Yup. My takeaway from other games where RNG is intrinsic to how it's played (anything by Wargaming comes to mind, Borderlands...) is that RNG is cancer. It's easy to see how it *seems* like a good idea, but for video gaming it is bad, even in limited amounts; I hope they come up with something better/cooler.
I don't know what they thought, but initially the storage was not even increased from the original 300, only after complaints in the beta forums did they set it to 600 as a "quick fix".
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This seems to be FD's approach to quite a few issues: change something only after blowback or incessant nagging, whichever is loudest. To be fair most of the changes in 2.1 are rather good, it's just that this particular design choice feels to me like it was aimed at turning us into farm-bots.
My solution to engineers would be to lock the upgrades behind rep with the engineers, and make their rep harder to get..
that solves the problem of getting the players to experience the new content because they will have to do missions etc to get rep with the engineer..
and once you done "grinding" rep, you can purchase the mods for credits... that way the grind is a one off..
also if you pick your special... then you loose rep, and have to grind a bit more rep.
a simple system that everyone can enjoy
the effort put into all the materials and current system could have gone into a bunch of hand crafted theme missions to give the engineers some flavour and not the run of the mill missions kicked out from the procedural "speak and spell" machine
EDIT: my suggestion falls in line with the game's current philosophy, whereas the current system feels very tacked on/out of place, in my opinion
that solves the problem of getting the players to experience the new content because they will have to do missions etc to get rep with the engineer..
and once you done "grinding" rep, you can purchase the mods for credits... that way the grind is a one off..
also if you pick your special... then you loose rep, and have to grind a bit more rep.
a simple system that everyone can enjoy
the effort put into all the materials and current system could have gone into a bunch of hand crafted theme missions to give the engineers some flavour and not the run of the mill missions kicked out from the procedural "speak and spell" machine
EDIT: my suggestion falls in line with the game's current philosophy, whereas the current system feels very tacked on/out of place, in my opinion
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X-Terminator
Banned
Actually, the game is perfect apart from Bugs and other missing suggested ideas. Although for now it's a mismatch of NPC MODs and a grind to get them. In the long term we will see our ships become FASTER, LONGER RANGE, MORE SHIELDED & RESILIENT, and POWERFUL WEAPONS. Plus once we gain all these it is up to us if we gamble at trying each one to get that 6% SPECIAL EFFECT! It means we have no predictable outcomes always and can keep going another 30yrs.
RNG can be a wonderful tool for creating events/content/missions/etc. Crafting is not one of them. We have a fixed recipe, we should get fixed results. Or at least have some way to influence the outcome. Like spending 1-2 million so we could get a guaranteed good result.
You could spend 10-20 hours only focusing on collecting the rare mats / rounding up commodities...only to get 2-3 spins on the wheel of fortune, and end up with a toaster that freezes the bread.
I think FD has a very specific vision for the game and it's components. Maybe they wanted high-end engineered components to be very rare, not something you can just get. This would be ok too, except all the NPCs have pimped out rides.
Maybe they fail to communicate their goals to us, and we, the community just assume how things will work, then get upset when they don't work as expected. When the players rise up as one against a design decision, they don't really have a choice but change things...or at least compromise. I respect their vision, but they won't be able to make the game they want without people buying it.
Maybe they just botched this release...that's also a possibility.
Would love to hear the dev's standpoint on this matter.
One things for sure: as a player, focusing only on the engineers in this update is a sure way to burn out, so I'm just doing my usual things, and start focusing on crafting when that 600 unit material hold fills up
You could spend 10-20 hours only focusing on collecting the rare mats / rounding up commodities...only to get 2-3 spins on the wheel of fortune, and end up with a toaster that freezes the bread.
I think FD has a very specific vision for the game and it's components. Maybe they wanted high-end engineered components to be very rare, not something you can just get. This would be ok too, except all the NPCs have pimped out rides.
Maybe they fail to communicate their goals to us, and we, the community just assume how things will work, then get upset when they don't work as expected. When the players rise up as one against a design decision, they don't really have a choice but change things...or at least compromise. I respect their vision, but they won't be able to make the game they want without people buying it.
Maybe they just botched this release...that's also a possibility.
Would love to hear the dev's standpoint on this matter.
One things for sure: as a player, focusing only on the engineers in this update is a sure way to burn out, so I'm just doing my usual things, and start focusing on crafting when that 600 unit material hold fills up
Are we to assume you'd like to roll the dice for 30 years until you can get the fastest, longest ranged, best shielded & most resilient ship, with the most powerful weapons? That's... good for you... buddy...
I do hope, however, FDev doesn't intend to have the rest of us go through such a tedious-and-decades-long grind.
My impression is that most players (that don't just throw up their hands in frustration) are only to take the first roll and call it good. Perhaps once Fdev has changed the requirements and gave us more storage capacity and pilots have aquired 1000-2000 mats they'll start re-rolling modules. I know that I'm just going to take what I can get on the first roll and move on, at least for now.
IMO Panic Button is correct--focusing on the engineers is going to burn a lot of folks out. Its probably best to just do normal activities.
First, let me say that it's your own preference if you think variability in ship upgrades is good or bad. We can argue about that all day. I haven't played enough Engineers to say whether it's "too grindy" or "unfair" or whatever, but I do like the flavor the new materials add to the game.
But, I have to take issue with two things in the original post.
First, everyone keeps using the term "RNG" and comparing the mechanic to dice rolls. But "random" can mean a lot of things. You can have a truly random distribution of number in which each number has an equal chance of appearing. So if the range of numbers is -1,000,000 to + 1,000,000, your chance of getting any number between those two is about 1/2,000,000. But, I highly doubt that's how the variability in the numbers produced by the engineers. I assume (possibly incorrectly) that the positive or negative effects of the Engineer upgrades follow a normalized distribution where the probability of getting a number clusters around a mean. This is much different than a truly random distribution in that you can tweak it to have any median value and spread you want. So, I could say that such-and-such upgrade has a median of +100 and a sigma of 10. Then there is something like a 99.8% chance that I'm going to get an improvement of between +70 and +130, and basically no chance that I'll get a negative result, which is not the same thing as evenly distributed randomness.
Now the second thing. You mention engineers and NASA specifically in your post. Hey, I'm an engineer who has worked at NASA for a short time. I work on the cutting edge in infrared detector technology. These are devices we spend millions on, developed by scientists and engineers who do nothing but try to perfect these devices. These devices are going to be in the next fleet of space-based telescopes. Guess what? They're not perfect. Take any measure of performance for these devices and they vary. Some are better, some are worse, even though they are manufactured by exactly the same people in exactly the same manner. It turns out the the better something needs to be, the harder it is to reliably produce consistent results, especially when things are new or experimental, which I gather is the idea with the engineers.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong in general about 2.1 changing the game in ways that make it less fun. But, I am saying that in my opinion those two bits of your argument don't hold much water.
But, I have to take issue with two things in the original post.
First, everyone keeps using the term "RNG" and comparing the mechanic to dice rolls. But "random" can mean a lot of things. You can have a truly random distribution of number in which each number has an equal chance of appearing. So if the range of numbers is -1,000,000 to + 1,000,000, your chance of getting any number between those two is about 1/2,000,000. But, I highly doubt that's how the variability in the numbers produced by the engineers. I assume (possibly incorrectly) that the positive or negative effects of the Engineer upgrades follow a normalized distribution where the probability of getting a number clusters around a mean. This is much different than a truly random distribution in that you can tweak it to have any median value and spread you want. So, I could say that such-and-such upgrade has a median of +100 and a sigma of 10. Then there is something like a 99.8% chance that I'm going to get an improvement of between +70 and +130, and basically no chance that I'll get a negative result, which is not the same thing as evenly distributed randomness.
Now the second thing. You mention engineers and NASA specifically in your post. Hey, I'm an engineer who has worked at NASA for a short time. I work on the cutting edge in infrared detector technology. These are devices we spend millions on, developed by scientists and engineers who do nothing but try to perfect these devices. These devices are going to be in the next fleet of space-based telescopes. Guess what? They're not perfect. Take any measure of performance for these devices and they vary. Some are better, some are worse, even though they are manufactured by exactly the same people in exactly the same manner. It turns out the the better something needs to be, the harder it is to reliably produce consistent results, especially when things are new or experimental, which I gather is the idea with the engineers.
Now, I'm not saying you're wrong in general about 2.1 changing the game in ways that make it less fun. But, I am saying that in my opinion those two bits of your argument don't hold much water.
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Seen a lot of uses of real life analogies to defend the use of RNG as a the sole means of crafting. But to me that logic(while correct about nothing being certain) just does not hold water in elite. I.e
"Well engineers are supposed to be these cutting edge, on the fringes of tech tinkerers that cannot replicate or predict the results.."
"Umm.. But if my ship is destroyed the insurance company can supply these impossible to predict or replicate modules exactly how I had them. Why?"
"Gameplay reasons"
"So if are using gameplay as a reason to dispense with realism. Why can't we use gameplay as a reason to give players more options.."
"Well engineers are supposed to be these cutting edge, on the fringes of tech tinkerers that cannot replicate or predict the results.."
"Umm.. But if my ship is destroyed the insurance company can supply these impossible to predict or replicate modules exactly how I had them. Why?"
"Gameplay reasons"
"So if are using gameplay as a reason to dispense with realism. Why can't we use gameplay as a reason to give players more options.."
I agree. I've seen "realism" quoted often as both an argument for and against variability in upgrade stats. While I think variability is actually more realistic, that doesn't really make it right for a game.
Damn... straight for the jugular, eh?
You're right about the meaning of random. I don't know for sure that FDev didn't put in a very reasonable effort to curb the apparently evenly distributed randomness in the rolls. It seemed reasonable, to me at least, to assume that the implementation of said game mechanic was the simplest one: I've been developing software for a few years and the overwhelming majority of the time programmers are under a lot of pressure from the bigwigs to get things done before X arbitrary deadline, which doesn't leave much room for thinking about normalizing the distribution of - in this case - dice roll results; particularly if you think about it in terms of the time and manpower needed to code, test, debug, repeat merely one of a ton of the features 2.1 had.
TLDR: I apologize if my OP was a bit too simplistic; you may be right. Thanks for bringing it up.
The point I was trying to get across, and I'm sorry if I was dead wrong, was that the thresholds for fault tolerances, outputs, resistances, performance, etc, shouldn't vary by double digits (which seems to be the case for both the positive and negative effects of each upgrade here).
And NASA... Damn... the blood loss from around my neck is making me feel dizzy, but I still want to shake your hand and ask you tons of questions.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read my post. Sorry to disappoint.
Edit: the infrared detectors you mentioned wouldn't happen to also be a part of this baby, would they?
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A lot of the materials are tiered versions of similar/the same thing, so my suggestion would be: Add a salvage merchant/junk dealer to stations, where you can trade your materials up and down the tiers i.e. 4 worn shield emitters = 1 shield emitter and vice versa.
Yeah, it's always the same. Either the "realism" or "gameplay" card is pulled by the white knights, depending on what is more effective at defending FD's decisions.
Would only barely help at all. You'd still have your storage full of 40 worn shield emitters until you return to the junk dealer to turn them into 1 shield emitters. What's really needed is either no limit at all (apart from the technical 4 billion limitation), or individual limits. Now 600 per material, that sounds much better.
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From one engineer to another I know that, in real life, at the cutting edge of science and technology you will see variability in component performance, after all, if your components arn't failing then your tests arn't tough enough
The issue I'm struggling with in terms of the whole in-game "Engineers" upgrade system is the full-scale RNG-ness of component stats.
To try and bring a relatable IRL example in as a comparison;
Would you agree that the IR tech you work with in NASA is far superior to widely available off-the-shelf technology?
I would presume that it is, so lets place this in context of the in-game system;
The components available to the player in the outfitting screen could be considered the off-the-shelf standard so to gain performance you want to upgrade them:
1 - The current "Engineers" seem more like back-street chop-shops that can be found all across the world, the ones that spring to mind are the incredibly talented and resourceful folks that the old Top Gear cast used to use on their grand adventures: The team arrive with cars and a a collection of random components and they leave with rather "specialised" vehicles somewhat more suited (!?) to their forthcoming adventure but also with significant drawbacks.
Topgear - From Bethlehem to Beaulieu Middle East challenge - used as a tongue-in-cheek example of the current "Engineers" chop-shop approach
2 - It's my opinion that the Engineers should be more like the true-life engineering specialists that can be found if you know where to look. In my line of work I could put serious enquirers in touch with a Motorsport Engine Builder with decades of knowledge and expertise that works in a unit found on a remote chicken farm and a Composite (Carbon Fibre, Kevlar etc) Specialist that can design and construct anything in composites that will weigh 1/10th and be 300% stronger than the component you want to replace, he works out of a ramshackle collection of sheds at the bottom of his garden.
Grid Autosport - image used as an example of vehicles modified to suit specific uses by specialist engineers
We currently have option 1 - a pot-luck approach to modification, I tried the system last night on an FSD and a Shield, I barely got anything better (2-3%) but a number of penalties (5-8%) to other component stats. This left me deeply unhappy that I'd wasted the materials and disheartened that I would now need to spend much more time hoping to get lucky finding the parts to enable another roll of the dice.
I believe we should have option 2 - a true engineered solution, the guarantee of an improvement relative to the tier of upgrade along with a realistic penalty to other component stats; you don't get something for nothing after all!
Hey, maybe have both, spacecraft "Chop-shops" - "you pay's yer money, you takes yer chance sonny" and true specialist spacecraft Engineers - "Speed cost's money Commander, how fast do you want to go?"
I'm wondering if it's worth proposing the above as a viable game suggestion?
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From one engineer to another I know that, in real life, at the cutting edge of science and technology you will see variability in component performance, after all, if your components arn't failing then your tests arn't tough enough
The issue I'm struggling with in terms of the whole in-game "Engineers" upgrade system is the full-scale RNG-ness of component stats.
To try and bring a relatable IRL example in as a comparison;
Would you agree that the IR tech you work with in NASA is far superior to widely available off-the-shelf technology?
I would presume that it is, so lets place this in context of the in-game system;
The components available to the player in the outfitting screen could be considered the off-the-shelf standard so to gain performance you want to upgrade them:
1 - The current "Engineers" seem more like back-street chop-shops that can be found all across the world, the ones that spring to mind are the incredibly talented and resourceful folks that the old Top Gear cast used to use on their grand adventures: The team arrive with cars and a a collection of random components and they leave with rather "specialised" vehicles somewhat more suited (!?) to their forthcoming adventure but also with significant drawbacks.
http://i.imgur.com/LhHTr3b.jpg
Topgear - From Bethlehem to Beaulieu Middle East challenge - used as a tongue-in-cheek example of the current "Engineers" chop-shop approach
2 - It's my opinion that the Engineers should be more like the true-life engineering specialists that can be found if you know where to look. In my line of work I could put serious enquirers in touch with a Motorsport Engine Builder with decades of knowledge and expertise that works in a unit found on a remote chicken farm and a Composite (Carbon Fibre, Kevlar etc) Specialist that can design and construct anything in composites that will weigh 1/10th and be 300% stronger than the component you want to replace, he works out of a ramshackle collection of sheds at the bottom of his garden.
http://i.imgur.com/6Q1ofka.jpg
Grid Autosport - image used as an example of vehicles modified to suit specific uses by specialist engineers
We currently have option 1 - a pot-luck approach to modification, I tried the system last night on an FSD and a Shield, I barely got anything better (2-3%) but a number of penalties (5-8%) to other component stats. This left me deeply unhappy that I'd wasted the materials and disheartened that I would now need to spend much more time hoping to get lucky finding the parts to enable another roll of the dice.
I believe we should have option 2 - a true engineered solution, the guarantee of an improvement relative to the tier of upgrade along with a realistic penalty to other component stats; you don't get something for nothing after all!
Hey, maybe have both, spacecraft "Chop-shops" - "you pay's yer money, you takes yer chance sonny" and true specialist spacecraft Engineers - "Speed cost's money Commander, how fast do you want to go?"
I'm wondering if it's worth proposing the above as a viable game suggestion?
Awesome post! I think what you suggest would be a great idea. Don't know how difficult FD might find the implementation though: on the surface it seems like 2 sets of engineers but with distinct back-end algorithms for managing upgrades.
I'll add a summarized version of your suggestion to the OP. Thank you! And have some more +rep!
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Damn... straight for the jugular, eh?
You're right about the meaning of random. I don't know for sure that FDev didn't put in a very reasonable effort to curb the apparently evenly distributed randomness in the rolls. It seemed reasonable, to me at least, to assume that the implementation of said game mechanic was the simplest one: I've been developing software for a few years and the overwhelming majority of the time programmers are under a lot of pressure from the bigwigs to get things done before X arbitrary deadline, which doesn't leave much room for thinking about normalizing the distribution of - in this case - dice roll results; particularly if you think about it in terms of the time and manpower needed to code, test, debug, repeat merely one of a ton of the features 2.1 had.
TLDR: I apologize if my OP was a bit too simplistic; you may be right. Thanks for bringing it up.
The point I was trying to get across, and I'm sorry if I was dead wrong, was that the thresholds for fault tolerances, outputs, resistances, performance, etc, shouldn't vary by double digits (which seems to be the case for both the positive and negative effects of each upgrade here).
And NASA... Damn... the blood loss from around my neck is making me feel dizzy, but I still want to shake your hand and ask you tons of questions.
Again, thank you for taking the time to read my post. Sorry to disappoint.
Edit: the infrared detectors you mentioned wouldn't happen to also be a part of this baby, would they?
I wasn't trying to go for the jugular, mate. Reasonable people can disagree. Honestly, it's more of a reply to lots of arguments I've seen floating around the forums and elsewhere. People seem to to be equating randomness, any randomness with "bad" and "unrealistic" and it just annoys me. Now, like you said there's certainly a strong case to be made for there being too much variability in the outcomes for engineer modifications and that's something that can be tweaked. I'm not sure if my branch worked on WISE. JWST and Hubble are from before my time. I work on detectors for WFIRST right now. It's a really cool instrument... or it will be.
From one engineer to another I know that, in real life, at the cutting edge of science and technology you will see variability in component performance, after all, if your components arn't failing then your tests arn't tough enough
The issue I'm struggling with in terms of the whole in-game "Engineers" upgrade system is the full-scale RNG-ness of component stats.
To try and bring a relatable IRL example in as a comparison;
Would you agree that the IR tech you work with in NASA is far superior to widely available off-the-shelf technology?
I would presume that it is, so lets place this in context of the in-game system;
The components available to the player in the outfitting screen could be considered the off-the-shelf standard so to gain performance you want to upgrade them:
1 - The current "Engineers" seem more like back-street chop-shops that can be found all across the world, the ones that spring to mind are the incredibly talented and resourceful folks that the old Top Gear cast used to use on their grand adventures: The team arrive with cars and a a collection of random components and they leave with rather "specialised" vehicles somewhat more suited (!?) to their forthcoming adventure but also with significant drawbacks.
http://i.imgur.com/LhHTr3b.jpg
Topgear - From Bethlehem to Beaulieu Middle East challenge - used as a tongue-in-cheek example of the current "Engineers" chop-shop approach
2 - It's my opinion that the Engineers should be more like the true-life engineering specialists that can be found if you know where to look. In my line of work I could put serious enquirers in touch with a Motorsport Engine Builder with decades of knowledge and expertise that works in a unit found on a remote chicken farm and a Composite (Carbon Fibre, Kevlar etc) Specialist that can design and construct anything in composites that will weigh 1/10th and be 300% stronger than the component you want to replace, he works out of a ramshackle collection of sheds at the bottom of his garden.
http://i.imgur.com/6Q1ofka.jpg
Grid Autosport - image used as an example of vehicles modified to suit specific uses by specialist engineers
We currently have option 1 - a pot-luck approach to modification, I tried the system last night on an FSD and a Shield, I barely got anything better (2-3%) but a number of penalties (5-8%) to other component stats. This left me deeply unhappy that I'd wasted the materials and disheartened that I would now need to spend much more time hoping to get lucky finding the parts to enable another roll of the dice.
I believe we should have option 2 - a true engineered solution, the guarantee of an improvement relative to the tier of upgrade along with a realistic penalty to other component stats; you don't get something for nothing after all!
Hey, maybe have both, spacecraft "Chop-shops" - "you pay's yer money, you takes yer chance sonny" and true specialist spacecraft Engineers - "Speed cost's money Commander, how fast do you want to go?"
I'm wondering if it's worth proposing the above as a viable game suggestion?
I don't think off-the-shelf version of what we test even exist. Each one is unique and has its own quirks.
Say there were an engineer who specialized in infrared detectors in the same way we do. You'd have to pay him 1,000,000 credits per detector (not the actual value of ours, just an example) and have them test 40 or 60 over the course of a few years, while you dial in the specs you're trying to optimize. In the end you'd have make, test, and throw away something like 2/3 of what you pay for before you get something that has the characteristics you want. Sounds a lot like rerolling to get the stats you want doesn't it? Maybe additional rerolls on modifications could improve the median value you get? I don't know, but there's lots of ways to tweak it.
Also, I think that people are upset because of their expectations being different from what the developers had in mind. It seems clear that the developers were thinking of these as more "experimental modifications" rather than "upgrades" (even though I'm sure they used the term in advertising the update). Upgrades are what you get when you go from a 5E to a 5A shield. There's no randomness and what you get is what you pay for.
Edit: My experience with real life engineering is very limited, so the things I said might not apply to things like engines or lasers or whatever. Engineers just seems to line up pretty well with my experience in my particular line of work.
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I just hope the game doesnt get too broken or bomb to the point where we never get the Walking around expansion or atmospheric landings.
Those two things could save the game, but I dont know if the game will survive that long for them to be implemented.
Every update brings 10 new good things and 20 new bad things!
FDev seem to be awesome at mathematics but pretty bad at creativeness!
Those two things could save the game, but I dont know if the game will survive that long for them to be implemented.
Every update brings 10 new good things and 20 new bad things!
FDev seem to be awesome at mathematics but pretty bad at creativeness!
