There seems to be a misconception that players are neatly packed and priced products sold on supermarkets that you can pick up before doing trade runs, when one has an hour or two to play after coming home from work (or swapping desktops after work in the age of home office..), having been someone else's bitch for 7 - 12 hours (depending on where you live). One could argue that these neatly priced products are going to be adjusted to a fair and reasonable level by qanta, but players still have other motivational considerations other than pricing: Whenever a pirate says you need to hire an escort or a gunner, it's like they are saying "*&^% you", cuz the amount of money that is required to turn someone into a McGuffin needs to exceed their own financial capability. A normal combat pilot can earn 10K every 5 minutes if they stack their authorized execution warrants right with the ECN's. A lot of Star Citizens own Caterpillars. Try having them be your gunner or escort for 10,000 per 5 minutes. Might as well be a contractual pre-paid ransom without guarantee for safety. It'd be be cheaper to pay pirates protection money, than hire other players to be your bitch in their free time. Admittedly people might consider sitting in a turret doing jack-shit for 10K per 5 minutes a great deal, especially since they don't lose anything during a 30K... but it's not a deal your going to be ok with being extorted into by the system. Now, let's say you found a snowflake (too negative for the Eradicator) person who wants to experience multicrew starships for the first time. You will have the following problems: - Crew can require up to 10 minutes to travel to you, IF he owns a ship with enough fuel to get that far. (Agent smithing is currently up in the air?) - Has less time to play than you - Can (get) disconnect(ed) - Requires a lot of logistical effort to get back after a 30K (until iCache/server meshing becomes a thing) - Won't always play in the same times as you, and thus you can't build a rapport where they are trustworthy enough not to inside job your ship. (until you can give authorizations as a captain, and assign access levels to doors and bulkheads) - Crew isn't as invested in your ship, because it's not his ship. - Can go AFK for 5 minutes for a smoke and get paid 10K for that, coming back to a smoking wreck. - Escorts can double-cross/sell out on you, if your cargo is more valuable than the defense contract. (Sure, you got a reputation system, but the 5 star escorts are going to cost a pirates ransom to hire due to demand) And this isn't going to get any easier as people get richer. NPC's need to be good enough to be effective and affordable enough to not be pre-paid ransom. There are many people out there that argue that NPC's need to be complete gimps, because they got unemployment PTSD or something, i'm sure those people are going to enjoy being someone's bitch for the first few months, but even they will one day be able to afford their own multi-crew starships. What then?