HufarTed

Despite the quasi-facetious "TRUST NOBODY" above, I have no problem socializing and making friends online, but i dont extend great gobs of trust to everyone. Do you? Building trust takes time and interaction. Larger Orgs have less interaction between all members than smaller ones because of time zones, work/school schedules, etc. and it ony takes one Reaver infiltrator to totally ruin your Org/personal efforts. It would be great if we could always know right off the bat who's a Reaver and who's a Good Guy, but unfortunately sometimes you don't find out until you feel the vibroblade slip between your ribs. As for NPC crew "jeopardizing" the social aspect of the game - How? Will such a mechanic suddenly turn everyone into antisocial loners? Will it force everybody to fly solo with only their droids to interact with? EVE only has single player ships yet their chat and community are still active and space is full of fleets working together (even though popularity has been declining for some time).

I like the idea of multi-crew ships but i know there will be times when there wont be enough of my friends & Org mates online at the same time to crew a ship (much less several for fleet ops) and i'm not about to hire some potentially mutinous PUG crew & hand them my ship on a silver platter (is my EVE paranoia showing? TRUST NOBODY!) so i have a couple of suggestions: 1. Give players the ability to use offline friends/Org members as crew with the caveat that the offline crewmen can only be assigned to one construct at a time (no virtual clones on all your friends ships) AND/OR 2. Recruitable NPCs similar to Star Trek online -Fully trainable (not inherently specialized) like player characters but with skills capped at the players corresponding skill level -"Crew Management" skill to determine how many crewmen players can recruit -NO ENTOURAGES! NPC crew cannot leave their assigned constructs. -Requires crew quarters? A bed per creman? I'd be ok with this. It makes sense and players would only have to include quarters in their constructs if they want to use NPCs. -Gear? Not even sure if players will have gear but im ok either way. Might be nice aesthetically (uniforms & such) but not exactly a priority. Anyway it'd be nice to be able to just log in and play rather than log in and wait, potentially forever, for enough trustworthy people to log in AND be willing to crew my ship.

We've seen forcefields in one of the vids (March dev diary) so why not incorporate those into doors and windows with scripted transparency, color, and effects? Especially since they've said they're not going to have rotating/sliding elements at release. Edit: I know this won't allow curved windows and such but it's better than nothing until we get variable translucent/transparent voxels