Great pics, bonnie! And fond memories
Thanks!
Maybe i shouldn't exhume Chili's concerns, but I can't resist giving a crew perspective:
People join a mothership crew (most often on repairs) for 3 reasons:
skilling
fun and companionship
the satisfaction of being part of a well-oiled machine
Now,
you take skilling away and there just isn;t enough incentive. People are not gonna want to just stand around doing nothing for the 2-3 hours a roundtrip takes, just in case of attack! And they are not gonna want to pay thruster decay and landing fees all the time, either, if they get nothing back in the form of skills. I think MA have left the so-called exploit in place , because they realise that no way could an MS get a fully functional crew without that "exploit". They need to come up with some whole new incentive first.
Pay crew instead, you say? I shudder to think what a warp trip would cost if you had to pass that expense on to pasengers! It's already hard enough to recover the cost of buying, upgrading, warping and fuelling, I'm sure. Do you really want to have to pay for crew's wages as well? And how many would buy? Again, you're looking at space, as we know it, dying if you go down that road. And we all go back to travelling everywhere by quad
...unless logged-out travelling remains an option. But that takes out all the fun doesn't it? And that's also regarded as an "exploit" by many players. At least Normandie and a few others are running an MS service in exactly way that MA intended...but ironically, that's made possible by what seems to be an unintended feature (0.0 repairs)
I'd also like to add that
Normandie was the last ship to take advantage of that feature. We did it the really hard way by driving thru mob-fields, whilst other MS crews laughed at us, until John had made enough support-cases to be sure that MA were never gonna reply with "No , you mustn't do that"
You're gonna say- we can do it the hard way again? well, yeah, but not on a passenger trip. And there only so many people stoic enough to put up with so much hassle for a much lower skilling-rate.
And
does loss of T-ing in space really benifit Normandie? I don't think so. I'm sure I'm not the only crew member who often has to fly across the Universe by quad to join Normandie for my tour of duty. And who won;t be bothering so often as before
. I think you forget that full time MS crews have more need to travel by quad than almost everyone else. We're like busmen! Catching the bus to work just ain't an option! It's a bummer, however you look at it.
jay