4Game

I tried multi-crew for the first time the other day and I finally understand why everyone complains about it. I honestly don't get why we need multi-crew options for different mission types (legal, illegal, mentor). That's not to mention the fact that it's buggy as hell (although better than it was, I'm told), and it's hard enough just setting up a multi crew to begin with. Why does it have to be so complicated?

Here's what I would do to make multi-crew a viable, balanced way of both players making money (proportionate to their rank) whilst simultaneously making it work better. Multiplayer just isn't a viable option if you want to increase your rank/income by much at the moment, in my opinion. Here's what I'd do to improve it:

1) do away with the multi-crew "types" (ie multi crew for this or that type of play, mentoring multi crew and so on). Just have a multi crew option. That's it.

2) make sure the host has the power to kick the crewmate from the session. This would give the host control over any toxic players who join their session, even though that's probably pretty rare. Something like this would be essential imo.

3) make it possible to share 50% of all payments with your multi crew partner, with a few caveats to ensure balance:

Profit sharing should be scalable based on rank differences. I.e., if you're a brand new player and you crew up with a triple elite, you shouldn't be able to get 50% of what they earn. It would make the game unbalanced as a new player could earn endgame money just by having a friend who's got hundreds of in-game hours. It wouldn't make sense.

So how do you balance it while making it worthwhile? Introduce a simple algorithm. If you and your partner are similarly ranked, the host can choose to share more of every payment they receive, up to 50%. If you're not similarly ranked, the host can only choose to share up to a certain percentage of what they are earning. This percentage they can share would be determined by the difference in rank between the two players, and would increase the closer the two players are. There would always be a minimum percentage (say, 10%), to allow a new player to make money playing alongside a long term player and prevent a host from keeping 100% of what they make for themselves. Additionally, the host would have to decide how much money to share before the crewmate is allowed to join, to prevent a host from reducing the profit sharing to minimum just before handing in a mission/receiving a payment.

This would mean that if you're both similar ranks, you could split all proceeds for any income received 50/50. If you're not, the lower ranked player would have to increase their rank separately to be eligible for a higher share of the profits. If, for example, a triple elite decides to multi crew with a low rank host, the low rank host can share up to 50% of their income with the triple elite, but this wouldn't work the other way around. As mentioned, there would always be a minimum profit share percentage, regardless.

3) allow the host to give flight controls to the crew mate at any time, but be able to take the flight control back over when they want.

4) add in a percentage increase to any payments earned, to ensure that you still earn a reasonable amount of money despite splitting your proceeds with your crew mate. Make that percentage increase with more crew members. Again, make it based on rank so that youd get a higher percentage increase for all payments the closer you and the crew mate/s are in rank to each other.

5) work on the connectivity problems which currently plague multi crew

6) allow your crew mate/s to pilot an SRV

In my opinion, structuring multi crew like this would make it 100% simpler and better overall. It would prevent new players receiving obscene payouts from playing with a high ranked person, while still allowing them to earn decent money with their high ranked friends. It would also mean that your crew member can earn money from absolutely anything you do, so you don't have to be tied into a certain way of playing while you're in a multi crew. You can switch up what you're doing on the fly, without any worry about payments.

I know there's a slightly different "teams" system coming up in odyssey, but this profit sharing mechanism could still work for this I think. Again, the host decides (there's always a minimum), and the joining player sees this and agrees to it. Again, it's based on rank.

What do you reckon? Would this make multi crew better?