I'd filled my hold with three quests worth of trader wares, set sail for the next destination and was eagerly awaiting a new crew member from the Open Crew charter.
Then they arrived. They spawned on my ship and, without a word, scoped the horizon for a ghost ship, dropped anchor and redirected our merchant ship into battle.
When I tried to point out that we were half way through a quest (that I'd already sunk an hour into) and that getting our ship sunk would erase all that, he just started shooting the damagable cargo and throwing what he couldn't destroy overboard.
And I couldn't stop him. Crew members are immune to your attacks and you can't kick someone off your crew without majority vote. As it was a two man team, I didn't have majority.
Eventually, he found the gunpowder keg below deck, set it up in the dingy and blew up every single useful item on board. I lost everything to a petulant child who wanted a different experience to me.
My solution:
If you are alone in a crew and you set a quest, you become the "Captain" of your one-man crew. This gives you two votes when kicking players and closing the crew recruitment, allowing the player who arrived first and set the quest (and presumably sank time into completing that quest) to kick disruptive newcomers.
You retain the "Captain" title till a new quest is voted into play, at which point it checks to see if you're still the only player in your crew and possibly returns the "Captain" title to you.
This way you don't become vulerable to greifing after quests that end before you "cash in" your loot. It also means that once your crew decides to do the same thing, via the voting system, the normal democracy returns.
It wouldn't work to count 1 vote/2 crew as majority as that way round, you can grief people by spawning onto their ship and voting them off of it.
