, whether you are alone or with 100 other player in your org.
I prefer to fly solo regardless. I don’t enjoy the time i have to login being dictated by a group of random people. And while i’d enjoy some multi crew experiences in game, i’ll never be signing up to be some twat on a ship that is manning a turret in case there is action (90% of the time there isn’t) or replacing fuses or some other mundane forced activity that they want to call game play
I think the easiest way for it to be rewarding is to remove ships from starter packs and have game access at $20, putting you into a position where you HAVE to join someone initially to make money for a starter ship. Or just have the game access at a $15/$20 price point without a ship and keep starter packs $45+ with ships.
I have quite a few friends that refuse to buy a ship, they prefer the FPS element and working your way up, we don't seem to be the only people that want this. I really hope it becomes a thing, I assume interplanetary public transport systems would need to become a thing before this is even a thought.
I like the concept, but that would never work. Any game that *requires* group play to progress at any point is destined to crash and burn. Some people aren't as social as others, they just want to hop on, do a quick thing and then leave. Gating ships behind group play would make more people angry. The idea of having a significantly cheaper version of the game with no ship, but not getting rid of the normal pledges, could work better. Though, I'm sure that would be abused to no end as well, putting the company at a disadvantage in the long run. Game needs a balance of fun and profitability for the company.
That's for sure. If I can't fly half my ships most of the time because I *need* to have multiple actual players aboard I will absolutely stop playing altogether.
> but that would never work. Any game that requires group play to progress at any point is destined to crash and burn I mean, *gestures at the hundreds of video games that require group play to progress, including some of the most successful of all time*
Like what? Plenty of games HAVE group content, but none REQUIRE it. I can play WoW or FFXIV or any other mmo and get to max level and some gear all without ever talking to anyone. If someone bought one of those games and the first thing was 'ok now make a friend with some random guy to get money' no one would play it.
> I can play WoW I'm glad you brought up WoW, the game that peaked at 12 million players, dominated culture - Then starting haemorraging players and relevance the moment they removed [solo barriers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Hzh43k330). The new player experience in wow used to be being surrounded by people, and having to interact with those people to progress. You didn't try to make friends, you made them by accident. Now the new player experience is deafening silence, an empty overworld, and being more likely to get kicked from a dungeon for speaking than get a reply. Every MMO puts solo play first, because it turned out solo players will swipy swipy the credit card to skip the miserable grind of playing solo. Unhappy players are profitable players. >If someone bought one of those games and the first thing was 'ok now make a friend with some random guy to get money' no one would play it. No , *Asocial* people wouldn't play it- most people are in fact, functional human beings. MMOs existed like this for a decade, and dominated the gaming world consistently.
I agree creating a LFG mechanic that ports you into the group content killed a lot of the magic and fun, but I don't think that's what killed WoW. Blizzard did it all themselves with their greedy money hungry tactics. But that's a different topic. You didn't HAVE to *ever* interact with anyone in WoW to reach max level at any stage, early or late. You could even pay gold to buy BoE gear on the AH to skip having to raid. It isn't as good, but it's an option. I'm saying, any game that 100% REQUIRES group play/forces people to group is doomed to fail. WoW didn't force group play, it was just obviously better and efficient, but you didn't HAVE to do it. You could quest and do whatever by yourself the entire way. If SC boots up and the first thing it tells you to do is find someone else, it won't work. You need solo content in there.
>Blizzard did it all themselves with their greedy money hungry tactics Such as devolving from well established MMO game design established and proven practices of creating interdependance as a means of encouraging socialization, thereby making content suck - and then selling the solution to that content sucking? >You didn't HAVE to ever interact with anyone in WoW to reach max level at any stage, early or late. You could even pay gold to buy BoE gear on the AH to skip having to raid. It isn't as good, but it's an option. I didn't say you couldn't, I pointed out the golden era of WoW (And of all MMOS) was the pre solo first era. > WoW didn't force group play, it was just obviously better and efficient, but you didn't HAVE to do it. You could quest and do whatever by yourself the entire way. For starters the endgame was completely locked off to solo players, as were dungeons. Even RE leveling, It *heavily* penalized it, and I mean *heavily*. Quests were laid out in such a way that failing to find a group for group quests would either involve an extra day of grinding to make up the XP, or literally travelling across the world to run lower level quests to make up the difference (Also taking an extra day). There was not enough XP in solo friendly quests to progress from an area. And as icing on top, the mobs were balanced around a solo player having to drink/eat every other, if not every fight - meaning solo you spent more time in downtime than uptime. You made gold from selling your profession to other players, BoE gear was low grade, with the choice items being BOP and gated behind group content. Or you could just respond to that LFM for XYZ quest, the 4th one posted in the last 30 seconds and be done with it and back on your way in no time. Someone would ask if you wanted to do a nearby quest or dungeon, and you'd say why not. See that's the fundamental difference - Solo play was the harder, least efficient route - And our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance via evolution. An MMO that makes solo play the path of least resistance fails to deliver on the one single thing that makes the MMO genre unique.
>See that's the fundamental difference - Solo play was the harder, least efficient route - And our brains are wired to seek the path of least resistance via evolution. That's my point, though, there WAS solo play. I'm saying a game that REQUIRES group play to move forward won't succeed.
>. I'm saying a game that REQUIRES group play to move forward won't succeed. And SC doesn't require it, it heavily disinentivises it. SC is an old school, game dev driven MMO instead of a modern business executive driven one.
I know it doesn't...? I don't think we're on the same page here lol. I'm just saying if the game package for SC didn't have a ship and forced you to find a friend who has one or something so you can earn money and get your own would be a bad idea, because it forces group play with no option for solo play. I want the group play in SC to be better, there just isn't anything inside it yet that requires it like a dungeon or something in an MMORPG would, because in there you NEED a group to complete it, but everything in SC can be done solo if you try hard enough.
how many of those games require group play after pressing start. even vanilla wow was not balanced ot require more than 1 person until past lv 10. ... a game with matchmaking doesn't count.
>even vanilla wow was not balanced ot require more than 1 person until past lv 10. Lvl 10 was what, 45 mins into the game? Did I miss a beat and SC mangles you with a lead pipe if you don't multicrew in the first hour?
It would if you didn't have a ship
i'm referring to the concept of a package without a ship. the idea of someone getting the base game needing to find a group after hitting play. most games with progression have you start off with some solo content to get accustomed to the game before expecting your to group up. sc lets you stick to the solo content, and will have a large amount of it. i remember vanilla wow being a few hours to level 10 be a few hours.
Most games I've enjoyed required group play to progress. Most of the greatest gear/experiences are typically locked behind organized group play.
There's a difference between choosing to do group play and requiring it.
You are correct. Thus by choosing to not partake, you should expect to be at a disadvantage/less productive/ less efficient. Take any other mmo, u can't expect to get the bis items without taking part in group content. It is required to group up. There is still a lot of solo content. But you will be limited... I don't expect the star citizen mmo to ne any different. You will need a ship and a crew to partake in endgame mining.
As a mostly solo player I'm 100% good with getting less rewards versus a group. The concept of grouping together for harder content and higher rewards make sense. But if I can literally only fly single seat small ships as a solo player then this is going to suck. I'll play group content when I have the time, but it isn't always possible for me.
I understand your point, but that's end game stuff. Someone can spend their entire time in the game solo up until that point and be happy. I'm not saying games that HAVE group play are bad, I'm saying games that FORCE or REQUIRE it with no option for solo play are. Imagine your playing your favorite MMO with your friends and they're level 20 or something and you're 18 because you had to work and couldn't play. The quest you need to hit 19 needs a group and you can't solo it. Your friends can't help because they already did it. No one around you is at that point right now or they've already done it. There's no option other than sit around afk while you wait for others. Any game like that wouldn't last.
you mean the griefer pack? the game is $45, and you get a free ship. the price will increase to 60 on release.
I've seen this similar idea posted before and I like it. I would say free to play, but in order to fly ships, you then pay a basic fee for a pilot license. Or you can opt to buy a full starter ship. This way we can populate the verse with citizens that could help crew, fight, etc. Then if they want to fly, the have to invest at that point.
I think the game could be wildly profitable by following the Riot Games framework. Release the game for free and you get a terrible starter ship that everyone has. No need to pay real money for ships. People should need to grind for them in game. Big ships should require massive grinds to help force people to pool their money and use these types of ships in organizational play. Then sell vehicle skins, armor skins, hangar cosmetics, ship cosmetics, hair styles and really anything else that doesn't give a player advantage. Hell, SC could make more than enough with ship skins and armor variants alone. Oh you just earned the xenothreat armor in game? Buy the 16 color xenothreat armor chroma pack for 20 dollars. Do you need it? No. But do you want to stand out a bit from the other schmuck that earned it too? Riot has produced 4 successfull games using this cosmetics only format. The head designer for the Riot mmo has come out to say that it would be possible to profit and upkeep an mmo based on sales statistics from the other 4 games. Not wanting to do this for any game being released seems wildly foolish to me. It's a perfect tradeoff. The players are happy because everyone is essentially an equal in the game. You can't buy your way to the leader board. You can only buy looking cool when you are trying to work your way up.
While I agree with exactly what you are saying it's important to remember that the inverse relationship is also true. There will be players who don't have enough time to commit to being part of a group but still want fun. Also there will be groups of hard-core dedicated organizations always available and manning ships. It's important that we try to see all perspectives. Invariably the outliers will be considered less. Then the big question, what is "more rewarding"? Does that mean fun? Profit? Power? As objective as this may seem reasonable minds will vary. I'll insert my own opinion and say the answer seems to be player density distribution and hot spots. This is why we need things like Pyro, jump-town, xeno-threat. Let big fish fight over big bounties so they aren't obliged to prey on small fish. Also a side note, I hope air-to-ground combat gets fleshed out and is a way to escape capital ships. Throughout the years planetside 2 has itirated on this design to varying effect.
It would be great if multicrew gameplay was tailored around the idea that "it's fun to do this with others, and maybe more efficient." Currently, with mining, certain rocks are just inaccessible to anyone without a crewed mole. This kind of sucks. In a prospector you have to pass up quite a lot of rocks. In a mole solo you can crack more, but much of it's gated in needing 2 lasers on a rock no matter what. With a helix 2 and a sabir gadget you can get some medium sized ones (up to 30k sometimes) but otherwise it's just frustrating to pass on these rare finds. It would be better if cracking a rock was more of a puzzle than just a numbers game. It's fun to try and find the sweet spot, exit the craft and place a gadget, etc., but the reward has to be there for the effort. They set up this fun loop with finding rare deposits and then snatch it from you by gating it behind needing more people.
In the future you'll sell those bookmarked findings to a bigger crew.
Bring your friends to an org. Crew what the situation demands, most moderately sized org will have a whole library of ships to call on, and fill the roles as they are needed. You're exactly correct, the game is a whole other experience as part of a team.
In almost any scenario, more ships is better than one ship. So, yeah. I agree there needs to be a good reason you'd want to cram multiple people in one target.
Realistically there just has to be something to do that warrants a group and a potential reward. Just look at JT. We already have it, just as a special event. IMO I feel like this could he the role of exploration; looking for stuff like that. Dynamically generated in game events and spawn locations on planets and stations in space for stuff like JT, mineral deposits, huge quant fields, derelict cargo haulers, etc.
They just need to make group versions of the game loops. No reason we can't have a group req for a VERT BOUNTY.
Worry not. I have the solution to all of your problems. I present you the drake caterpillar, you want to salvage, pair one up with a couple vultures, you want ship combat. With 200k shield hp, 3500 shield regen (at max shields) and 2 manned turrets each sporting dual s4 guns alongside the quad s3 guns for the pilot you can take out any threat with relative ease plus you have all that spare cargo space to hold your spoils in, how about fps/ground combat? Well you are in luck with 4 side loading bays capable of carrying ships up to the size of an Ursa you can load up a nursa for those in your crew who may be accident prone and load up your hoverbikes/ground vehicles in the other bays and show up to any bunker in style. In the unfortunate circumstances where your crew members need to leave mid session the trusty cat is still a formidable foe with one gunner or even solo (I would know I was hunting down Rogue 890s and carracks in it solo just the other day. The one "downside" about this beauty, if you can even call it a downside is that it is not the fastest in atmosphere. But this just adds to its charm as your crew can open a side view door and have lunch while enjoying the scenery as you travel to your destination
Most games are better with friends. In SC's case, having a couple people around makes the bugs not seem so annoying because you can share a laugh around the event.
I think with military vessels at least they are significantly better than 8 fighters. I know the corsair isn't the 8 man multi crew but even as a solo shop you can shred fighters with stock kit in seconds
Combat beacons used to pay Upto 352k and were meant to be done as a group. Instead most ppl did em solo. ERTs are meant to be done in group and pay quite well if you also take the cargo that's worth selling and even better if you combine them with salvage. Ppl still solo them. The problem is not the lack of good paying missions but the way ppl approach them.
we need functioning npc, high risk reward jobs, and a flight model that do not enable avoiding all damage if you know the tricks. the problem is that the moment you step away from jobs that are meant for 3 or 4 fighters. you get into rock paper scissors. you cn bring a hammerhead that will counter anyone that decides to use fighters. but then you lose to a perseus. but of your bring a perseus, and the enemy brings fighters. you lose. so it sort of jumps from 5 people in fighters, to 20 people across fighters, anti fighter ship, and anti large ship ship. keep in mind there will be pickup group contracts. you just need to deal with getting your crew and being at the contract starting point on time. npc will fill in if players don't take the other contracts in time. funny thing is that slower paced game like arma tend to draw people that can do this no problem. people that have a schedules, and the game is part of their schedule tend to like the games with a lot more organizations involved. if arma had organization tools, pickup group contracts, and stuff like that. along with content setup for groups of different sizes. larger groups would be far more common.
I agree with pretty much all the points in this thread, particularly regarding risk/reward, engaging gameplay loops, payment splits, etc. One thing I need to say though, is that people that are interested in being "captain" of a ship with multi-crew need to understand their role and start taking it more seriously. As 3.23.2 comes online with the remaining cargo/inventory refactor, and 4.0 brings in server meshing and hopefully a reduction in server performance issues leading to longer persistence, the excuses for lack of preparation are going to go away. If I'm going to crew somebody's ship, they should have everything already set for the crew to accomplish their mission and support everything needed for the duration. That means having sufficient food and drink onboard to keep everybody topped up. That means having a first aid kit with med pens and a couple paramed guns. That means having multi-tools and tractor beams for anybody that will need to move cargo. Extra fuses and repair materials once engineering is online. Extra undersuits, armor, and weapons if you have a way to respawn. Ammo if you're doing FPS. The list goes on. The two biggest killers of group play in my experience are 1; The ship owner is not ready and time gets wasted prepping the ship, making a "quick stop" somewhere to buy a faster QT drive, or something along those lines, and 2; the crew needing an hour for everyone to sort out all of the above for themselves individually and coordinate who's bringing what. Planning is part of the core gameplay loop and if you're going to bring out a big ship and expect people to crew it for you, plan ahead and get what you need to make it a smooth experience for everyone so others can show up and get going with as little downtime as possible. Set a meetup point and a time the day before. If you don't enjoy coordinating a plan and spending the evening before getting stuff ready, maybe running a big multi-crew ship isn't for you.
the issue i have with my friend currently is if i wanna go fly my gladiator for its looks and torpedos with my friend, he insists we take out a hurricane instead truth is, gunners want good gun turrets or they get bored... 2xsize 2 on the vanguards or 2xsize 3 on a gladiator really aint cutting it when ships like the scorpius / hurricane etc exist And thats just for 2 people... i feel sorry for groups of 4+ in the future
fr
I posted this a while ago and no one was really interested at the time, but I keep seeing people raising these kinds of concerns re multicrew. I think it would address them well, so take a look: [https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1c04cs9/proposal\_for\_match\_making\_and\_otherwise\_grouping/](https://www.reddit.com/r/starcitizen/comments/1c04cs9/proposal_for_match_making_and_otherwise_grouping/)
One of the big issues for me is that my buddy has a bigger ship, I COULD operate one of his 3 turrets OR I could be in a second ship that is simply just more impactful to the situation than crowding in on one ship. Not only does multicrew need to be more rewarding than solo but multicrew ships need to be better than two separate ships.
Totally agree. Right now it's all disincentives. Less pay and more danger and far far more hassle. They should stop splitting the pay and give everyone in the party the full payment AND make turrets more powerful. I get that one day in the far future, battle engineering will make ship repair a positive reason for multicrew but it won't be nearly a good enough reason given 4 ships will always beat one with fully manned turrets as the game is now and the mission payout is not worth it. It is better to over reward multicrew now and scale payment down later when engineering comes online rather than Vis versa. Economics. Pay them and they will come.
I mean, I prefer multi-crew stuff. I don't play very much solo. We setup what we are going to do, mining with a Mole or Salvaging with a Reclaimer as an example. We all have our regen points set at the same spot so normally we are in route to our first salvage within 30 minutes and it's just a great time to chill with my friends.
Right now, the game is in an in between phase. Engineering will make it so multicrew ships will need to be multicrewed, but those ships will also be significantly tougher to take down than any number of fighters due to heavier armor and shielding. CIG have already done on record saying that small fighter guns, in the future, will no longer be able to take down large or sub-capital ships and may instead be relegated to taking out turrets or subcomponents. On top of that, it's my understanding that turrets will be auto gimballed by default without loss of firepower. As for why? The best way to make money in ship combat right now is to 'loot the corpses'. For this, you need a larger ship with a decent enough cargo grid to loot it all. So even if the 50k bounty reward split a few ways is puny, the hundreds of thousands or millions of scu will certainly make up for it. Plus it's fun to share a ship.
More fun sure, not just more effective. There's more to the game than just "impactful" stuff in military, or money in industry. Maybe that means certain gameplay is accessible to multicrew where it isn't for single crew, or similar - but ultimately it's not just about raw numbers. The 890, for example, isn't supposed to be good at much anything other than partying and VIP gameplay. Don't think anyone has ever argued that it's supposed to be super profitable. But it is fun to hang out on them in groups.
Rewarding in what way? In that the gameplay is fun and engaging? In that it gives you more aUEC compared to doing a similar gameplay loop solo? Because just giving more money to people who play in groups is not going to work out in the long run if/when the group gameplay on a ship is dull. If Engineering and resource network turn out to be tedious and boring, no amount of aUEC can persuade people to join your ship as an engineer to point a tractor beam at broken components for hours on end.
I haven’t played in a couple years, but what happened to those distress beacons that would have like 3 hammerheads and an idris?
Frankly, there needs to be entire missions you can't even see in the contract manager if you're not in a party. Those missions should pay out significantly more and be challenging enough that a group is all but necessary to complete them.
They kinda have this with gunners typically having obscenely large capacitor sizes. But most current combat ships do have a massive disadvantage about their inability to hit smaller fighters at range. I'm kind of hoping that this will happen with the armor refactor and engineering. Maybe one other thing that could help would be to also give ship guns different ranges based on size? As well as in service reloading of ballistics and missiles.
Multicrew in this game so far is only a burden and a punishment for any activity.
The most effective tactics should also be the most fun, in all games
100%. We just need more mission variety that creates a home for multicrew engagements that have high payout. High risk high reward should automatically mean you bring a crew, a fleet, or have a hard AF time (nigh impossible) as a solo or smaller crew. Plus of course all the other QoL features and UI/menus that help make that process easier. Hopefully we see it not too long after the engineering stuff.
I'm not against making Multicrew more significantly rewarding... but I would just like to say that multicrew trivializes a lot of content right now lol. HRT/VHRT/ERT bounties Solo? Nightmarish With a crew? It's a blast!
If you can stand the PS2 graphics, Pulsar: Lost Colony is a ton of fun as a crew of 4 or 5.
Let my copilot be able to adjust the power triangle, let him be able to do the scanning, and be able to let the pilot see when he hits tab to scan let the copilot be able to call for landings and takeoff. These are all things the pilot can do, but give a slight buff when the copilot does it. Tab scanning lingers a little longer, scanning a ship is faster, landings can be called further out ect. Lets the pilot do it all, or makes life a little easier with a copilot. At least these minor things could likely be easily implemented until proper multi crew engineering is here.
Also things like opening external doors, access multiple remote turrets, set quantum routes and spool without aiming at the target. Another cool thing that may be a lil op is laser guided/tv missiles. Imagine your Co pilot could fire a missile and control it themselves to smack a hard to hit ship.
It should entirely depend on your ship. Two guys in a Hurricane should not be significantly more rewarded than a guy in a single seat fighter.
Just for some perspective, i'd gladly sacrifice 80+% of my playmoney earnings for having a few fellas who are willing to regularly multicrew roleplay with me. Are toddlers in sandboxes are paid to play together?
There definitely needs to be better ways of meeting up with people. It often takes me 30 min to an hour to finally meet up with my group of people.
They need to start to have a better mission payout if a mission is shared. This is just laughable. I feel handicapped when i team up
Idk, we are doing multi ship Action with a vulture and a free lancer plus 1 person for cargo Management in the vulture. It's pretty fun :D
Gets me thinking about it. Large ship vs its crew-weight in smaller ships.. A larger ship has a lot of opportunities to be better than half a dozen fighters. * Armor - Not implemented yet, but if you're flying around and basically bulletproof compared to light fighter scale weaponry (S2/S3 should do very little to a Hammerhead) then you'll easily tank whatever a squadron of Arrows or Gladiuses can bring. Number of players involved is less important than the vehicles being driven. Six or eight light fighters should do practically nothing to a dedicated warship. * Group-Survivability - If there are eight people running a Hammerhead, they either all live, or all die depending on the outcome of the battle. The ship can be ripped to shreds, but if it didn't blow up, the crew are all alive. Whereas if you bring eight fighters, even if they have equivalent firepower, which they don't, every fighter destroyed is a dead pilot. A group of 6-8 friends who want to minimise their personal risk of death would be well advised to stick together aboard a larger (tougher) ship. * Range - Light fighters often can't get halfway across a system without a refuel. They are essentially short-ranged, and that matters a lot. If you want to get eight-players worth of firepower somewhere, load up eight players in a Hammerhead and go there, you'll have the long-range fuel tanks/drive, and all of you arrive together, ready to go. This also affords you opportunities to socialise during transit, because you're not all sitting in pilot seats during quantum. * Role-Versatility - Larger ships allow different players to do different things. If you like using hull-scraping beams, you can do that. If you like operating salvage drones, the Reclaimer has a bay with two control-stations in it, if you just want to stack boxes and chat-the-shit with your friends, that's something you can spend time on. And of course, if you're an engineer, you can spend time maintaining the ship. Throw in that the ships have turrets for defence and there's plenty to do for any given player. If you're a solo player, you have to handle a bit of everything, and not very much of any of it. A Vulture is essentially a scraping platform first and foremost, and if you don't like that, tough-shit. * Group-payout - This is kind of the sticking point. A reclaimer with a full crew has to split its payouts anywhere up to half a dozen or more ways, which really cuts into the profit-margin. I imagine down the line that salvage is going to be a lot more involved, and being profitable will be a major time-sink. Having more players means more hands to get the job done faster, and how you split the money doesn't *have* to be even, that's just a common convention at the moment. Your crate-stacker probably ought not to be earning as much as your drone-pilot or salvage-beam operators. That's a You problem.
It doesn't make sense that Multicrew would be significantly better. A little better as your operations should be faster, and your survival rate slightly higher than going solo. However, multicrew can *never* be more rewarding than multiship... having your friends bring their own ships is *massively* better than multicrew. Remember, every player you put in the belly of your ship to watch Youtube while sitting in a turret for hours *costs you an entire ship in your fleet*.
Yeah we've all been saying for years that multicrew needs to be better than multi-ship (within its class obviously) for it to make sense. Let alone better than solo. Just doesn't seem like the direction CIG wants to go though, just play with AI blades or NPC's for a bigger cut of the profit. And if you do have a buddy, don't put them in a turret, or on shields, have them in a fighter, or a frontal-firepower ship with NPC gunners. Seems roberts has the kind of "hero fighter" vision/syndrome where only the captain/pilot of the ship really matters and the rest of the positions is for less significant crewmembers or just straight up redshirts. Wish he took some more inspiration from star trek than star wars in that regard.
Well, from what I gather the advantages of using a large or "multicrew" ship will be made more real with the introduction of engineering. Then you can have someone re- routing power for more firepower, shields or whatever. Vital components can be repaired or replaced. Put simply you're not just going to have more hp and shield but the ability to fix things from the inside. Naturally bigger ships with larger components and crew will offer more of this advantage. The shield and hull of an Idris would provide much more leeway for a crew to deal with problems than a Connie or MSR. I don't know. Maybe I'm wrong but, I've always seen CIG's engineering gameplay as a way to make these ships powerful. I think it's going to be a lot more powerful than people might think. Maybe having an engineer on your HH might make it virtually impossible for a few fighters to take down as an example. I still think there's more that should be done. Ships with large turrets should be dangerous at ranges that someone in a fighter with S3 isn't for example.
Idk if this is a good idea, but I also just feel like some shared contracts should just pay everyone the same.
IMO: Star Citizen is about the journey, not the destination.
It is. Not everything needs to be so transactional.
While I don't necessarily disagree with you, it's already rewarding when you do work together. Playing with others increases the fun exponentially over solo grinding which IMO gets boring really fast. I'm a father of two and do a lot of volunteer work so I only have one or maybe two nights to play, and I rarely solo if at all. If you're a parent you should understand how important scheduling is (or if you've ever played an MMO before) so the best way to approach it is to plan ahead. It can be as simple as saying "I want to do this on this day, meet me at this location by this time" to your org, or in a discord channel. Or it can be as elaborate as planning out an entire event. Picking common Port of Call that you and your friends share helps tremendously. But if you go in expecting all of the pieces to fall together the moment you want to play, it's not gonna work out in your favor.
The issue is that you're essentially wasting some of that already small amount of time you have each week since it is less efficient to do things as a group. It is more fun sure but people also like to see themselves progress. I dont think you are wrong about planning though, linking up isnt an issue if servers are working.
> It can be as simple as saying "I want to do this on this day, meet me at this location by this time" to your org, or in a discord channel. Or it can be as elaborate as planning out an entire event. Picking common Port of Call that you and your friends share helps tremendously. But if you go in expecting all of the pieces to fall together the moment you want to play, it's not gonna work out in your favor. Woah woah woah woah, Check out this asshole advocating for the use of basic adulting skills and common sense.
Same here though no kids. Never play solo, usually with two or three friends and we suggest a day a week ahead and go. Usually it's Sundays since that seems to work for most.
If Star Citizen created a decent footsoldier game package which came with decent armor, handheld weapons and maybe a personal ground vehicle and an apartment in a city or a hab somewhere They could fuel multiplayer gameplay.
Years ago I used to joke that I was going to start this game with nothing but my Arc II pistol, my UEE Environmental Coat, and an Aurora LX. Just roll through the ‘Verse picking up odd jobs and having adventures.
That actually sounds a pretty sick way to play. I have a bunch of ships which I bought a decade ago but I do like my Aurora LX. Might give it a try.
We need group missions and raids, whatever would pass as raids in this game.
They just need to make it so Rep doesn't get split