RNG crew hiring is pointless

[Xarteros]

Limiting our ability to hire crew with particular stats to an RNG selection once per day is absolutely terrible.

It accomplishes nothing, and stands in the way of players enjoying the content however they like.

Instead, we need the ability to either "retrain" one of their skill ranks into a different skill (even just 1 rank per day, but you could do 1 per hour or 6 hours or something), or the ability to level crew members up.

Retraining would be the easiest solution, and would allow players to adjust their crew as their play style changes or as game changes lead to new styles.

Leveling could also work, with crew members gaining experience for each completed mission, and each level constitutes better stats (health/shield/armour/speed) with interspersed skill points. It would give players a sense of attachment to their crew (the ability to rename would also be nice if it isn't planned yet), and open up doors for further development as well.

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

This is crew 1.0......   They will eventually let us level them up.   They first just wanted to test the crew out with the basics from instrinsics.  

[MollAgdeduba]

Yeah... this system is terrible... and also is different from player to player. So every day all my available crew have skill randomly generated in all of 5 stat, making that "not the best" while my friend, that play just something has visit the shop 1 day and found two crew with the stat only in endurance+another.

-) Give ability to train the crew must be a thing.

-) Totally agree with you for rename them

[SpicyDinosaur]

15 minutes ago, MollAgdeduba said:

Yeah... this system is terrible... and also is different from player to player. So every day all my available crew have skill randomly generated in all of 5 stat, making that "not the best" while my friend, that play just something has visit the shop 1 day and found two crew with the stat only in endurance+another.

-) Give ability to train the crew must be a thing.

-) Totally agree with you for rename them

you can train the crew...

[chaotea]

Its demonstribly fine. Hire 3 crew, then get better ones when you see them.

[Xarteros]

53 minutes ago, chaotea said:

Its demonstribly fine. Hire 3 crew, then get better ones when you see them.

Except with only one new wave per day, it's statistically ridiculous to get any crew with specific stats, even factoring in the +3 you get from intrinsics. Not to mention if you wanted specific syndicates out of that crew. Not to mention that half of the available picks (all the ones purchased with credits) have fewer stat points.

As an example: In the absence of a system where AI can do multiple tasks with more intricately player-defined priorities and behaviours, there is no point in having an engineer with ranks in Piloting or Gunnery, although an Engineer can still benefit from the Combat skill. Thus, the optimum skill distribution for an engineer is to have all its ranks divided between repair, endurance and combat, whilst also being of the higher stat variants (purchased with railjack resources), and then further limited if you have a select preference of syndicate that you want the crew to be from. The odds of the ideal option occurring even once might as well be zero, and that would also require you to log in every day to check. Even if the odds were 1 in 1000, that means you'll have to log in every day for three years (ish) to get the ideal crew.
 

2 hours ago, (PSN)AbBaNdOn_ said:

This is crew 1.0......   They will eventually let us level them up.   They first just wanted to test the crew out with the basics from instrinsics.  

I guess I expected there would be more coming, but my issue is largely with how it was implemented initially. Having it be RNG is a terrible solution to implement it as content. If nothing else, all crew should just have blank slates and a number of points to spend, with the Command Intrinsic adding +3 still. That way, players get whatever they want without being limited by yet another wall of aimless RNG that benefits nobody. The ability to retrain skills would also work as a solution, albeit a crappy bandaid solution, but still.

It's just a really bad decision. At no point does this kind of RNG add to the game in fun, challenge or content. It diminishes the experience of the game by seeming arbitrary, tedious and frustrating. It's offputting to spend a week logging in to see if you can finally get a competent engineer, only to see them all with wasted ranks in gunning or piloting, especially since we've got limited slots to work with (yet another platinum sink)

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, chaotea said:

Its demonstribly fine. Hire 3 crew, then get better ones when you see them.

That requires constant visits to Ticker, which is not something you can do on a team - not without breaking and reforming. Maybe if the Railjack Configuration console in the Dojo had access to crew hiring, it might not be as annoying. Or hell - why not put them on the Mobile app? Even if I can't buy them from there, at least I can have a look at what's on offer and decide if I want to log on without having to go through all of the loading screens.

Or better yet - just let us retrain them. I understand that there's a certain amount of "verisimilitude" to have to make do with whatever crew we can come up with, rather than custom-tailoring them to our preferences. However, we can do that with everything else. What if I specifically want a Perrin Sequence pilot, but the game won't roll one of those with good Piloting skills, or any Perrin Sequence dudes at all?

Personally, I feel that Rank 10 Command should be the ability to level up crew and fully retrain them. Crew level would match the total number of stat points they have when we first purchase them (so a crew member with 10 points total would be "lower level" than a crew member with 14). We'd eventually be able to level them all up to some maximum number of points (say 15) and potentially retrain them, redistributing points as we see fit. This way, we could invest in our crew and eventually turn them into what we want.

[chaotea]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

That requires constant visits to Ticker, which is not something you can do on a team - not without breaking and reforming.

Ive been to ticker 3 times total, and the first time i got someone good at flying, someone good at shooting and someone good at repairs. The rest is just options.

[chaotea]

1 hour ago, Xarteros said:

Except with only one new wave per day, it's statistically ridiculous to get any crew with specific stats, even factoring in the +3 you get from intrinsics. Not to mention if you wanted specific syndicates out of that crew. Not to mention that half of the available picks (all the ones purchased with credits) have fewer stat points.

Again, not seeing an issue on my end. Maybe im less obsessed over it, but it was easy to get 3 specialists. Now when im in fortuna i check to see if there are any better replacements up for grab, but its not like its neccisary.

 

[Steel_Rook]

45 minutes ago, chaotea said:

Ive been to ticker 3 times total, and the first time i got someone good at flying, someone good at shooting and someone good at repairs. The rest is just options.

Someone good at "flying" doesn't make that person a good pilot. Gunnery is what controls weapon performance, so ideally you want your pilot to be good at both. Someone good at "Repairs" is also not that useful as the buffs don't do much. Ideally, you want someone good at repairs who can also double up as Security, since they're the first person to meet boarders.

Moreover - great, you got lucky. I hit the lever on a slot machine once and got three "Bars." Doesn't mean I'll get lucky every time. In fact, we shouldn't even have to BE lucky in hiring our crew. DE already tried this with Kuva weapons and Railjack armaments and in all cases ended up having to implement Valence Fusion because people weren't happy with getting random stats on their stuff. We need a deterministic fallback of a similar fashion for Crew, as well.

[SpicyDinosaur]

5 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Someone good at "flying" doesn't make that person a good pilot. Gunnery is what controls weapon performance, so ideally you want your pilot to be good at both. Someone good at "Repairs" is also not that useful as the buffs don't do much. Ideally, you want someone good at repairs who can also double up as Security, since they're the first person to meet boarders.

Moreover - great, you got lucky. I hit the lever on a slot machine once and got three "Bars." Doesn't mean I'll get lucky every time. In fact, we shouldn't even have to BE lucky in hiring our crew. DE already tried this with Kuva weapons and Railjack armaments and in all cases ended up having to implement Valence Fusion because people weren't happy with getting random stats on their stuff. We need a deterministic fallback of a similar fashion for Crew, as well.

it takes like no effort to go back to Ticker periodically. Why does everyone want everything immediately and handed to them on a silver platter

[Hobie-wan]

9 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

That requires constant visits to Ticker, which is not something you can do on a team - not without breaking and reforming.

Are you leaving yourself logged into the game 24 hours a day and always in a group that waits to play the game for exactly the times you do? Then you can visit Ticker when you first log on before you're in a group or right before you log off when you've left the group.

[ArmsForPeace84]

17 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Someone good at "flying" doesn't make that person a good pilot. Gunnery is what controls weapon performance, so ideally you want your pilot to be good at both. Someone good at "Repairs" is also not that useful as the buffs don't do much. Ideally, you want someone good at repairs who can also double up as Security, since they're the first person to meet boarders.

Moreover - great, you got lucky. I hit the lever on a slot machine once and got three "Bars." Doesn't mean I'll get lucky every time. In fact, we shouldn't even have to BE lucky in hiring our crew. DE already tried this with Kuva weapons and Railjack armaments and in all cases ended up having to implement Valence Fusion because people weren't happy with getting random stats on their stuff. We need a deterministic fallback of a similar fashion for Crew, as well.

If you have a pilot with a high Gunnery stat, are you finding them at all good at taking out fighters? I would think the way they just fly a racetrack pattern would mean they're very rarely lined up properly to engage anything.

At the moment, though, my pilot is not part of the active crew. If I'm soloing, I just park the ship in cover, but with good line of fire on approaching ramsleds for the gunners. And I've got one crew member on security. Engineering, ostensibly, but they're doing a far better job clearing out the boarding parties than putting out fires.

[Steel_Rook]

4 hours ago, ZokuGojira said:

If you have a pilot with a high Gunnery stat, are you finding them at all good at taking out fighters? I would think the way they just fly a racetrack pattern would mean they're very rarely lined up properly to engage anything.

I routinely leave my Pilot alone to deal with Fighters, and he does just fine. I tend to find piles of pick-ups when I come out of whatever Point of Interest I was doing. A good Pilot with good Gunnery is pretty capable, even up to Veil Proxima - especially with at least one additional Gunner. With a decent ship in their hands, the AI crew can do pretty well for themselves.

 

15 hours ago, Hobie-wan said:

Are you leaving yourself logged into the game 24 hours a day and always in a group that waits to play the game for exactly the times you do? Then you can visit Ticker when you first log on before you're in a group or right before you log off when you've left the group.

My point, though, is "why is this even necessary?" Was the argument for replacing Alerts with Nightwave not this exact same thing? That "we don't want to miss out on cool loot because we happened to be sleeping/at work/playing other games? These days, I mostly only log on when I have someone to play with and mostly log off when we're done. I've been checking Ticker periodically and haven't found anything better than the crew I already have. And even if I did - I'm happy with my faction selection. I have a Perrin Sequence dude on the Pilot's seat, a Steel Meridian lady on the guns and a Suda lady fixing the ship and pwning boarders. I like all of these factions. I don't want Red Veil terrorists on my ship or New Loka hippies. I could probably use a Solaris United, but I definitely don't want any Ostron WoW rejects.

Again, look at Kuva weapons. Yeah, sure - I can just keep killing Liches and just hope a better weapon drops... Or I can Valence Fusion my weapons together so that even a weak weapon can help improve my strong weapon up to a cap. The same applies to Railjack Armaments. I COULD grind Veil Proxima Crew Ships for those MK3 Corpus Armaments... Or I can get one, then upgrade it with the much more plentiful MK2 variants available on Neptune. The game has progressively moved away from "keep refreshing this page every few hours and hope something you want turns up." The Crew hiring system just is not good, especially if you happen to also want something thematic in addition to "whatever, just high stats."

 

17 hours ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

it takes like no effort to go back to Ticker periodically. Why does everyone want everything immediately and handed to them on a silver platter

Do you not recognise the conundrum you just said? You're chastising me for wanting to put in "no effort" while at the same time describing visiting Fortuna as taking "no effort" anyway. In fact, consider what I proposed - the ability to use, level up, promote and upgrade crew through actual play. I would suggest that actually putting gameplay hours onto a thing in order to improve its stats constitutes far more effort than loading into Fortuna and chatting up Ticker. The latter is just boring, tedious and worst of all RANDOM.

If I may be so bold as to ask - why do you consider RNG to be "effort?" I've seen this a lot in the Warframe community. Someone complains about RNG wasting our time, and inevitably the "you're just entitled" retort comes out, even though randomness doesn't actually take more effort. Walking by the slot machine and hitting the lever a few times per day doesn't constitute "effort." It just constitutes a waste of my time. I'd much rather put in actual effort in bringing my crew through missions, training them through experience and improving them that way than hitting the lever on Ticker and hoping the game just straight-up gives me a high-stat crew member for no effort on my part.

Grind is not content. RNG is not effort. Time sinks are not compelling. Maybe put some actual gameplay behind improving my crew and then we'll talk.

[Yamazuki]

I personally think each crew member should've been more of a cosmetic thing with their own personality. Various resource sinks for hiring them, plain boring starter npcs that cost credits. Then more resources spent overtime on actually training them. Use them in combat enough, and eventually you get close enough to them to give them a nick-name. It would also make it a system that could be monetized further beyond just slots if they wanted...

As it is now, it's an inconvenient system that's been copy/pasted from all the other rng time gated shops, and there's no variance between each type of npc beyond their stats/name anyways.

[SpicyDinosaur]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Do you not recognise the conundrum you just said? You're chastising me for wanting to put in "no effort" while at the same time describing visiting Fortuna as taking "no effort" anyway. In fact, consider what I proposed - the ability to use, level up, promote and upgrade crew through actual play. I would suggest that actually putting gameplay hours onto a thing in order to improve its stats constitutes far more effort than loading into Fortuna and chatting up Ticker. The latter is just boring, tedious and worst of all RANDOM.

If I may be so bold as to ask - why do you consider RNG to be "effort?" I've seen this a lot in the Warframe community. Someone complains about RNG wasting our time, and inevitably the "you're just entitled" retort comes out, even though randomness doesn't actually take more effort. Walking by the slot machine and hitting the lever a few times per day doesn't constitute "effort." It just constitutes a waste of my time. I'd much rather put in actual effort in bringing my crew through missions, training them through experience and improving them that way than hitting the lever on Ticker and hoping the game just straight-up gives me a high-stat crew member for no effort on my part.

Grind is not content. RNG is not effort. Time sinks are not compelling. Maybe put some actual gameplay behind improving my crew and then we'll talk.

I'm saying that it takes no effort and it is still getting complaints, though your idea of leveling up crew is actually a good idea and a better way to do things, so I apologize for being so flippant about it.

 

RNG and other elements often complained about have been in MMOs since the very early days. It's part of it. It's effort insomuch as you often have to "put in the time" to get those items, though yes you can get lucky. I got my second Nidus within like 5 or 6 salvages, for example of some no effort, good luck. But I've put in a lot of time on other RNG things and that time makes it effort to do. Challenging? Only if the fight itself is. But definitely effort.

 

DE does allow skips if you don't want to do the content (including any RNG that might be frustrating) by selling most stuff for plat. But I disagree that grind and RNG aren't effort. They may not be challenging, but they still require patience and time. I don't have a problem with throttling progress through time gates either, as that is also an MMO staple. The playerbase that is vocal in the game is not like any other I can think of, there are constant complaints about things that exist in any MMO. I don't see why Warframe would be different in these. Often it is so players don't finish the content on the first day then go back to being bored.

 

But, maybe I'm biased because I like Ticker so much and want her to be our new space mom. /shrug

[continue]

22 minutes ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

RNG and other elements often complained about have been in MMOs since the very early days. It's part of it. It's effort insomuch as you often have to "put in the time" to get those items, though yes you can get lucky. I got my second Nidus within like 5 or 6 salvages, for example of some no effort, good luck. But I've put in a lot of time on other RNG things and that time makes it effort to do. Challenging? Only if the fight itself is. But definitely effort.

i'm not confident how true this is generally, but at least in my experience playing stuff like monster hunter, RNG drop systems are more fun if the fight itself is also challenging. a lot of stuff in Warframe isn't actually that bad of RNG, but sometimes, how long it takes to farm is kind of out of whack with how challenging it is, so it kind of just becomes a chore.

and on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, RNG grind can also be like relaxing zen content, like fishing in FFXIV. but i find that's only fun when it's optional and doesn't unlock any special rewards that benefit you in other content. a lot of people really hated fishing in FFXIV because they only did it to raise their level and get the title for maxing all your classes.

in both of these examples, i think there's sort of a concept of intrinsic reward. RNG can be intrinsically fun on its own, but locking extrinsic rewards behind it tends to take the focus away from the intrinsic, and then you need to supplement it with gameplay that is also intrinsically fun. that's just my guess, though, and it's not like you can't still have fun with MMO grinds and RNG and whatnot. i just prefer to measure games by how fun they are instead of how much time they take.

[SpicyDinosaur]

6 minutes ago, continue said:

i'm not confident how true this is generally, but at least in my experience playing stuff like monster hunter, RNG drop systems are more fun if the fight itself is also challenging. a lot of stuff in Warframe isn't actually that bad of RNG, but sometimes, how long it takes to farm is kind of out of whack with how challenging it is, so it kind of just becomes a chore.

and on the complete opposite end of the spectrum, RNG grind can also be like relaxing zen content, like fishing in FFXIV. but i find that's only fun when it's optional and doesn't unlock any special rewards that benefit you in other content. a lot of people really hated fishing in FFXIV because they only did it to raise their level and get the title for maxing all your classes.

in both of these examples, i think there's sort of a concept of intrinsic reward. RNG can be intrinsically fun on its own, but locking extrinsic rewards behind it tends to take the focus away from the intrinsic, and then you need to supplement it with gameplay that is also intrinsically fun. that's just my guess, though, and it's not like you can't still have fun with MMO grinds and RNG and whatnot. i just prefer to measure games by how fun they are instead of how much time they take.

I agree with your post almost completely.

 

I would love to see more challenge in the fights Warframe has that must be ground out. 

 

The "zen" like feeling is abnegation. basically you get in "the zone" and just grind and it is relaxing. DE has a lot of grind and I often find it relaxing. I don't mind if stuff is locked behind it, personally. The grind is content, even if many people don't see it that way. It gives you a reason to play the game.

[continue]

54 minutes ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

The "zen" like feeling is abnegation. basically you get in "the zone" and just grind and it is relaxing. DE has a lot of grind and I often find it relaxing. I don't mind if stuff is locked behind it, personally. The grind is content, even if many people don't see it that way. It gives you a reason to play the game.

that's certainly a way to play that i think is possible for most everyone, but i do think that requires a change in perspective that isn't trivial when so much of the game is structured around motivating players through extrinsic rewards. what i have to do with some of the grindier stuff is to only play for a short amount of time, so that i can't actually expect to get a drop before i'm done playing. 

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

RNG and other elements often complained about have been in MMOs since the very early days. It's part of it. It's effort insomuch as you often have to "put in the time" to get those items, though yes you can get lucky. I got my second Nidus within like 5 or 6 salvages, for example of some no effort, good luck. But I've put in a lot of time on other RNG things and that time makes it effort to do. Challenging? Only if the fight itself is. But definitely effort.

Right, but I'd caution against using the Grandfather Argument - "It's like this because it's always been like this." Yes, RNG loot drops have been in MMOs since their inception, but so have lootboxes. Fifa and Overwatch get cited for popularising them, but I distinctly remember earning "Lockboxes" in 9Dragons and the like 10-15 years ago. It wasn't until Battlefront 2 that popular backlash got severe enough to actually burn publishers off of using them. A lot of the arguments they made in their own defence only served to bring up legitimate concerns. From "surprise mechanics" to "like Kinder Eggs" to "like Panini Stickers" and so on - all that did was make us sit back and reevaluate those other things, themselves.

If I may go off-topic for just a second - random rewards get used over deterministic rewards for purely habit-forming, anti-consumer reasons. I can't cite the studies any more as it's been a while, but it was discovered that players maintain an overall higher average level of "engagement" when rewards are unpredictable. With predictable, deterministic rewards, engagement peaks very high when players are close to attaining a reward, but then drop all the way down to near-nothing afterwards. This creates a "stopping point" - a point where a player has had enough of the game for a while and might go play something else... Or log out. With random rewards, every roll offers an opportunity to make progress, thus players retain an overall higher level of engagement. Even if you just earned a big reward, the next one might drop off the very next roll.

I personally look at these things the other way around. RNG loot drops ensure that I make NO progress unless I get the roll I was after. Anything else means I literally could have stayed in bed and made exactly as much progress. Engagement remains high because you're effectively not progressing. You're at the exact same initial stage at every step of the process until you get your drop. Rather than feeling like we're very far away, however, the gambler's fallacy makes us feel like we're getting closer and closer, giving us a sense of euphoria and progression... Even though we're doing little more than treading water.

But back on-topic: We seem to be in agreement that a system for crew progression through gameplay is superior to what we have right now. I'll be honest with you - I would rather get Crew with zeroes across the board for any skill and have to train them up to some cap (say 15 total), rather than just by them with a random 15-star distribution. It would let me distribute them as I please AND it would let me feel invested in my own crew, having known them since they were newbies who didn't know where the consoles on the ship are. I'm with the others, arguing that this is just the first iteration of crews. Hopefully, we'll get some kind of more hands-on system at a later date.

Or at the very least, I hope we can get a Valence Fusion system where we can use up a new crew member to "teach" one of our existing ones.

[SpicyDinosaur]

23 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

Right, but I'd caution against using the Grandfather Argument - "It's like this because it's always been like this." Yes, RNG loot drops have been in MMOs since their inception, but so have lootboxes. Fifa and Overwatch get cited for popularising them, but I distinctly remember earning "Lockboxes" in 9Dragons and the like 10-15 years ago. It wasn't until Battlefront 2 that popular backlash got severe enough to actually burn publishers off of using them. A lot of the arguments they made in their own defence only served to bring up legitimate concerns. From "surprise mechanics" to "like Kinder Eggs" to "like Panini Stickers" and so on - all that did was make us sit back and reevaluate those other things, themselves.

TBF, the workaround for RNG, and I must say it is more satisfying than it, is currency. You run the risk of dead currency, but I've noticed a lot of newer MMOs use currency earned from doing the content you need to do to get the items, and some of the old ones have added it.

 

24 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

If I may go off-topic for just a second - random rewards get used over deterministic rewards for purely habit-forming, anti-consumer reasons. I can't cite the studies any more as it's been a while, but it was discovered that players maintain an overall higher average level of "engagement" when rewards are unpredictable. With predictable, deterministic rewards, engagement peaks very high when players are close to attaining a reward, but then drop all the way down to near-nothing afterwards. This creates a "stopping point" - a point where a player has had enough of the game for a while and might go play something else... Or log out. With random rewards, every roll offers an opportunity to make progress, thus players retain an overall higher level of engagement. Even if you just earned a big reward, the next one might drop off the very next roll.

I have no knowledge to add to this, but it's actually pretty interesting.

 

40 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

But back on-topic: We seem to be in agreement that a system for crew progression through gameplay is superior to what we have right now. I'll be honest with you - I would rather get Crew with zeroes across the board for any skill and have to train them up to some cap (say 15 total), rather than just by them with a random 15-star distribution. It would let me distribute them as I please AND it would let me feel invested in my own crew, having known them since they were newbies who didn't know where the consoles on the ship are. I'm with the others, arguing that this is just the first iteration of crews. Hopefully, we'll get some kind of more hands-on system at a later date.

Or at the very least, I hope we can get a Valence Fusion system where we can use up a new crew member to "teach" one of our existing ones.

This is a well thought out comment, and I have very little to add. It does seem we agree on this. Though the current system doesn't bother me, your ideas are simply better, imo.

 

I would also like to be able to hire the people whose debts I buy, but that may or may not have been difficult to implement even if they thought of it.

[VoidArkhangel]

And yet I want a "rescue" option to give those that I defeat or are in a bad situation a hand : /

[continue]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

If I may go off-topic for just a second - random rewards get used over deterministic rewards for purely habit-forming, anti-consumer reasons. I can't cite the studies any more as it's been a while, but it was discovered that players maintain an overall higher average level of "engagement" when rewards are unpredictable. With predictable, deterministic rewards, engagement peaks very high when players are close to attaining a reward, but then drop all the way down to near-nothing afterwards. This creates a "stopping point" - a point where a player has had enough of the game for a while and might go play something else... Or log out. With random rewards, every roll offers an opportunity to make progress, thus players retain an overall higher level of engagement. Even if you just earned a big reward, the next one might drop off the very next roll.

i think the term you might be looking for is skinner boxes. they've definitely been discussed enough in video game design and criticism circles to be considered common language, at least in those spheres. i'm not aware whether similar studies were ever applied to humans rather than rats, though.

[Steel_Rook]

18 hours ago, SpicyDinosaur said:

I would also like to be able to hire the people whose debts I buy, but that may or may not have been difficult to implement even if they thought of it.

Not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm not sure what form that would even take beyond the existing system of recruiting Fortuna civvies. The game currently doesn't appear to keep any record of whom the Debt Bonds belonged to when you bought them. The little bit of flavour text seems to be randomly assigned to Ticker's store and ceases to exist past the point of purchase. Do you figure some change can be done to recruiting Fortuna AI Crew which could approximate what you're after?

 

15 hours ago, continue said:

i think the term you might be looking for is skinner boxes. they've definitely been discussed enough in video game design and criticism circles to be considered common language, at least in those spheres. i'm not aware whether similar studies were ever applied to humans rather than rats, though.

Possible - those studies got passed around some 15 years ago, and had to do with the behaviour of MMO players. I don't recall what they were based on - could be on drawing metrics from player behaviour. Their core concept was the idea of "stopping points" and "level of activity" (which I called "engagement"). Specifically, the goal was to ensure moderate but consistent level of activity by removing stopping points or points of low activity. They discovered that players are - on average - more motivated when they don't have a tangible measure of progress. So yeah, I guess this does basically boil down to the Skinner Box concept. I'm speaking off memory, though, so it's possible I misremember.

[SpicyDinosaur]

4 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Not necessarily a bad idea, but I'm not sure what form that would even take beyond the existing system of recruiting Fortuna civvies. The game currently doesn't appear to keep any record of whom the Debt Bonds belonged to when you bought them. The little bit of flavour text seems to be randomly assigned to Ticker's store and ceases to exist past the point of purchase. Do you figure some change can be done to recruiting Fortuna AI Crew which could approximate what you're after?

I have no idea. The debt bond people aren't actually fleshed out either. I could say it doesn't seem too hard since the current crew is RNG from what I can tell, and they could just use the old corpus models, or a few sets of graphics, but without knowing the code, I haven't a clue.