I am personally not too happy with being able to unlock all ship blueprints with absolutely no effort. You take down the bounties in your starter system, then you're suddenly able to create a level 15 ship. Another thing I'm not happy with is that every faction is able to have more crew than sense. I feel like I am acting as my own faction, yet the only way to get the crew numbers of a rival faction, is to have my fame reach endgame levels. I don't have any reason to visit low level systems except to harvest resources.
A lot of players of Cosmoteer are happy with how this system functions, but me and a few friends are not too keen on it. What I am proposing is a new gamemode that switches blueprints and earning crew. Blueprints would become something that would require the current money for them, but each unlocked blueprint requires more fame to do so. This incentivises players to both choose wisely on the parts they wish to unlock first, while also giving players more reason to continue exploring new systems.
The second part to this is to make crew a lot easier to obtain. I like the idea of crew becoming more expesnive with each new crew member you hire, but I feel like this should increase a lot more per crew member you hire and have NO fame requirements. Just have it purely about having money. This would mean that I could have as many staff on my ships and space stations as I please, as long as I have the means to pay for it. This gives players more incentive to continue doing all of the missions that come their way, makes them want to travel to each system instead of skipping lower level ones, and also encourages making stronger ships. At the moment, the only real penalty for me having my ship destroyed is that I have to sit AFK for a few minutes while my storage ship pieces my other ship back together, but if I have gotten to the stage where it would cost a lot of money to replace all of the crew I just lost, then I would feel like I need to create a better ship.
Thank you for reading!