Flying The Ship Is A Team-Sized Task Bigger than "Piloting"

I've seen a pattern arising since release: you load into a team, or are in Lucky Docks, and someone asks, in text or voice chat, "Who will pilot?"

This question is symptomatic of an attitude and mental model that will make you lose. I don't want you to lose! So let me talk about the idea of "piloting".

Piloting is probably the least-reliably rewarding thing you can do in the game. There are severe consequences for failure (if your ship is out of position), and no immediate feel-good rewards for success. You do not get to turn off the enemy's shields when piloting; you do not get to shoot out enemy systems when piloting. Guess what though? If you don't do it right, your whole team will be mad at you!

It is not simply reward asymmetry, however. The helm also *needs help* to be able to do its job. Because knowing what to do on that helm requires information---information that can usually only be had by probing. Which you can't do when you're on the helm.

Finally, because piloting is so important and consequential, it is a common target for boarders. Killing the pilot can be really valuable as a boarder---you can drop shields, get the ship out of position, turn it so the guns are facing the wrong way---lots of stuff.

Combine all these aspects---low reward/dopamine, reliance on probing, high enemy pressure---and it's easy to see why some people don't want any part of it. And if you squint, well, hey, only one person can fit on the helm, so this must be a one-person job, right? And thus: "who will pilot? (not me)"

This is, spiritually, equivalent to starting up a wolfpack and asking "who will be the omega"? It is not conducive to the healthy, cooperative dynamic that you (presumably) want on your team.

Instead, the correct thing for a team to do is *mutually* bear the burden of flying and managing the ship. It's a big ship, in a hostile area of the Reach, with an average 20% winrate! There is much to be done---it might be probing, it might be getting leeches off the ship, it might be fighting off boarders, it might be cooling the reactor, it might be repairing systems, and yes, it might be jumping on the helm for a bit.

So, when I am in Lucky Docks, and I hear someone ask, "who will pilot," I get worried. Because they seem to think that's a meaningful, important question. But it's not: Managing the helm is *just not that hard* if the rest of the team is doing what they ought to do, and *freaking impossible* if they are not. The only reason "who will pilot?" is a meaningful question is if you think of it as something one person can do all by themselves, without any help from the rest of the team. Which is not true.

As with all things in online team games, all of this tends to fall into place more naturally with smarter, more pro-social, mike-enabled teammates, and less naturally with mikeless xxxKDA_NoobMaster(teemmatesRtrash)xxx teammates.