Ozric
Volunteer Moderator
OK so here is a summary of the most recent livestream with Sandy. I really forgot what I was letting myself in for when I started doing this 
Wall of text incoming!!!
In how many ways does this update benefit Exploration and explorers in general?
FSD, armour (for basically not dying) they have upgrades, as well as collecting materials and resources. Exploration is an ongoing thing so in the future there will be more.
On a personal note, I'm getting slightly tired of being told more things will be coming for exploration. After 18 months we have the wave scanner for the SRV and that has been the only addition, I thought things might change with engineers, but there's no upgrades for either the discovery or surface scanners
Could we please (gratefully) see a final graphic showing the actual build, achieved by the engineer, before choosing accept (ie. not just the RNG procedure page)
I think you mean when you've crafted an upgrade you'd like to see the stats as they apply to your ship. Not something we can do right now, but it's very valid and something when we get a bit more time we can get in there
Should Collector Limpets - or any type of limpet which are counted as cargo for that matter - really be attracting the attention of Pirates as much as they seem to do?
No they shouldn't and we're fixing that, hopefully at some point in the Beta that will change.
Is planned to PIN more than one recipe for each Engineer?
Not initially. Totally understand the desire, but actually it'll be a little problematic to do. In the future but not right now.
Can you give us your thoughts on the current state of the Retributor Laser?
Yes, well, it should work now. It wasn't delivering heat through shields now it does. As some people have found out when you stack some of these bad boys or use other weapons that deliver heat it's pretty effective, some might say it's too effective. I think we've seen some ships heated up to 8000% heat at which point basically they're dead whatever happens. This is one change we're going to make I'm not sure when it's going in, but it should definitely happen during Beta. There's going to be diminishing returns on heat generation from multiple weapons. What we don't want to do is nerf them so they're rubbish, so you should still be able to overheat ships very effectively, into hull damage, however it's diminishing returns so some of the smaller class weapons with have less impact on larger ships, but more importantly Heat Sinks and avoiding being shot for a while will be able to combat these things.
A lot of these things are skill dependent, if someone's just tagging you constantly you're in trouble especially if you're trying to do things that heat your ship. We don't want to ruin heat delivery systems because we think they're very cool, but we also don't want to create "path of least resistance" where you just stack all of the same weapon and it's an insta kill.
Would it perhaps be a cool idea to be able to reject the outcome of a recipe at a loss of 50% of the materials? This would then represent the recycling of the materials to have another go at generating the modification.
It's a really nice idea, we're not going to do it initially, but it's a really good lever and I don't think it's outside the realms of possibility. That's the kind of thing we can look at, but we wouldn't want to make that kind of change till we have a lot more data
Good engineer upgrade stats and special mod (e.g. regenerating beam) rolling together requires a double lucky roll. If you have your desired special mod but want to try for better stats, or want to keep your stats but roll again for a special mod, you can only accept the whole package right now. This makes the RNG extra frustrating, so why not decouple them so you can choose to accept or decline stats and special mod independently of each other?
We're not going to change it at the moment, however we are making sure that under the hood there are a number of quite interesting ways we manipulate statistics, which mean it's not quite as random as people think it is and if you end up rolling a weapon that has an experimental effect (by the end of the beta) you'll likely find that your stats rolls in general will be more extreme. The way that stat creation works for our module upgrades, the more extreme it is, the better it is. So hopefully that's the start of something that should be quite interesting.
Why are Enhanced Thrusters not sold outside engineer bases, for example (and especially) Jameson Memorial?
At the moment upgraded drives are for Horizon users only. Whether this changes in the future it might do or it might not.
Shocking
Bookmarks are sorted by time created. Why not alphabetically?
I've been talking with team GUI and it came down to resources and time. In the future it looks like there will be various filter and sorting options.
Do all mods exist in grades 1-5 and we haven't yet found the higher grades, or are some of them limited to 1-2 or 1-3? This makes a huge difference to decide whether to spend lots of materials for a good grade 3 roll, or work towards doing the grade 5 upgrade instead.
Not all modules have all grades, I suspect as time goes on this is something that will be expanding but for now you'll have to make the choices from information you gleam from the game.
Will engineer rank gain be slower than it is in Mayhem
Yes, it has probably got faster than from where we first were at, but it will be slower than it currently is.
Some upgrades get reduced downsides at higher grades; some downsides even turn into extra buffs. Other modules get escalating advantages and disadvantages at higher grades. Why aren't all like that, with bigger boni always coming with bigger mali? Or is there a logic behind this divide which we just don't see?
The first thing to remember is modules can't be measured apples for apples with each other. You've got to look at a module on it's own, sometimes having equally powerful downsides would ruin any benefit to a module and also we don't all modules to be prescriptively the same, as in every module has x amount of downsides and upsides. The one rule I can say is as modules go up in rank they generally get better and better across the board.
What counts for engineer rank progression beyond using their services? Some apparently accept exploration data, for example, but what works and what doesn't is not really clear.
You've been misinformed. Only crafting will increase your reputation. This is something we're looking at (we'll be coming back to this later in the questions)
What use does major faction reputation still have, now that only the minor faction rank counts in all situations (offered missions, aggressiveness of police cargo scanning, whether ships are pre-scanned etc)?
Factions and Super Powers as they're now called because it makes it cleaner. Super Power reputation does have an effect because it acts as a modifier to all the reputation you gain with the associated factions.
Why no class 4 burst lasers?
Really sorry, they weren't ready in time. They're a little more complicated, but we will be getting them at some point. I'm fairly confident I'm not going to lose my job for saying that... Although you never know
Fortunately Sandy is still with us
Now that we have Large and Huge Multicannons AND rebalanced Missiles, is there any chance to get Large and Huge Missile Racks too that can just carry more ammo with bigger magazines?
Not at the moment. Just having loads more ammo is not something that we really want missile to have. There is synthesis, so you can restock missiles outside of combat.
ECM VS Point Defense? Will they get another look? "perfect defense" is kinda not fun (PD is almost perfect while ECM is useless)
Yes at some point in the future we will look at them. PD is somewhere close to where we want it to be, ECM is very difficult to use and we're going to make it better. Not sure when but we're probably going to do something along the lines of rather than holding down the button and the effect happens when you release it, it will have an increasing bubble effect around you when you hold the button down. No ETA, no guarantee.
What about Cannons? Will they get another look now that we have those Multicannons? Increased projectile speed would be nice
It's funny you should say that. I think Mike may have made a post on this already but yeah we are going to buff cannons, quite a lot. We are going to increase the speed the bullets travel because now ships in general can go a lot faster because of upgrades, we're going to increase their damage at distance (reduce the falloff to 0) so it's hard to hit at long range but if you manage it you'll do pretty much full damage. We're increase their ability to overcome hardness, so their effective against ships that are larger than the hardpoint size and we're going to increase their penetration value. This might look at face value that they're doing lees damage to the hull but it's because more damage is going through to the module.
Could it be possible that you atleast show us what we can get as additional effect (Healbeam etc)? I mean...there will be a list somewhere on the wiki anyway, so why not showing it ingame?
At the moment no we're not going to do that, although it will be interesting to look at the wikis if people do like to make wikis I do love looking at those wikis. I don't know in the future, that would be again a finesse and we have some ideas about experimental effects and how they are applied, but we're not ready to go into that yet.
When will there be development of On-Planet surface analysis and scanning? - detailed surface scanner 2ry benefit - not only added detail from space - why not allow it to refine or focus the surface analysis when searching for items or resources - benefit at heights <5km - when ground skimming.
I'm not sure when we're getting back to planetary exploration, we definitely are at some point because we have some other stuff there that I'm not allowed to talk about. They're good ideas and we've talked about things quite similar to those.
Galaxy map opens in a couple of seconds - but the system map can take 30s why?
The reason is unfortunately very technical. It's generating visuals for the stars and the planets whereas the Galaxy Map isn't. It's a bit of a bugbear for me, I kind of like the idea of there being a toggle to look between a simplified version for a faster loading and then a more detailed one, but I don't know if that's ever gonna happen. I'm now going to whine and moan about it to everyone but that probably won't make any difference
Missions board very slow to start - can this be background process loaded once landed even before selected?
Basically I think you're saying loading in mission boards even before you land, I don't know I was going to ask Dav but he's very busy. We will look at the reasons for it, the game's very complicated and so I'm not sure
Personally I'm not a fan of always preloading things like the mission boards when landing at a station/planet because it's generally putting extra strain and resources into something that I rarely use. Preloading things is hard, because you can't just want it to happen because it suits your style of gameplay. If it doesn't cause any detriment to others then fine
Ship skins - please release a single skin for all ships? - not collections for a single ship type - I would have 1 tactical skin - but for all my ships - I would not buy it 6 times for only 6 ships of the many available
It's completely valid, it's not my remit, so I don't know I'm afraid.
When will the engineer rep gain be reworked to cover missions/tasks as originally intended, rather than number of items crafted?
People are misunderstanding comments that have been made. It was never the intention to go with mission system, not that it's a bad idea, it's a very good idea, but it's also very expensive to do. Maybe at some point in the future we might get something like that. We are looking at engineer progression, I totally take the criticism of crafting something you don't like just to progress, we are seeing if there's ways we can improve it maybe through some of the suggestions that have been made (bounty vouchers/exploration data/specialised markets).
What about the bookmarks infinite plotting bug in the Beta, will you fix it
Errrr, I'm not sure. If it's an infinite plotting bug then that's not great, but plotting a route from home to Sag A is a real long way... I'll look into that.
WHY!!! Why did you ask that question! Sssshhhh It's not an infinite plotting bug, using a bookmark allows you to plot a route to a system you've previously visited even if it's beyond 1000Ly. If you're computer can handle it then you can plot it (Sag A* on mine took 1 min, Beagle Point crashed it ) Please FD don't remove this.
Can you explain the reasoning behind allowing us to enter any hangar with our SRV?
It makes no sense what so ever. I guess you have put it in thinking it will be a help to racers? Which while we do appreciate it, I find myself having a very hard time understanding how I can enter a hangar on a small landing pad and then being magically transported to another Large landing pad on the other side of the outpost/port to enter my ship.
It wasn't for racers. The reason we did it was because hunting down your hangar, especially in the larger bases, we just didn't think it was that fun. It was very much game driven. As for context, most of the bases are underground anyway and so the bits you see are just the external parts, so if you like, that's the context we use for it.
Will the materials be added to commodity markets for players to buy or added to faction missions to earn as rewards.
They already are.
Why is the material list requirements for the module manufacture called "recipe" are they baking cakes in their spare time?
We agree with you, they shouldn't really be called recipes and hopefully at some point the word recipe will be removed from the game and replaced.
Why are all the randomly created engineer / contact avatars horrifically ugly swamp donkeys?
That's pretty harsh! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Has the extra heat generation of silent running while firing weapons made it into CQC? If so that would completely make a marginal gain item in CQC useless.
I wouldn't say it was marginal gain, I've had my posterior handed to me by people in Silent Running. Yes it does carry over, but fear not we're going to keep an eye on it. If it turns out it ruins things then we'll change it.
Is there a plan to re-balance them (slight reduction of heat produced/Power Draw?) to account for the change?
Not at the moment. The reduction to Heat Sinks is purposeful and it is to do with combat and so it is part of the network of things including SCB. We'll keep an eye on it, we're never gonna say never to potential changes if we think that the feedback and/or the telemetry and our own feelings on it are that it could be better, but for now we're going to run with it and see how it goes.
Been having trouble looking for 'Micro Resources'. For example: 'Cracked Industrial Firmware' or 'Hybrid Capacitors'. Are we to head out and find them by luck or is there a method to finding them?
Yes it is difficult, but there is methods to where materials and commodities are found, technically if you put in a lot of work and deductive reasoning then you can find out where certain things will be, but it's a bit too hard. Hopefully what we're going to be doing at some point during Beta (if luck holds out) we're going to add the ability to interrogate materials on the Blueprint (not recipe) screen at the Engineers and in your pinned Blueprint. So what that will allow us to do is to put a little bit of text in there to give you some pointers and hints as to where to find these things and what activities you will need. We're not going to spell it out exactly but we totally get that there are a lot of resources and there's a lot of activities and it's cool that exploration and detective reasoning is great, but it was too much and that's something we've directly got from feedback and we've looked back at it in hindsight and we agree with you. In addition we're going to (hopefully in the Beta as well) do a munge (Urban dictionary: The act of consolidating 2 or more mutually exclusive data sets or sections of computer code, circumventing the requirement to write a load of complex code.) of some of the lower resources so there's not quite so many of them. So they should be easier to get and also they'll be used in more recipies especially the lower level ones and so you should have access to more, more quickly.
I am personally very glad that Sandro said they would only be hinting to where the materials and commodities are found rather than pointing you to exact locations.
Adding NPC chatter about materials?
That's a really good idea, who knows in the future.
Will there be an engineer who does SRV mods?
Not at the moment
Will Npc's ever use SRVs?
Not anytime soon, that's a big bucket of work. We do want it, but that's in of itself a big chunk of work and we want to make sure we can support if with some pretty awesome gameplay as well.
Are an engineer's chances of obtaining special attributes the same across the board? (ex: All engineers with Beam Laser modifications have the same X% chance to create healing lasers?) Or will engineers be specialized? (ex: Some creating healing lasers more often while others have a better chance of granting some other modification?)
At the moment it's flat across the board, in the future who knows. We've got some pretty cool ideas, but it's not for 2.1 we want to make sure the base stuff is working first.
Engineer rep building missions were recently confirmed by Mike Evans as not ready yet...
That's unfortunately not true, what he was actually saying was that we couldn't do them.
Can you please detail any AI changes implemented or about to be implemented due to player feedback? I.e. "brave Sir Robin" etc.
Yes, let's talk very briefly about AI. I think hopefully people will agree in general the AI is better. The lower level of ranks it should be on a par with what it was before, the higher ranks hopefully more of a challenge. Running away at the moment is a bit of a problem which is why we're going to change it, but we don't want to remove it completely. There has been some contention, some people really like it, some people don't, on balance we think it's a little bit too predictable and a little bit too powerful (for them). They're not cheating though, they're not cheating at how fast their going. Ships can go at that speed if you're a god at managing pips and know what you're doing. But we're going to add some amount of variation into the black box that is flee behaviour and Sarah Jane is already working on it and doing wonders with it. So they'll still run away but it won;t be the same way all the time. Hopefully it will make it a bit fun again, because the point of it is yeah it need to be a challenge, but it has to be fun too.[/QUOTE]
Ed commented on being able to drop out at a nav beacon further away and Sandro explained again about the drop out distance being affected by the gravitational pull, so the further into deep space the further the drop out
Now will there be Engineer mods for hatch breaker controllers?
Glutton Limpet: dumps canisters twice as fast
Discerning Limpet: dumps high value canisters first
Smuggler's Limpet: only dumps illegal items
Vampire Rat Limpet: dumps fuel blisters siphoned from the target's tanks
Dial-a-Limpet: Attempts to dump a specified type of canister selected on Target Cargo UI
Madonna Limpet: goes for the target's materials
Really cool ideas there aren't any mods for them yet, but hopefully in the future these are really good ideas.
With materials being generated whilst mining - Have you considered adding a method where you can instruct collector limpets to ignore / auto discard certain material types. Its quite tedious having to empty out a hold of carbon/nickel/sulphur every so often.
Yeah that's a really good idea, I'm gonna say no at the moment, that's often going to be the case I'd rather be honest with you and not lie. The reason we're not doing it at the moment is it's quite an involved amount of interface for it. It's on my Sandy's secret I really want this list.
Will there be engineer bases further out of the 'bubble'? I'm thinking in the region of 10k LY out or more for the explorer ones.
No comment at the moment, I don't want to say anything more about the engineers
Hmmmm....
Will there be engineers who can modify the module types not already covered in future? (Scanning / Mining / Repair / etc module types)
Hopefully if things go well that's in the plan. No ETA, no guarantee.
Will there be engineer upgrades that allow you to improve the effectiveness of synthesised items / add more synthesis recipes (such as limpets perhaps?)
No to the first one, and yes hopefully to the second one. I think there are already plans for synthesis recepies for Chaff, Heatsink and things. I don't know when, but yes hopefully.
Will there be engineer recipes that require you to bring back things like meta alloys or the unidentified artifacts ( or any similar future alien materials/items )
Couldn't possibly say on that one.
Withnail, that's a great film Will 2.1 bring the introduction of the collapse mechanic in Powerplay, as the notes for the first beta identified that you had been making fixes to defecting from a dead power etc.
Also, how will a power know they are about to collapse?
I don't know, hopefully, maybe, not sure. There are still a few wiggly things going on with that, we have been looking at it but things are very busy at the moment. But it is coming so those powers had better watch out because Death is coming at some point.
With the way engineers are presented, will all available engineers appear to anyone who has triple elite instantly come launch of 2.1 to the masses ?
I think what you're saying is if you've already fulfilled the criteria the engineer's looking out for will they all just send you invites and the answer's a bit tricky. Yes they will but there's only 5 of them that do this, the others are locked to other engineers. So invitations to the first 5 will be applied retroactively and as you gain reputation with those then you will unlock others.
Sandro looks across at the spinning orange Cobra "did you just die?" Ed "Yep, and it hurt" Sandro "Oh dear"
Should materials be given a different scanner icon colour to that of cargo?
Yeah, maybe as a suggestion, I don't know. There's already quite a lot of colours on the scanners, so I'm not sure.
Will players get materials from destroying other players ships?
No sorry, but we don't trust you enough, it's too open to exploitation. It's a great concept, but the effort involved in making that work securely I don;t think is worth it at the moment, it may be in the future though.
There has been a lot of criticism over the RNG nature of the crafting and the craft and trash reputation increase mechanic. What assurances can you give to those critics who see these mechanics as non engaging, unfun and reminiscent of mechanics in other games that were disliked by their players?
Well I think I've already said what I can say on that one which is, we've looking at certain things to change, but we're not going to completely throw it out and so unfortunately if you really hate it then you really hate it, but that's totally OK. So there's nothing more I can really say.
Will we ever see full bearing wrecks float in space and what modules can we get from them
No I don't think we'll ever have whole modules being dropped from wreckage, but there are probably some cool things coming in that area.
Why am I finding it so difficult to find arsenic? The Engineer at Knuth wants arsenic for her modifications and I could not find it on planets.
Well it is rank 3, it's pretty rare, keep plugging away at that one I think you might be able to get it from mining rarely.
What are the plans for the new livery items in the game; spoiler, bumper, wings?
No comment are you sure you're not hallucinating? I've no idea what you're talking about
What are the chances of us ever being able to purchase a Bobble Sandro (complete with Hat and Loach accessories) and who do I need to bribe in order to improve those chances?
Much as Elite desperately needs a bobble space loach, it certainly doesn't need a bobble me with my Jelly Bean face, that would be horrific. And really sorry I don't know who the best person to bribe is
Also, out of interest, since the launch of beta, have you noticed any significant changes in game play on the live servers in reaction to what players have discovered in the beta (eg builds changing, sudden increase in mining/mineral collection, etc)
Yeah we've seen some things and there's been a bunch of changes and some of them we're not really sure why but that's why we're doing these streams and collecting your feedback
Reddit questions: (I'm saying nothing)
Can you say if and when there's a fix coming for smurf mode?
Took me a while to work out what you meant here, but it's when you change the HUD colours. We're looking at it, I've talked to team GUI and they are looking at it. There's no ETA on it and so no guarantees especially as this issue is technically caused by an unsupported modification that we allow, but we would like to fix it and we're hopeful.
When will you speed up the limpet collection of materials after a fight, it takes ages having to sit there watching them collect them all up
Not at the moment. They're hella faster we gotta say than scooping on large ships. We are looking, certainly not in 2.1, for the possibility for having resource chunks containing all bits of 1 resource. Surprisingly it's quite complicated to do that, but I don't know when that's gonna happen.
With the current implementation experimenting with different loadouts will become prohibitively costly no-one wants to sacrifice the equipment they've spent months working on just to try something else. Buying a second ship just to try a new engine or whatever isn't a good solution either (Sandro says "it's not that bad a solution actually but I take your point) this topic was dicussed at length on reddit are there any plans to solve this issue, if so what timeframe 2.1, 2.2 sometime this season, after season 2.
Looking at the balances of some commanders I'm not sure costs would ever be prohibitive, I'm not sure what we could charge and they'd be like yeah whatever. However it is a valid point in all seriousness. As it happens we are looking at the future, I'm not sure when but it will definitely be in Season 2 (ah, OK, as definite as I'm ever going to say, which means possibly) probably not 2.1 unfortunately as we ran out of time, but we are looking at loot storage. Storage for resources, including modules, it's on the todo list we understand it's very important but WE RAN OUT OF TIME unfortunately but it is gonna be coming hopefully. And hopefully I'm allowed to say that, no ETA or total guarantee but that's the plan.
Why are there such a small number of mods for the plasma accelerator?
Well there are at the moment, but engineers is an ongoing process.
How much of engineers will XBOX players get?
When Xbox gets Horizons, and it is coming, it should bring you bang up to date with the PC version
Facebook Questions:
Will we some weapon buffing lowering in the Beta?
Well there you are, we've already started. We've already made one set of changes to low end mods and if you keep giving us feedback in the forums, then we'll look into it. This is a giant amount of work people like Mike Evans (he's done a bang up job on this) and Mark and team everyone, they are awesome and I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. But we can't do everything and that's what we need the Beta for, for testing so get in there and do it.
And finally, before my voice cracks. Can you get modules back with buyback on ships
You can at the moment, but we know it's not optional which is why we're looking at storage. But for now the reason we thought we could just about get away with it is because you can get them back with buyback.
Why are there so few bobbleheads in the store
I don't but they are very difficult and take a long time to to make
Wall of text incoming!!!In how many ways does this update benefit Exploration and explorers in general?
FSD, armour (for basically not dying) they have upgrades, as well as collecting materials and resources. Exploration is an ongoing thing so in the future there will be more.
On a personal note, I'm getting slightly tired of being told more things will be coming for exploration. After 18 months we have the wave scanner for the SRV and that has been the only addition, I thought things might change with engineers, but there's no upgrades for either the discovery or surface scanners
Could we please (gratefully) see a final graphic showing the actual build, achieved by the engineer, before choosing accept (ie. not just the RNG procedure page)
I think you mean when you've crafted an upgrade you'd like to see the stats as they apply to your ship. Not something we can do right now, but it's very valid and something when we get a bit more time we can get in there
Should Collector Limpets - or any type of limpet which are counted as cargo for that matter - really be attracting the attention of Pirates as much as they seem to do?
No they shouldn't and we're fixing that, hopefully at some point in the Beta that will change.
Is planned to PIN more than one recipe for each Engineer?
Not initially. Totally understand the desire, but actually it'll be a little problematic to do. In the future but not right now.
Can you give us your thoughts on the current state of the Retributor Laser?
Yes, well, it should work now. It wasn't delivering heat through shields now it does. As some people have found out when you stack some of these bad boys or use other weapons that deliver heat it's pretty effective, some might say it's too effective. I think we've seen some ships heated up to 8000% heat at which point basically they're dead whatever happens. This is one change we're going to make I'm not sure when it's going in, but it should definitely happen during Beta. There's going to be diminishing returns on heat generation from multiple weapons. What we don't want to do is nerf them so they're rubbish, so you should still be able to overheat ships very effectively, into hull damage, however it's diminishing returns so some of the smaller class weapons with have less impact on larger ships, but more importantly Heat Sinks and avoiding being shot for a while will be able to combat these things.
A lot of these things are skill dependent, if someone's just tagging you constantly you're in trouble especially if you're trying to do things that heat your ship. We don't want to ruin heat delivery systems because we think they're very cool, but we also don't want to create "path of least resistance" where you just stack all of the same weapon and it's an insta kill.
Would it perhaps be a cool idea to be able to reject the outcome of a recipe at a loss of 50% of the materials? This would then represent the recycling of the materials to have another go at generating the modification.
It's a really nice idea, we're not going to do it initially, but it's a really good lever and I don't think it's outside the realms of possibility. That's the kind of thing we can look at, but we wouldn't want to make that kind of change till we have a lot more data
Good engineer upgrade stats and special mod (e.g. regenerating beam) rolling together requires a double lucky roll. If you have your desired special mod but want to try for better stats, or want to keep your stats but roll again for a special mod, you can only accept the whole package right now. This makes the RNG extra frustrating, so why not decouple them so you can choose to accept or decline stats and special mod independently of each other?
We're not going to change it at the moment, however we are making sure that under the hood there are a number of quite interesting ways we manipulate statistics, which mean it's not quite as random as people think it is and if you end up rolling a weapon that has an experimental effect (by the end of the beta) you'll likely find that your stats rolls in general will be more extreme. The way that stat creation works for our module upgrades, the more extreme it is, the better it is. So hopefully that's the start of something that should be quite interesting.
Why are Enhanced Thrusters not sold outside engineer bases, for example (and especially) Jameson Memorial?
At the moment upgraded drives are for Horizon users only. Whether this changes in the future it might do or it might not.
Shocking
Bookmarks are sorted by time created. Why not alphabetically?
I've been talking with team GUI and it came down to resources and time. In the future it looks like there will be various filter and sorting options.
Do all mods exist in grades 1-5 and we haven't yet found the higher grades, or are some of them limited to 1-2 or 1-3? This makes a huge difference to decide whether to spend lots of materials for a good grade 3 roll, or work towards doing the grade 5 upgrade instead.
Not all modules have all grades, I suspect as time goes on this is something that will be expanding but for now you'll have to make the choices from information you gleam from the game.
Will engineer rank gain be slower than it is in Mayhem
Yes, it has probably got faster than from where we first were at, but it will be slower than it currently is.
Some upgrades get reduced downsides at higher grades; some downsides even turn into extra buffs. Other modules get escalating advantages and disadvantages at higher grades. Why aren't all like that, with bigger boni always coming with bigger mali? Or is there a logic behind this divide which we just don't see?
The first thing to remember is modules can't be measured apples for apples with each other. You've got to look at a module on it's own, sometimes having equally powerful downsides would ruin any benefit to a module and also we don't all modules to be prescriptively the same, as in every module has x amount of downsides and upsides. The one rule I can say is as modules go up in rank they generally get better and better across the board.
What counts for engineer rank progression beyond using their services? Some apparently accept exploration data, for example, but what works and what doesn't is not really clear.
You've been misinformed. Only crafting will increase your reputation. This is something we're looking at (we'll be coming back to this later in the questions)
What use does major faction reputation still have, now that only the minor faction rank counts in all situations (offered missions, aggressiveness of police cargo scanning, whether ships are pre-scanned etc)?
Factions and Super Powers as they're now called because it makes it cleaner. Super Power reputation does have an effect because it acts as a modifier to all the reputation you gain with the associated factions.
Why no class 4 burst lasers?
Really sorry, they weren't ready in time. They're a little more complicated, but we will be getting them at some point. I'm fairly confident I'm not going to lose my job for saying that... Although you never know
Fortunately Sandy is still with us
Now that we have Large and Huge Multicannons AND rebalanced Missiles, is there any chance to get Large and Huge Missile Racks too that can just carry more ammo with bigger magazines?
Not at the moment. Just having loads more ammo is not something that we really want missile to have. There is synthesis, so you can restock missiles outside of combat.
ECM VS Point Defense? Will they get another look? "perfect defense" is kinda not fun (PD is almost perfect while ECM is useless)
Yes at some point in the future we will look at them. PD is somewhere close to where we want it to be, ECM is very difficult to use and we're going to make it better. Not sure when but we're probably going to do something along the lines of rather than holding down the button and the effect happens when you release it, it will have an increasing bubble effect around you when you hold the button down. No ETA, no guarantee.
What about Cannons? Will they get another look now that we have those Multicannons? Increased projectile speed would be nice
It's funny you should say that. I think Mike may have made a post on this already but yeah we are going to buff cannons, quite a lot. We are going to increase the speed the bullets travel because now ships in general can go a lot faster because of upgrades, we're going to increase their damage at distance (reduce the falloff to 0) so it's hard to hit at long range but if you manage it you'll do pretty much full damage. We're increase their ability to overcome hardness, so their effective against ships that are larger than the hardpoint size and we're going to increase their penetration value. This might look at face value that they're doing lees damage to the hull but it's because more damage is going through to the module.
Could it be possible that you atleast show us what we can get as additional effect (Healbeam etc)? I mean...there will be a list somewhere on the wiki anyway, so why not showing it ingame?
At the moment no we're not going to do that, although it will be interesting to look at the wikis if people do like to make wikis I do love looking at those wikis. I don't know in the future, that would be again a finesse and we have some ideas about experimental effects and how they are applied, but we're not ready to go into that yet.
When will there be development of On-Planet surface analysis and scanning? - detailed surface scanner 2ry benefit - not only added detail from space - why not allow it to refine or focus the surface analysis when searching for items or resources - benefit at heights <5km - when ground skimming.
I'm not sure when we're getting back to planetary exploration, we definitely are at some point because we have some other stuff there that I'm not allowed to talk about. They're good ideas and we've talked about things quite similar to those.
Galaxy map opens in a couple of seconds - but the system map can take 30s why?
The reason is unfortunately very technical. It's generating visuals for the stars and the planets whereas the Galaxy Map isn't. It's a bit of a bugbear for me, I kind of like the idea of there being a toggle to look between a simplified version for a faster loading and then a more detailed one, but I don't know if that's ever gonna happen. I'm now going to whine and moan about it to everyone but that probably won't make any difference
Missions board very slow to start - can this be background process loaded once landed even before selected?
Basically I think you're saying loading in mission boards even before you land, I don't know I was going to ask Dav but he's very busy. We will look at the reasons for it, the game's very complicated and so I'm not sure
Personally I'm not a fan of always preloading things like the mission boards when landing at a station/planet because it's generally putting extra strain and resources into something that I rarely use. Preloading things is hard, because you can't just want it to happen because it suits your style of gameplay. If it doesn't cause any detriment to others then fine
Ship skins - please release a single skin for all ships? - not collections for a single ship type - I would have 1 tactical skin - but for all my ships - I would not buy it 6 times for only 6 ships of the many available
It's completely valid, it's not my remit, so I don't know I'm afraid.
When will the engineer rep gain be reworked to cover missions/tasks as originally intended, rather than number of items crafted?
People are misunderstanding comments that have been made. It was never the intention to go with mission system, not that it's a bad idea, it's a very good idea, but it's also very expensive to do. Maybe at some point in the future we might get something like that. We are looking at engineer progression, I totally take the criticism of crafting something you don't like just to progress, we are seeing if there's ways we can improve it maybe through some of the suggestions that have been made (bounty vouchers/exploration data/specialised markets).
What about the bookmarks infinite plotting bug in the Beta, will you fix it
Errrr, I'm not sure. If it's an infinite plotting bug then that's not great, but plotting a route from home to Sag A is a real long way... I'll look into that.
WHY!!! Why did you ask that question! Sssshhhh
It's not an infinite plotting bug, using a bookmark allows you to plot a route to a system you've previously visited even if it's beyond 1000Ly. If you're computer can handle it then you can plot it (Sag A* on mine took 1 min, Beagle Point crashed it ) Please FD don't remove this.Can you explain the reasoning behind allowing us to enter any hangar with our SRV?
It makes no sense what so ever. I guess you have put it in thinking it will be a help to racers? Which while we do appreciate it, I find myself having a very hard time understanding how I can enter a hangar on a small landing pad and then being magically transported to another Large landing pad on the other side of the outpost/port to enter my ship.
It wasn't for racers. The reason we did it was because hunting down your hangar, especially in the larger bases, we just didn't think it was that fun. It was very much game driven. As for context, most of the bases are underground anyway and so the bits you see are just the external parts, so if you like, that's the context we use for it.
Will the materials be added to commodity markets for players to buy or added to faction missions to earn as rewards.
They already are.
Why is the material list requirements for the module manufacture called "recipe" are they baking cakes in their spare time?
We agree with you, they shouldn't really be called recipes and hopefully at some point the word recipe will be removed from the game and replaced.
Why are all the randomly created engineer / contact avatars horrifically ugly swamp donkeys?
That's pretty harsh! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Has the extra heat generation of silent running while firing weapons made it into CQC? If so that would completely make a marginal gain item in CQC useless.
I wouldn't say it was marginal gain, I've had my posterior handed to me by people in Silent Running. Yes it does carry over, but fear not we're going to keep an eye on it. If it turns out it ruins things then we'll change it.
Is there a plan to re-balance them (slight reduction of heat produced/Power Draw?) to account for the change?
Not at the moment. The reduction to Heat Sinks is purposeful and it is to do with combat and so it is part of the network of things including SCB. We'll keep an eye on it, we're never gonna say never to potential changes if we think that the feedback and/or the telemetry and our own feelings on it are that it could be better, but for now we're going to run with it and see how it goes.
Been having trouble looking for 'Micro Resources'. For example: 'Cracked Industrial Firmware' or 'Hybrid Capacitors'. Are we to head out and find them by luck or is there a method to finding them?
Yes it is difficult, but there is methods to where materials and commodities are found, technically if you put in a lot of work and deductive reasoning then you can find out where certain things will be, but it's a bit too hard. Hopefully what we're going to be doing at some point during Beta (if luck holds out) we're going to add the ability to interrogate materials on the Blueprint (not recipe) screen at the Engineers and in your pinned Blueprint. So what that will allow us to do is to put a little bit of text in there to give you some pointers and hints as to where to find these things and what activities you will need. We're not going to spell it out exactly but we totally get that there are a lot of resources and there's a lot of activities and it's cool that exploration and detective reasoning is great, but it was too much and that's something we've directly got from feedback and we've looked back at it in hindsight and we agree with you. In addition we're going to (hopefully in the Beta as well) do a munge (Urban dictionary: The act of consolidating 2 or more mutually exclusive data sets or sections of computer code, circumventing the requirement to write a load of complex code.) of some of the lower resources so there's not quite so many of them. So they should be easier to get and also they'll be used in more recipies especially the lower level ones and so you should have access to more, more quickly.
I am personally very glad that Sandro said they would only be hinting to where the materials and commodities are found rather than pointing you to exact locations.
Adding NPC chatter about materials?
That's a really good idea, who knows in the future.
Will there be an engineer who does SRV mods?
Not at the moment
Will Npc's ever use SRVs?
Not anytime soon, that's a big bucket of work. We do want it, but that's in of itself a big chunk of work and we want to make sure we can support if with some pretty awesome gameplay as well.
Are an engineer's chances of obtaining special attributes the same across the board? (ex: All engineers with Beam Laser modifications have the same X% chance to create healing lasers?) Or will engineers be specialized? (ex: Some creating healing lasers more often while others have a better chance of granting some other modification?)
At the moment it's flat across the board, in the future who knows. We've got some pretty cool ideas, but it's not for 2.1 we want to make sure the base stuff is working first.
Engineer rep building missions were recently confirmed by Mike Evans as not ready yet...
That's unfortunately not true, what he was actually saying was that we couldn't do them.
Can you please detail any AI changes implemented or about to be implemented due to player feedback? I.e. "brave Sir Robin" etc.
Yes, let's talk very briefly about AI. I think hopefully people will agree in general the AI is better. The lower level of ranks it should be on a par with what it was before, the higher ranks hopefully more of a challenge. Running away at the moment is a bit of a problem which is why we're going to change it, but we don't want to remove it completely. There has been some contention, some people really like it, some people don't, on balance we think it's a little bit too predictable and a little bit too powerful (for them). They're not cheating though, they're not cheating at how fast their going. Ships can go at that speed if you're a god at managing pips and know what you're doing. But we're going to add some amount of variation into the black box that is flee behaviour and Sarah Jane is already working on it and doing wonders with it. So they'll still run away but it won;t be the same way all the time. Hopefully it will make it a bit fun again, because the point of it is yeah it need to be a challenge, but it has to be fun too.[/QUOTE]
Ed commented on being able to drop out at a nav beacon further away and Sandro explained again about the drop out distance being affected by the gravitational pull, so the further into deep space the further the drop out
Now will there be Engineer mods for hatch breaker controllers?
Glutton Limpet: dumps canisters twice as fast
Discerning Limpet: dumps high value canisters first
Smuggler's Limpet: only dumps illegal items
Vampire Rat Limpet: dumps fuel blisters siphoned from the target's tanks
Dial-a-Limpet: Attempts to dump a specified type of canister selected on Target Cargo UI
Madonna Limpet: goes for the target's materials
Really cool ideas there aren't any mods for them yet, but hopefully in the future these are really good ideas.
With materials being generated whilst mining - Have you considered adding a method where you can instruct collector limpets to ignore / auto discard certain material types. Its quite tedious having to empty out a hold of carbon/nickel/sulphur every so often.
Yeah that's a really good idea, I'm gonna say no at the moment, that's often going to be the case I'd rather be honest with you and not lie. The reason we're not doing it at the moment is it's quite an involved amount of interface for it. It's on my Sandy's secret I really want this list.
Will there be engineer bases further out of the 'bubble'? I'm thinking in the region of 10k LY out or more for the explorer ones.
No comment at the moment, I don't want to say anything more about the engineers
Hmmmm....
Will there be engineers who can modify the module types not already covered in future? (Scanning / Mining / Repair / etc module types)
Hopefully if things go well that's in the plan. No ETA, no guarantee.
Will there be engineer upgrades that allow you to improve the effectiveness of synthesised items / add more synthesis recipes (such as limpets perhaps?)
No to the first one, and yes hopefully to the second one. I think there are already plans for synthesis recepies for Chaff, Heatsink and things. I don't know when, but yes hopefully.
Will there be engineer recipes that require you to bring back things like meta alloys or the unidentified artifacts ( or any similar future alien materials/items )
Couldn't possibly say on that one.
Withnail, that's a great film
Will 2.1 bring the introduction of the collapse mechanic in Powerplay, as the notes for the first beta identified that you had been making fixes to defecting from a dead power etc. Also, how will a power know they are about to collapse?
I don't know, hopefully, maybe, not sure. There are still a few wiggly things going on with that, we have been looking at it but things are very busy at the moment. But it is coming so those powers had better watch out because Death is coming at some point.
With the way engineers are presented, will all available engineers appear to anyone who has triple elite instantly come launch of 2.1 to the masses ?
I think what you're saying is if you've already fulfilled the criteria the engineer's looking out for will they all just send you invites and the answer's a bit tricky. Yes they will but there's only 5 of them that do this, the others are locked to other engineers. So invitations to the first 5 will be applied retroactively and as you gain reputation with those then you will unlock others.
Sandro looks across at the spinning orange Cobra "did you just die?" Ed "Yep, and it hurt" Sandro "Oh dear"
Should materials be given a different scanner icon colour to that of cargo?
Yeah, maybe as a suggestion, I don't know. There's already quite a lot of colours on the scanners, so I'm not sure.
Will players get materials from destroying other players ships?
No sorry, but we don't trust you enough, it's too open to exploitation. It's a great concept, but the effort involved in making that work securely I don;t think is worth it at the moment, it may be in the future though.
There has been a lot of criticism over the RNG nature of the crafting and the craft and trash reputation increase mechanic. What assurances can you give to those critics who see these mechanics as non engaging, unfun and reminiscent of mechanics in other games that were disliked by their players?
Well I think I've already said what I can say on that one which is, we've looking at certain things to change, but we're not going to completely throw it out and so unfortunately if you really hate it then you really hate it, but that's totally OK. So there's nothing more I can really say.
Will we ever see full bearing wrecks float in space and what modules can we get from them
No I don't think we'll ever have whole modules being dropped from wreckage, but there are probably some cool things coming in that area.
Why am I finding it so difficult to find arsenic? The Engineer at Knuth wants arsenic for her modifications and I could not find it on planets.
Well it is rank 3, it's pretty rare, keep plugging away at that one I think you might be able to get it from mining rarely.
What are the plans for the new livery items in the game; spoiler, bumper, wings?
No comment are you sure you're not hallucinating? I've no idea what you're talking about
What are the chances of us ever being able to purchase a Bobble Sandro (complete with Hat and Loach accessories) and who do I need to bribe in order to improve those chances?
Much as Elite desperately needs a bobble space loach, it certainly doesn't need a bobble me with my Jelly Bean face, that would be horrific. And really sorry I don't know who the best person to bribe is
Also, out of interest, since the launch of beta, have you noticed any significant changes in game play on the live servers in reaction to what players have discovered in the beta (eg builds changing, sudden increase in mining/mineral collection, etc)
Yeah we've seen some things and there's been a bunch of changes and some of them we're not really sure why but that's why we're doing these streams and collecting your feedback
Reddit questions: (I'm saying nothing)
Can you say if and when there's a fix coming for smurf mode?
Took me a while to work out what you meant here, but it's when you change the HUD colours. We're looking at it, I've talked to team GUI and they are looking at it. There's no ETA on it and so no guarantees especially as this issue is technically caused by an unsupported modification that we allow, but we would like to fix it and we're hopeful.
When will you speed up the limpet collection of materials after a fight, it takes ages having to sit there watching them collect them all up
Not at the moment. They're hella faster we gotta say than scooping on large ships. We are looking, certainly not in 2.1, for the possibility for having resource chunks containing all bits of 1 resource. Surprisingly it's quite complicated to do that, but I don't know when that's gonna happen.
With the current implementation experimenting with different loadouts will become prohibitively costly no-one wants to sacrifice the equipment they've spent months working on just to try something else. Buying a second ship just to try a new engine or whatever isn't a good solution either (Sandro says "it's not that bad a solution actually but I take your point) this topic was dicussed at length on reddit are there any plans to solve this issue, if so what timeframe 2.1, 2.2 sometime this season, after season 2.
Looking at the balances of some commanders I'm not sure costs would ever be prohibitive, I'm not sure what we could charge and they'd be like yeah whatever. However it is a valid point in all seriousness. As it happens we are looking at the future, I'm not sure when but it will definitely be in Season 2 (ah, OK, as definite as I'm ever going to say, which means possibly) probably not 2.1 unfortunately as we ran out of time, but we are looking at loot storage. Storage for resources, including modules, it's on the todo list we understand it's very important but WE RAN OUT OF TIME unfortunately
but it is gonna be coming hopefully. And hopefully I'm allowed to say that, no ETA or total guarantee but that's the plan.Why are there such a small number of mods for the plasma accelerator?
Well there are at the moment, but engineers is an ongoing process.
How much of engineers will XBOX players get?
When Xbox gets Horizons, and it is coming, it should bring you bang up to date with the PC version
Facebook Questions:
Will we some weapon buffing lowering in the Beta?
Well there you are, we've already started. We've already made one set of changes to low end mods and if you keep giving us feedback in the forums, then we'll look into it. This is a giant amount of work people like Mike Evans (he's done a bang up job on this) and Mark and team everyone, they are awesome and I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. But we can't do everything and that's what we need the Beta for, for testing so get in there and do it.
And finally, before my voice cracks. Can you get modules back with buyback on ships
You can at the moment, but we know it's not optional which is why we're looking at storage. But for now the reason we thought we could just about get away with it is because you can get them back with buyback.
Why are there so few bobbleheads in the store
I don't but they are very difficult and take a long time to to make
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