Is Star Citizen Forcing Multicrew in a Bad Way?

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[cbrown]

My biggest gripe with the MOLE is that it doesn't really have a natural progression to it.

The Prospector should be a Forager, picking through smaller clusters of rocks(Lyria/ Aaron's Halo 5000mass rocks) where as the MOLE should be used for mining bigger Asteroids (Grim Hex Size) where maybe each crew needs to find a critical area to overcharge separately to collectively break the rock).

The MOLE should be to the Prospector, what the Prospector is to the ROC. We need a larger classification of Asteroids to justify the additional manpower.

[RaysGuide]

People whining about the Mole are missing that the Mole has larger mining heads and the possible use of specialization. Optimize one head for cracking power, the next for stability, and the third for collection.

[Le_Sigh]

The sad fact is MMO’s as a whole are failing. The trends are showing that people want a single player experience in a multiplayer world.

[TheNucaKola]

I don’t think it’s bad to encourage multi crew ships for players, as some of the best gameplay experiences players can have are with others. As someone who doesn’t have friends who play or are interested in SC, these kind of decisions would make it easier for me to find a group to have adventures with with their multi crew ship, or even my own

[durtyred]

The Mole would be leagues better than the Prospector overnight if they turned those machines that are supposed to filter out dirt, into small refineries.... That's literally all it'll take. Keep the ability to filter ofcourse, but make them onboard refineries too and boom... The Mole just became a very useful ship over 3 or 4 Prospectors.

[dimman]

They might ignore complaints of ineffective combat performance in the new flight model for multi-crew unless the turrets are manned. Say Avenger One's disengage example where someone is running in SCM and keeping their chasing enemy at bay/making them fall behind by turret fire.

[LockDCS]

It might be more fun to fly in a multicrew ship but it's hard to get people to join up in the first place.

[drksideofthewal]

You know what 4 Prospectors don't have? A fuel tank that will let them travel across Pyro. They have the same small fuel tank as a fighter.

The MOLE, on the other hand, has 2 medium fuel tanks. It would be a better choice, unless you want to pay for a Starfarer or a Kraken to ferry your Prospectors.

[CyberneticArgumentCreator]

I think they have the right concept with how much they mention "systemic" things but then almost all of the content they are making is precooked.

Instead of cargo running where you are just looping npc terminals and trade routes, why not make those very limited in quantity but raise the amount of value for mining and salvage/stripping etc so a "cargo run" involves work to fill up whatever ship you are using's cargo space and then a single huge-profit run to sell it? Figuring out how to fill the ship should be the task, not rote memory of a static trade route.

I've said it before, but it should be like 4 or 5 gaming nights of an hour or two to fill up a C2. Maybe you do a pve bounty and your friend or yourself return to strip and salvage the materials from the wrecks, then you mine another night, then one night you and a few friends spread out and bring back a few cutlasses or freelancers worth of trade goods from all over the place, piecemeal but highly valuable. Maybe a ground mission or three one night and then grabbing all of the weapons and gear. You get some money here and there over those nights and then you gather up the results of all of those varied play sessions into the cargo bay of a C2 with your friends and run it through a direct route to sell the stuff you've acquired for a huge payout.

It's really uncreative to implement self-contained loops, so I hope they shift over to this. Gathering up lots of hours worth of spoils and then having a cannonball run across the universe to sell the mishmash of what you gathered is way cooler than Desert Bus in space. THAT's how systems should interconnect. THAT's how multicrew should organically happen. Several people crewing a Constellation in order to run PvE bounties and create salvageable material and then using a multicrew salvager to salvage all of it. The additional crew should raise the amount of stuff completed/gathered per hour, it shouldn't be a pain point where you are putting crew in a ship because it requires crew to do menial minigames in order to fly it. That's the wrong approach. Crew to man turrets or salvaging/mining laser arms? Good. Crew required to constantly play FTL or else your ship falls apart? Tedious for most.

It's cool to have a drone guy, it's not cool to have a guy moving packages from floor 2 to floor 1 after salvaging. Just make the packages propagate in the cargo bay of things like the Reclaimer and make all roles "cool" where they are operating drones or turrets/laser arms or monitoring sensors while searching for a target to mine/salvage. Make larger ships scale to do more the more crew you have on them, but don't limit their OPERATION by creating failure mode required tasks you need a guy sitting there doing just to use the ship. Maybe the cargo guy in the reclaimer fences off which SCU tiles the different cargo populates into, so you could limit the number of SCU of something less valuable but plentiful and reserve more tiles for high value cargo and jettison any product above that material's limited SCU space you chose. That way a reclaimer might have 1/4 reserved for common material, and 3/4 for higher-value ones and the boxes of the cheaper material start popping out of the reclaimer and floating nearby. Then another ship can make trips to gather up the overflow cheaper material boxes and hauling them to store or sell somewhere else. This lets the people involved realize more profit by adding another ship and lets the cargo management guy make meaningful decisions without running back and forth 100 times with a tractor beam moving the cargo into place. Decisions like "we were limiting the cheap material but I think we're going to leave soon so I'm going to remove the limits and allow the hold to fill up with whatever comes in so we can leave full".

I am talking from a long-term gameplay perspective, not a "ooh imagine if this were a thing, it would be so cool!" perspective without considerations for actually doing that thing constantly for hundreds or thousands of hours of playtime long-term.

[NewsViewsAndTruth]

In my opinion, the multi-crew ships should gain bonuses with mini-game opportunities. One such hypothetical, would be if one of the miners hit an explosive node, and the other miners can be prompted to solve a puzzle or finish a task in order to mitigate damage in some way. Perhaps this would be explained as a mining feedback that can be offset.

[FieldHoodGaming]

The Mole has a filter, which will eventually make it more effective than the Prospector

[sleepfishl]

The Mole has no use as a "Miner" as long as Quantanium is the only valuable Ore. ... Atm. it's only really profitable if you have 3 Prospectors to mine and the Mole to scoop.
To make the Mole even remotely usable atm. it'd have some form of dampener that keeps Quant longer stable, so you can actually fill the hold without other ships breaking rocks for you.

[Civilunit]

There are a good many ways to make a ship like the Mole more effective and better with multi crew. If I had a wish list I think the mole should be outfitted with a tractor beam that the pilot can lock onto asteroids or deposits. Keeping the rock in position as it is fractured by the miners. They could also make the yield return larger, having multiable beams could process the ore a bit to filter out some of the slag to increase profitable rock. This would give the pilot something to do, the mole a unique feature over the prospector and a bonus to having more than one beam on a rock besides just putting more power into it. Larger mining beams should just be more efficient anyways.

[JokeryEU]

no one forces you to buy a multi crew ship in the first place..., game its all about online play and player interaction with other players, you can use multicrew ships as solo and buy AI crew but will never be the same as with other players. mining its essential to survival/maintenance of your base because you will craft stuff to maintain your bases/starbases. Also the civilian ship shouldnt have much in terms of defense thats why you hire AI ships to guard you or player if you go for high risk high reward mining.
Star Citizen isnt for casual plays in the first place

[mcvellrobinson]

Anytime the pilot has no weapons at his / her disposal, you are being forced into multiplayer gameplay. Star Citizen was originally pitched as a game you can play in your own way. The "Maverick" loner was one of the architypes advertised as being viable in this game. I like playing solo. I like being able to jump in the game, don't have to meet up with anyone, don't have to wait on anyone, do my own thing and quit when I'm finished. When you talk about playing solo, many citizens will shout, "This is an MMOG, if you don't like it, you shouldn't play!" MMOG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Game. In other words, many people in an online game. Nowhere does it say you have to interact with others.

[JizzyNinja]

For multi crew, make them have the ability to mine more valuable ore because of their size, right? Build in game mechanics that are unlocked with larger ships. In MMOs, raids have the best loot and require more players. Applying this idea and embedding this into the game design like mining laser size for certain rocks feels like a simple and natural way to do this. I’m newish so maybe I’m missing something?

[ains]

What about players like me who can't find a group or who have schedules that mandate solo play?

[GenericName]

Think this boils down to how much you enjoy playing with other people and also how functional NPC's will be at this stuff.

I personally tend to play alone and being an engineer on a ship holds no real value to me. I'm not saying I would never want to do it but I certainly wouldn't want to do it to the extent they seem to be trying to build it into the game, where it's an important and ever present thing.

I just want to be able to log in after work, relax and go on some fun adventures for a couple hours. I generally don't have time to coordinate my play with 2-4 (or more) other people and I usually enjoy a more combat oriented play style.

That said I think options are always a good thing, the more ways to play you support the better it is for people to find a way to play they can enjoy. I just hope they do as they've said and have capable NPC crew that you can hire to fill these rolls and function well. I'm not going to be running an Idris or anything but I do want to be able to run like a five person oriented ship with just me and NPC's. So maybe two gunners, a co-pilot and an engineer or something like that. If they make that viable then I'm all good.

[HeloHounds]

If you don't want "forced" multi-player game play.... Don't buy multi-player ships.... Problem solved.

[Pappy_]

IMHO, the pilot of the Mole should be able to move the ship at SCM speeds while in the central mining turret. He would be allowed to scan and ping and adjust the ship from that seat. If he needs to quantum (or quantum boost) he must be back up in the pilot seat. If you have a 4 man crew, with three miners and a pilot, the pilot can be in the pilot seat on standby should there be an emergency. He would be able to switch control to himself and get the crew out of there.