General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

[Greasetrap42]

'just playing' takes a quite significantly longer time to get to the same stage. In other words... roadblock, in the form of time-gating yourself.

a) That is a judgement based on your gameplay style, skills, and experience. There are certainly some players that will have a difficult time achieving goals SUCH AS ENGINEERING A TOP TIER SHIP * with the game. That doesn't mean all players do. Somehow many thousands of players successfully obtain a top tier ship and engineer it.

b) It appears you don't know what "roadblock" means. Within ED if a player has a difficult time completing a goal using knowledge or skill, they can use persistence. For a player with the most basic skills there is no roadblock.


* The topic of this thread.

 

[Greasetrap42]

'just playing' takes a quite significantly longer time to get to the same stage. In other words... roadblock, in the form of time-gating yourself.

I don't think it's reasonable to expect players to willingly subject themselves to self-sabotaging their time & effort investment because taking the long & arduous way is more fun for certain folks

In a week of reasonable play sessions I can purchase a fully equipped Federal Corvette*, G5 engineer it, and recover my credits and most engineering mats**.

• Raw mats, np a play-session trip to visit crystal shards. One trip fills bins, enough for engineering several ships.
• Mfg mats, np mission rewards from bounty hunting & blowing up gangsters and drug lords.
• Data mats, np mission rewards and regular scanning ships while bounty hunting.
• Guardian mats, already collected a lifetime supply visiting guardian sites. Fun gameplay. You can grind the same one over-and-over in less than an hour. Or visit multiple sites. Either is not really a big chore.

IMO this is all normal ED gameplay.

If a player can obtain the credits and mats to purchase and engineer a top tier ship faster than I can using whatever method then I really don't see the issue.


* Already unlocked access with Fed rank. Unlocking this is gated but not road blocked. Any crumby player can unlock this with persistence.Or faster with skill & knowledge.
** Data mats I tend to mostly gather passively. I'm not sure where I get them from... they just accumulate.

 

[metatheurgist]

I've been playing 500 hours of golf! I keep smashing trees with my baseball bat but I never get any better! Golf sucks!

 

[kakes]

Speaking of pre engineered suits available in stations. Why are there no pre engineered ships or modules in some stations just like that... That would be brilliant.

 

[kakes]

I've been playing 500 hours of golf! I keep smashing trees with my baseball bat but I never get any better! Golf sucks!

Man do I hate such arrogant and short sighted responses over here. We can disagree on some points, but please at least try to get one's point and respond in a proper way, with some contrarguments, rather than insulting people.

We are the ED players just as you are, we are though maybe just a bit more assertive and less simping.

You missed the point. I'm pretty good at that game, just not the way the Devs want me to play it. You probably missed the part about scanning high wakes for hours, which is extremely boring, but is the ONLY way to get the required data materials. And if you want the materials for certain engineered modules like V1 FSD, you have to keep doing that for hours and hours (said you're not utilizing the exploits), which is not about the quantity but about the type of the data that you get. It's a matter of luck. I was unlucky enough to have scanned a few hundred ships and only got the datamined wake once. The game architecture is completely broken and there's no discussion around it.

 

[kakes]

In a week of reasonable play sessions I can purchase a fully equipped Federal Corvette*, G5 engineer it, and recover my credits and most engineering mats**.

• Raw mats, np a play-session trip to visit crystal shards. One trip fills bins, enough for engineering several ships.
• Mfg mats, np mission rewards from bounty hunting & blowing up gangsters and drug lords.
• Data mats, np mission rewards and regular scanning ships while bounty hunting.
• Guardian mats, already collected a lifetime supply visiting guardian sites. Fun gameplay. You can grind the same one over-and-over in less than an hour. Or visit multiple sites. Either is not really a big chore.

IMO this is all normal ED gameplay.

If a player can obtain the credits and mats to purchase and engineer a top tier ship faster than I can using whatever method then I really don't see the issue.


* Already unlocked access with Fed rank. Unlocking this is gated but not road blocked. Any crumby player can unlock this with persistence.Or faster with skill & knowledge.
** Data mats I tend to mostly gather passively. I'm not sure where I get them from... they just accumulate.

Even if we assume you're correct here, first up, cheers for having so much spare time, because that week would be intense. But probably you meant a week of gameplay, not a week-week. Anyway, some of us have life, too, bro. I can only play occasionally.

I don't doubt it you could do something like that, having some luck, the experience, knowledge, unlocked content and so on. But imagine being a new player getting absolutely no information about the most overcomplicated progression system. And imagine being unlucky. E.g. you keep mining for a certain material, but getting a load of another one instead (the one that has lower percentage on a planet).

Maybe stop bragging about how fantastic a commander you are and try to understand someone else's point of view. That would be a good start.

Please note that you literally said something like:

"When I started Reynholm Industries, I had just two things in my possession: a dream and 6 million pounds".

 

[kakes]

Well I suppose you just have to do it. After 400 hours I suppose you'll be at least scout in exploration ranking?

Why not go to Felicity Farseer to upgrade your thrusters to g3 dirty drag? For the unlock you'd need to pick up a meta alloy which you can get in game or buy from a fleet carrier.

For the upgrade itself you'd need something like 6 chromium, 12 specialised legacy firmware, 6 mechanical components, and 4 mechanical equipment. For the drag effect you'd need another 5 iron, 1 security firmware patch, and 3 hybrid capacitors.

These are all easy to collect materials and you ought to have them already if you haven't completely ignored mat collection, and if something specific is missing you could probably trade for it at a mat trader.

I can somewhat sympathize as I found myself in a similar situation, not having scanned all that I came across, not having collected many manufactured mats after combat, and not even having tried mining. IMO, the problem isn't really the collection of the mats, it's rather that as a noob you really have no idea that you ought to fit a wake scanner, and bring collector limpets to combat. I think the game isn't very good in helping you understand that you ought to collect mats for future engineering, nor is it very clear what mats you need for specific upgrades at an engineer. For this purpose I can't recommend OMH highly enough: https://github.com/jixxed/ed-odyssey-materials-helper

Also, replying to "quite easy to gather materials". Yes, if you tend to destroy someone else's ships. I don't like destroying ships. I like flying around and exploring, I've been doing it for over 400 hours already.

I have literally no idea what the heck hybrid capacitors are and how I'm supposed to get them, never seen one, done a lot of stuff. And you need 3!

Same about the security firmware patch. What the hell is that made up item. Or
specialised legacy firmware. Give me a break.

I guess that in order to do that I have to do some illegal activities. And see, this is an RPG. And my role is not some maniac that shoots people down for no reason.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

• Raw mats, np a play-session trip to visit crystal shards. One trip fills bins, enough for engineering several ships.

That's a 1kLy trip just to get there which is quite an ask for a new player without a long jump range ship already engineered with G5 FSD and a Guardian booster and ideally enough game knowledge to strip unneeded optional internals and lightweight/D rate some core stuff.

When there, if you go without a fleet carrier you have to fly out 100kLs+ to the secondary star (twice if you're doing all mats) and filling up one category of materials takes a while too; probably less than an hour per material, but I haven't timed it in odyssey and there's 7 categories to fill up (not filling up completely is less efficient due to the long travel time and you need to trade the G5 mats for lower grades anyway if that's the only way you're getting your raw mats).

This is one of the most efficient ways still, but for new players I'd suggest barnacle sites/forests instead for a shorter, more atmospheric experience where you're less compelled to feel like you need to fill up entirely due to the travel time being so long.

• Mfg mats, np mission rewards from bounty hunting & blowing up gangsters and drug lords.

I think you get worse missions/rewards when you're lower combat rank so it might vary. How do you get materials that don't drop from bounty hunting targets (smuggler ships are too rare).

You don't get exactly what you want here so you need this way so the goal here is to do it for as long as it takes? I tried to do some math on this before and it came out pretty bad (see this post). To sum it up - 20-25h to just G3 a big ship with everything titled in your favor (maybe more if you're doing missions/flying longer distances). This is in addition to everything else you need to do in your week of gameplay. You can go slightly faster with smart material trades here if you get G5 mats from missions and trade them for low end stuff so your limpets don't waste time picking up G1 mats but for a full G5 build that's not really an option.

With actual drop rates for G4-G5 materials being way lower (due to spawns) it's unrealistic to expect to do it in a week.

This is not "np" and it's not a trivial amount of game play required to do it this way, esp when starting with an underpowered ship.

I'd challenge anyone to actually empty their mats and try filling their mats enough to engineer some ship to G5 with optional internals this way to see how long it takes with all the actual difficulties and RNG involved.

Once you play enough to hit a critical mass of materials where the RNG starts evening out it does feel like you can sustain your engineering with just random pickups if you don't engineer new ships often, but it's not how it really goes in practice for newer players and it takes hundreds of hours to get there.

• Data mats, np mission rewards and regular scanning ships while bounty hunting.

You don't get wake data (and the almost-useless encrypted data) that way and not much G5 data.

• Guardian mats, already collected a lifetime supply visiting guardian sites. Fun gameplay. You can grind the same one over-and-over in less than an hour. Or visit multiple sites. Either is not really a big chore.

This is again a 700-800Ly trip just to get there which is a pain, esp when the player doing it for the first time won't have the option to unlock the guardian booster. A good option for newer players here is to also check out some brain trees for raw materials instead of going to the crystal shard sites.

I think what sometimes happens to new players is that they get enough of the module/weapon blueprints and miss out on the data/power cells/conduits that don't drop unless you're shooting specific panels on the sites and have to do another trip to finish the unlocks.

In addition to that you can pretty much add another session to unlocking the guardian stuff for most players as you need to divert to pick up HN Sock mounts and Power Transfer Bus goods (potentially also taking the time to find a place they can outfit a cargo bay first).

I have literally no idea what the heck hybrid capacitors are and how I'm supposed to get them, never seen one, done a lot of stuff. And you need 3!

Same about the security firmware patch. What the hell is that made up item. Or
specialised legacy firmware. Give me a break.

Hybrid caps are probably from CZ ships (and that whole category is a pain even with HGE farming and trading, but fortunately it's not used for that much), specialized legacy firmware would be from missions (traded down at the material trader from modified embedded firmware). Both are indeed stuff you might not get enough of during "regular gameplay" (picking up every worthless item) despite what people in this thread claim.

 

[Ned Flandalorian]

Also, replying to "quite easy to gather materials". Yes, if you tend to destroy someone else's ships. I don't like destroying ships. I like flying around and exploring, I've been doing it for over 400 hours already.

I have literally no idea what the heck hybrid capacitors are and how I'm supposed to get them, never seen one, done a lot of stuff. And you need 3!

Same about the security firmware patch. What the hell is that made up item. Or
specialised legacy firmware. Give me a break.

I guess that in order to do that I have to do some illegal activities. And see, this is an RPG. And my role is not some maniac that shoots people down for no reason.

You've never investigated some of those "XYZ emissions" signals you see all around inhabited space? Not much of an explorer...

 

[aRJay]

Guys, here's a real life example for you, I have been playing for 400 hours before getting my first V1 FSD from the technology broker (cause I haven't yet unlocked even 1 engineer, too complicated) while trying to play the game as I like it without grinding (exploring, doing various missions, thousands of them honestly),

In all my years of playing I haven’t done that many missions, the things some players enjoy amaze me sometimes.

but at some point of absolute-no-progress it was inevitable to keep doing some boring stuff for a long time for no reason like staying at the beacon and keeping scanning ships and wakes, for like 12 hours straight, to get the required 26 datamined wakes, which never pop up. Furthermore I had to look for planets with Tellurium and mine with my SRV for another 12 hours straight, where I got everything BUT Tellurium.

You said above that you like exploring and doing thousands of missions, I suggest keep doing those and be less focussed on upgrading your ships, after all this is not supposed to be a quick game.

I hope you know that you can trade raw, encoded, and manufactured materials at traders and so exchange stuff you have but don’t currently want for stuff you don’t have but do want. The exchange rates can be bad but it is an option for those in a rush.

And this is absurd, because I already:

-got my SOL permission (a load of missions, which basically is another type of grind, but it's a way better way to play the game that way)

Pretty much all the missions I have done were to unlock ranks and permits, progress through those ranks was slow because other than unlocks I avoid missions.

-visited 1750 systems
-13,574 detailed scans
-fully scanned a majority of those
-did twice as many hyperspace jumps
-scanned organic data 52 times

unavailable of course for most of my time here but now one of the main reasons I land on planets.

-travelled over 30k ly

That is impressive.

-claimed 30 bounties (even though I don't enjoy fighting and destruction, but on a few occasions I was forced to do it)

I do quite like this and it his how I spent a lot of my early time in the game.

-traded over 3500 commodities
-mined 30 minerals even though I dislike mining, and yet I did some deep core mining just to check it out
-delivered 204 first/business class passengers

My commiserations I find passengers insufferable on the whole.

Furthermore I mapped multiple planetary bodies, found multiple points of interest, visited multiple stations, you get the idea.

And after all that I only have 1 V1 FSD and I can't think of anything else for now because I'm so much far from it, and it still required about 30 additional hours of no-fun grindy gameplay, because otherwise I wouldn't even be able to get that. I don't even mention the space-suits or weapons, because that's another level of absurd.

If you don’t like the death and destruction stuff the space suits etc are the least grindy thing around you just visit Pioneer Supplies every Thursday and see what pre-engineered kit they have for sale for credits, if it is better than what you already have buy it and sell that one if not visit another station and try again. You could even take missions between stations.
You could also check out the pre upgraded gear thread in Odyssey discussions.

I think that that's the actual problem. The in-game progress should go in parallel, organically/naturally, as you're doing all that stuff. But it doesn't. Engineering wouldn't be bad if you didn't have to do all that crap to get one module.

It can go in parallel if you aren’t in a hurry especially if you just engineer modules a bit at a time which became easy to do once they introduced remote engineering so you didn’t have to actually visit the engineer every time rather than just the once to add a special effect.

Because, that's my point, I did a lot of stuff in that game, got about 800 million credits to date (it's still not too much but that's okay), but yet I had close to no materials, which should come naturally while enjoying and playing the game at a normal pace, but they do not come like that and you have to, at some point, keep scanning wakes for 12 hours straight or something like that.

So, your arguments about "just enjoying the game" are contradictory. Also, please stop with that nonsense that "you can play the game without engineering". Even the A-graded conda is worthless without engineering. Every ship has its problems, but first up, all of them have pathetic range, even striped down and A-graded. Secondary, no ship can provide enough power, they're all underpowered. It's impossible to have a truly multipurpose ship without engineering.

It’s impossible to have a true multipurpose ship even with engineering, some of them are talked of as being multipurpose, like the Anaconda, but what is really meant is that you can build them for different purposes and they will be quite good at that purpose. But for a different role you will need to swap modules around.

All ships are pathetically slow and are the true negation of agility. Engineering is absolutely crucial in that game to get absolute minimum required performance from your ship, and yet, not organic whatsoever. Requires you to do a lot of useless and artificial stuff.

The Anaconda isn’t agile in supercruise even if engineered, however agility while nice to have is only essential for combat.

That's the whole point. Keep the engineering as it is, but give us freaking materials, naturally. Don't make it that complicated to unlock stuff, engineers, systems. Make it a natural progression system instead of a system purely taken from some pay to win scams like Diablo Immortal. There's no monetization in ED so there's no need for such predatory progression system...

That's it. Other than that I get your points and understand you guys. I agree that you shouldn't get modules just like that. I agree with majority of your arguments as a matter of fact. Just the implementation sucks and that's it.

 

[aRJay]

Also, replying to "quite easy to gather materials". Yes, if you tend to destroy someone else's ships. I don't like destroying ships. I like flying around and exploring, I've been doing it for over 400 hours already.

I have literally no idea what the heck hybrid capacitors are and how I'm supposed to get them, never seen one, done a lot of stuff. And you need 3!

If you need it to actually engineer something then it will be some kind of material, in this case it sounds like something someone made so it will be a Manufactured material. If you see any material to collect you will find that collecting that one item will put three of them in your materials storage.
It could be a mission reward, found in and around some wreck in space (no you don’t have to create the wreck) or swapped for at the appropriate material traders.

Same about the security firmware patch. What the hell is that made up item. Or
specialised legacy firmware. Give me a break.

These are encoded data materials.
If you explore your storage menu besides the items for cargo racks and refineries there is one for your materials looking through that will not only show you what you have but also what sort of material it is.

I guess that in order to do that I have to do some illegal activities. And see, this is an RPG. And my role is not some maniac that shoots people down for no reason.

You are most likely to be asked to do something illegal if you do missions, doing something that you feel is appropriate for your character then trading the rewards from that for the ones you want is an option.

 

[V'larr]

One of the common complaints with Odyssey means this isn't true - at least not for Elite Dangerous.

It'd be entirely possible for Frontier to set up a route where ships, modules and engineering are free which was accessible from the start of the game. No Mans Sky has a creative mode which works that way, Kerbal likewise, X4 has ways to do the same thing. Anything short of that is always going to be too slow for someone (I don't know if that's what you want or if you just want something faster than now when it comes to outfitting/engineering/rank progression)

In Odyssey, things aren't quite there but are a lot closer than in the rest of Elite Dangerous
- you can buy pre-upgraded gear to G3 for an essentially trivial credit value (your first decent exobio world will pay for all of it for the rest of the game)
- G3 gear is sufficient for all Odyssey content (G5+mods makes it easier, definitely)
It's not quite creative mode but you could (with help from the "where's the pre-upgraded gear this week?" thread) spend about an hour of setup and have all the equipment you'll need for the rest of the game.

And so a very common complaint with Odyssey is that there isn't any point to doing the activities in it, because all you get from them is things to upgrade your suits and you don't need a suit upgrade (either at all, or after you've upgraded a fairly small set of items) because to get the things to upgrade the suits you already have to be able to do the activities.

Gradually acquiring things to progress a character is a way that lots of people like to play games - but doesn't work if everything is free from the start. So NMS has various Survival modes, Kerbal has a range of difficulty settings for Career mode, X4 you can set a range of difficulties and starting conditions, etc. And you probably start over with a new character once you've got to the "top of the hill" because climbing it is the point. You can always start a Creative Mode game if you want to mess around with lots of the high-level stuff.

Elite Dangerous has the problem that it needs to pick a single ruleset for everyone [1], so it's far too fast for the "it should take at least 1000 hours to get an Anaconda" players, and far too slow for the "I just want to fly a ship and shoot things without spending 1000 hours on setup" players [2] and any change they make in any direction will probably annoy as many people as it makes happy at this point.


[1] Okay, sure, in an ideal world there would be a singleplayer offline version which you could set to "Creative Mode" or "Excessively Tough Mode" or whatever you wanted in-between. That's even less likely than further engineering balance adjustments.

[2] Who might even be the same players on different days. There are plenty of games I play in "survival" mode and find even that gets to the "you're invincible" stage too quickly, and others where being slowed down waiting for the next bit of resources to come in just gets annoying and 95% of my play is spent building things in the post-scarcity phase.

The complaint with Odyssey I see most commonly shared is that it's an excessively inflated grind, foremost, and then also what you're pointing out where the grind isn't even worthwhile.

Getting away with G3 gear is done only because Fdev's left players with no other reasonable alternative. I would not put that anywhere remotely close to the 'creative mode' experiences of the likes of X4 or KSP.

The problem doesn't go away just because there's a band-aid or work-around for it in an otherwise neglected situation.

Arbitrarily inflated amounts of grind & sheer-quantity goalposts are not valid forms of creating meaningful character progression. That is by and large, in my view, why Elite has earned so many "mile wide/inch deep" criticisms. There really isn't any character progression to be found except that which you make up yourself. The Elite ranks are the only thing we really have and all of them are very simply quantity goalposts with no further thought or meaning put into them. Meaningful character progression would mean having:

- a narrative, bearing in mind that incoherence through omission is not a virtue

- unlocking equally viable, valid, & interesting options to use (that are not in turn grossly imbalanced power spikes making all prior options utterly irrelevant by comparison)

- customization & personalization options being available or earnable, as opposed to being IRL-currency-gated (granted, Fdev's pretty reasonable & generous with Arx, and we do have a handful of unlockable decals)

Things being 'easy or free' to obtain should be the least of anyone's concerns with the whole picture here - which is a concern doubly made trivial with the way credits have been utterly inflated & trivialized several times over. When was the last time anyone here cared about repair/rearm costs for a ship? Or even rebuy? Or even up-front purchase & outfitting costs? And yet, we have all of the would-be 'progression' content of Engineers & Odyssey hard gated behind heavy timesinks that nobody should be forced to deal with, as anybody wishing to make things take as long as explicitly possible can do so entirely of their own volition regardless.

It does not make sense. It should not be this way, and being preoccupied with preventing things from 'being easy or free' I feel is grossly missing, or purposefully avoiding, the real issues here.

And I don't think it would take an offline single-player mode to address these issues. I think these are solvable in the shared-universe setting that Elite Dangerous has been put in. What it will take is the motivation and vision to head for a more balanced & reasonable 'ruleset', as you termed it.

That necessary change is certainly never going to happen if you self-sabotage through avoiding annoying people - many (most, I would claim) have proven already to be quite unhappy with the current state of affairs for a depressingly long time now.

 

[V'larr]

Guys, here's a real life example for you <... snipping for brevity >
Just the implementation sucks and that's it.

Understandable frustrations, though I can't agree with the conclusion of "keep engineering as it is", in light of all the other problems caused by its current form. I do agree that the in-game progress is not as all as organic/natural as several posters make it out to be.

I do want to share the observation that you would greatly lessen your time invested doing no-fun grind if you didn't waste it on planet hoovering, though. Obtaining G4/G5 mats exclusively and trading down for what you need really does shorten the painful part significantly. The Jameson Cobra method of obtaining data is definitely repetitive to a tedious degree, but it does lend you consistency over the more RNG-laced wake-scanning route - similar to having the option of crosstrading Imperial Shielding for other manufactured mats (which does take longer than sourcing them directly).

I definitely agree regarding freedom of outfitting - pre-engineering & pre-hitpoint inflation vanilla ships were a lot more about trade-offs & tactical options, and far less about sustainability & attrition being king. Hitpoint inflation, really, is the reason why sustainability & power management to supply it became so critical, and then Engineering spiked things into exponential territory. It's really a shame; balance-wise, as things stand, your practical choices in ship outfitting is very much hindered by not having the options presented by Engineering.

It's worth noting though that even with Engineering, having a "truly multipurpose ship" is still a bad idea. Multipurpose in this game is best expressed as "a ship that can be fitted reasonably well for many different roles" - trying to do everything at once will only bear suboptimal results (with a caveat for ships specifically outfitted for mission-running, I suppose, but even then).

 

[V'larr]

a) That is a judgement based on your gameplay style, skills, and experience. There are certainly some players that will have a difficult time achieving goals SUCH AS ENGINEERING A TOP TIER SHIP * with the game. That doesn't mean all players do. Somehow many thousands of players successfully obtain a top tier ship and engineer it.

b) It appears you don't know what "roadblock" means. Within ED if a player has a difficult time completing a goal using knowledge or skill, they can use persistence. For a player with the most basic skills there is no roadblock.


* The topic of this thread.

I don't think it's reasonable to disregard time investment as an obstacle to progress or enjoyment - especially when it is deliberately & arbitrarily inflated to take up more time with no other reasonable purpose to it.

If anything I believe I have a clearer idea about what a 'roadblock' to satisfactory player engagement is than you seem to be expressing. "Persistence", as in 'just grit one's teeth and suffer through things you don't necessarily enjoy', should not be viewed as an acceptable state of affairs for trying to find progression in a video game.

Anybody can have their time arbitrarily wasted, obviously that doesn't require skill investment.

 

[V'larr]

In a week of reasonable play sessions I can purchase a fully equipped Federal Corvette*, G5 engineer it, and recover my credits and most engineering mats**.

• Raw mats, np a play-session trip to visit crystal shards. One trip fills bins, enough for engineering several ships.
• Mfg mats, np mission rewards from bounty hunting & blowing up gangsters and drug lords.
• Data mats, np mission rewards and regular scanning ships while bounty hunting.
• Guardian mats, already collected a lifetime supply visiting guardian sites. Fun gameplay. You can grind the same one over-and-over in less than an hour. Or visit multiple sites. Either is not really a big chore.

IMO this is all normal ED gameplay.

If a player can obtain the credits and mats to purchase and engineer a top tier ship faster than I can using whatever method then I really don't see the issue.


* Already unlocked access with Fed rank. Unlocking this is gated but not road blocked. Any crumby player can unlock this with persistence.Or faster with skill & knowledge.
** Data mats I tend to mostly gather passively. I'm not sure where I get them from... they just accumulate.

If you're doing Crystal Shards runs, you're already expressly NOT doing things the 'natural/organic' way suggested by various posters in this thread. Nobody playing the game naturally would ever be given an ingame reason to go those locations or look on the surface of those planets.

This is also presuming you have just 1 specific outfitting job in mind for your Corvette - if you're talking actual Engineering investment for one, where you're experimenting with Prismatics, reinforced shield gen setup vs thermal, and any number of different kinds of weapon arrangements (and resulting tweaks to optional internals), you're talking about a much higher investment of time & materials.

And I personally find it dubious that you could collect enough mats to g5 everything just through mission rewards/random combat mats/bounty hunting scans in the course of a week, unless you are heavily investing significant portions of your time every single day into doing those things in the game.

Guardian materials are, at least, reasonably easy to obtain in the course of doing a guardian site visit... which is still notably not something a player would ever normally be given a reason to do, ingame (unless they visit Ram Tah, but who would bother with that guy & his useless blueprints?).

Bottom line: you're both not doing things as naturally as has been claimed, and have the experience & knowledge that is not remotely reasonable to expect of newer players. The issue you're not seeing is because you're not trying to look at things from someone else's shoes - whether it be an experienced player who would prefer not to make Elite their daily life's investment for a full week just to get a ship ready to use for things they'd like to do, or a fresh player that wants to get going with being kitting & prepared to engage with the things they've yet to try.

 

[amigacooke]

I've been playing 500 hours of golf! I keep smashing trees with my baseball bat but I never get any better! Golf sucks!

The courses I’ve played on don’t give me a putter and then expect me to collect various materials as I go round the course to get a full set of quality clubs.

 

[Northpin]

I have been playing for 400 hours before getting my first V1 FSD from the technology broker (cause I haven't yet unlocked even 1 engineer, too complicated)

Wow. You are really, really bad at this game. You should practice.

I concur.

Yeah, that's a very smart response, isn't it. As you see I have been practicing for over 400 hours, and the numbers are pretty insane. And yet, no engineering.

This is a bad game design and there's no discussion about it.

Being bad at a game, doesnt mean bad game design.
It just means that you are bad at the game. (or let's say unfocused)
And please, do take that as intended constructive criticism and not as mockery.

As a counter example:
My own case: In about the same 400h i got to unlock almost all bubble engineers, Elite in Trade and Exploration, Unlocked the Cutter and had a fleet of about 5 more or less engineered Ships (Cutter, Python, Krait Mk2, AspX and Cobra).
And i was just starting.

Because like 5 weeks later, in a Friday evening, i built and fully engineered a mining/combat long range Conda and next day by noon (Saturday) i was in what was known as Stuemeae FG-Y d7561 taking part in the mining/bounty CG near SAG*A - 25000 ly away from the Bubble.
The net result of that CG was that we got a fully functional Starport (and a Megaship) at the center of the Galaxy - built by community efforts.

So again, you just need to do better - and no, engineers are not complicated.
I have to admit i had the same feelings when i started - before i got into mining (required to unlock some engineers) it looked to me like the most complicated gameplay in ED.
But it proved that i was wrong. Not only that, but later on mining became one of my favorite activities and i got tens and tens of billions out of it -(at least 60bn for my first 2 accounts)

 

[varonica]

The courses I’ve played on don’t give me a putter and then expect me to collect various materials as I go round the course to get a full set of quality clubs.

They don't give you a Wilson Dynapower Carbon Driver either, you get a basic set of clubs, you want something better you buy your own! You literally can't make your better clubs by gathering materials, the golf shops have the monopoly. That's the silliest analogy I have heard in a long time!

 

[Felix DiCestria]

It's a learning experience for us all, Over the last couple of days I've been doing exobiology and have a hypothesis regarding the different shades of blue on the map as a result, this has improved how quickly I can locate different species after landing.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Getting away with G3 gear is done only because Fdev's left players with no other reasonable alternative. I would not put that anywhere remotely close to the 'creative mode' experiences of the likes of X4 or KSP.

KSP is actually similar in that in non-creative mode you don't need to unlock the entire tech tree to build ships that can do anything.

If anything I believe I have a clearer idea about what a 'roadblock' to satisfactory player engagement is than you seem to be expressing. "Persistence", as in 'just grit one's teeth and suffer through things you don't necessarily enjoy', should not be viewed as an acceptable state of affairs for trying to find progression in a video game.

If things are too hard to unlock and the "good gameplay" is gated behind that then players will quit before reaching that. "It gets good after 60h" isn't a good way to recommend a game. The trouble is that nothing is (supposedly) gated behind engineering and gathering stuff for engineering itself isn't as fun as playing the game normally without worrying about stopping to gather up every piece of scrap after every fight which breaks the flow and consist of minutes of sitting around and waiting for limpets in the most (long term) unfun looting system in any game possibly.

If you don't like the base game engineering won't make you like it. If you like the base game as it is you can disregard engineering and be fine. If you almost like the base game or get bored/frustrated after a while and feel like your problems* could be alleviated with engineering (stuff like long travel times, long time to kill, survivability/staying power) then your experience with engineering is going to suck. If you like the base game and want to engineer stuff for progression/power/player expression it's going to suck.

Is there any outcome where engineering (the entire process of gathering the stuff) is good and fun and enjoyable for anyone?

It's meant to force you to try different activities as you can't get the mats from one activity, but it's just different types of dissapointments.

* that the developers put there for you to solve.

If you're doing Crystal Shards runs, you're already expressly NOT doing things the 'natural/organic' way suggested by various posters in this thread. Nobody playing the game naturally would ever be given an ingame reason to go those locations or look on the surface of those planets.

To be fair there's no natural way to gather raw materials as missions don't provide any raw mat rewards - mining is a niche activity and doesn't provide high grade stuff and SRV mining is impossibly slow. The crashed condas or meta alloy sites all require relogging too.

They don't give you a Wilson Dynapower Carbon Driver either, you get a basic set of clubs, you want something better you buy your own! You literally can't make your better clubs by gathering materials, the golf shops have the monopoly. That's the silliest analogy I have heard in a long time!

It works, you have to work for money (or run people over with a golf cart and loot their corpses) to buy the club which are activities entirely different from playing golf (as is gathering materials for golf club crafting!), unless you're some kind of golf god that wins every tournament with the starter club made out of a tree branch you found and likes playing golf only using that.