Engineers The 'Favour' Mechanic

BostromNZ

BostromNZ
As anyone who has gone through the loop of engineering weapons to a G5 with special effect knows, the mechanic where you can buy the special effect as a ‘favour’ with the engineer is frustrating, immersion breaking and unnecessarily cumbersome.

For those that don’t know, if you buy the special effect it costs you two ranks, dropping you from G5 to G3 or if you rolled a special effect but want to change it to another type, it will cost you one rank. The main way to rank back up to G5 is by crafting modules, using either lots of G1s, a few G3s and a few G4s until you’re rank 5 again and you have to do it all over again. One FDL has 5x hardpoints on it and that’s only one ship.

You can rank up in other ways at some engineers such as selling commodities but this takes much longer. You can also get lucky and roll the stats you want with the special effect you want – but that’s rare, and that’s okay.

Having to craft modules that you don’t want and will discard anyway is bad enough the first time round but after you’ve done it five or six times it really starts to feel like one big waste of time and unlike other time sinks in Elite, I’m not flying my ship, I’m looking at a menu screen.

My suggestion is to have a blueprint for the special effect – make it require lots of mats, or a mix of rare ones – just as long as when you rank the engineer up to G5, you can craft the mod you want such as an overcharged pulse laser and then depending on if you like the roll, choose to craft the special effect. Or make the special effect blueprints a little easier and make me choose before I roll whether I want to craft the special effect for that roll.

This way you still have to farm all the mats, just like you’d need to if you had to rank back up but you don’t have to sit through 50 crafting sequences (even skipping them takes long) that you don’t want. It’s also a bit stupid that you lose rank with an engineer because you like their handy work so much that you want them to craft one of their coolest upgrades for you. This way, it’s simply: you want this cool effect? Here’s what I need – go get it and I’ll do it for you.

I’m not asking for the game to be easier, let’s face it the engineers doesn’t require skill, just patience. But please cut down on the amount of time I’m looking at menus.
 

dangerousbeans

dangerousbeans
yeah agree with that, I have 2 grade two MCs on lvl 3 overcharged with "manually" chosen effects) and the engie dude is back to lvl 2 (twice already). I cant be bothered anymore refreshing the screen for 20 mins (twice again) because I'll manually be choosing to add an effect for each of them again at lvl 5.

I did so much engie grind it makes me sigh and common sense just says no!
 

Ydiss

Ydiss
I don't disagree that it might be done better but both Broo and Tod have g3 and g4 blueprints that can be used to get back to g5 that are relatively easy to do (lightweight pulse lasers g3 and g4, the materials are obtained from destroying trade ships in uss points, preferably in anarchy of course). On top of this you do, of course, need to buy the commodities for these two blueprints ahead of time (magnetic emitter coil and CMM Composite).

What it essentially boils down to is, if you want to hand pick your effect, you need to have these extra materials to do it and do the whole commodity buying trip for the two extra commodities.

You'll need to get enough of these to complete 3 of each per weapon you want to apply the specific special effect to.

If you actually consider what's required to obtain the materials for these two blueprints, it's really not hard at all (much easier than getting any of the primary materials for the g5 weapon).

In essence, what you're suggesting is either the same or harder, depending on what you think this "uber" blueprint should require. Just to avoid your lack of immersion and dislike of crafting needless modules.

I personally think the whole approach of random effects just doesn't feel right but FD are stubborn about it. What we have is a compromise. It basically lets us have what we want but makes it more time consuming to get it. I'm glad at least that we have this compromise (and, as I said, it's not a hugely difficult task if you pick the right g3 and g4 blueprints) but because we have it, the whole idea that FD are persisting with the random approach seems a bit pointless (because very few players will accept random).

It's a similar issue, for me, with FD's stubbornness with the necessity of commodities in blueprints. It's a non fun, trivial challenge time sink. Once you know where to get the commodities, it is purely a matter of adding an hour or so on at the final step of the crafting process. Yet, this "feature" causes so many problems for game play that FD are now considering introducing engineer commodity storage. Which will likely be convoluted and messy and totally unnecessary.

Unlocking engineers, finding all the materials you need and planning how to get to your final build is enough. I think these two additional time sinks detract from the whole process and add nothing that's fun. Simply doing away with both would significantly improve the player experience without removing any of the existing challenge that actually matters to us, in my opinion.
 
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BostromNZ

BostromNZ
Ydiss said:
In essence, what you're suggesting is either the same or harder, depending on what you think this "uber" blueprint should require. Just to avoid your lack of immersion and dislike of crafting needless modules.
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I understand having to have the requisite materials and commodities before going to the engineer and planning what G3/4 mods you will burn through. You can even see them as free shots at a G4 mod with an effect for things like beam lasers where G4 is the max.

You're right, what I'm asking for is the same in that regard - you still have to farm the mats before you go. The difference is that you don't have to sit through all the crafting screens when you're ranking back up. It's not about a lack of immersion, it's about not liking sitting in front of a crafting screen for an hour or more because you want 3x G5 mods with effects.

If we're allowed to 'buy' the effect then why not just let us buy it with mats instead of ranks because ranks are just bought with mats anyway.
 

rrobes

R
metatheurgist said:
They should never have caved and allowed the favour mechanic, but it would have been better not to have special effects in the first place.
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Absolutely, this started an unnecessary arms race. I hold the "healing ray" and "smart munitions" in particular dislike.
 

Shogouki

Shogouki
What about creating a favor pool for an engineer? Lets say that as you do tasks for them and make upgrades that favor pool will fill up. In order to buy special effects you'd need to spend favor from that pool. This way you wouldn't lose rank but you'd still need to work for their willingness to make those special upgrades.

Maybe they could also make it so that by donating engineering commodities and materials and data that a specific engineer uses that could also generate favor?
 

Ydiss

Ydiss
Shogouki said:
What about creating a favor pool for an engineer? Lets say that as you do tasks for them and make upgrades that favor pool will fill up. In order to buy special effects you'd need to spend favor from that pool. This way you wouldn't lose rank but you'd still need to work for their willingness to make those special upgrades.

Maybe they could also make it so that by donating engineering commodities and materials and data that a specific engineer uses that could also generate favor?
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I think doing missions and donating materials to gain reputation, which could then be burned a bit too pull in favours would be a much better approach.

Still, though, it amounts to much the same time sink.

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Kneejo said:
Yes you are. The effects are not supposed to be easy to get. Or else everyone would be flying with extreme mods on day one.
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They are easy to get though. You just need 3x g3 and 3x g4 blueprint materials, all of which are easy to get.

Extra time sink =! Harder.

On my first visit to Broo, I got all three pulse lasers upgraded with the exact effects I wanted. The favours mechanic didn't make it harder. The only hard part about the whole process was getting MEFs (which was really fun to work out, coincidentally).

I'm about to change those three pulse lasers for rapid fire. The only hard part about that has been scooping up the moving mats in the middle of a CZ. Again, this was fun.

The 9-12x mats I need for the g3 and g4 blueprints, I already have in abundance. I got them a while back for other blueprints. So the favour mechanic simply means two extra stops on the obligatory commodity collection run prior to heading to Broo.

It's neither harder nor more fun. It's a pure time sink. Another timer.
 
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Weps

Weps
My suggestion would be to simply implement a Contacts menu where you can donate materials (it was done in the last mats CG, just copy-paste it from there for Braben's sake!) and donating a certain rank of materials increases your reputation with the engineer by a set amount.

That way I could donate those 356 Grid resistors I carry around and maybe gain a quarter reputation bar from level 3 to level 4 with my engineer.

Oh, and let the reputation rank go beyond level 5. The fact that each higher level requires more reputation means that this method could never be abused - donating 1000 mats category 5 would give you a huge reputation quantity, but only so much to go from level 7 from level 8 for example (it would be determined by the actual factors in the function which I don't know). The point is that you could get reputation in advance and use it at once when crafting your level 5s, but it would be very hard to reach higher levels without spending ALL your mats and finding more, and besides, resetting two high levels (for example from level 8 to level 6) for higher levels would be inefficient in comparison with levels below 5.
 

Von Shadow

Von Shadow
Yeah ... favours != gameplay.... just a crappy timesink .... i got 4x Pulse lasers with phasing last week ... just had to plan out the 24 boost (grade 3 > 5) rolls again each time
 

RamirezKurita

R
I've got a few of alternative suggestions for this:

Firstly, what about adding in additional ranks for engineers that are only used for favours? That way we could rank an engineer up to rank 7 or so, then be able to force 2 rank 5 special effects.

Secondly, a "donate materials" option would be great. Getting vast amounts of common materials is incredibly easy, but it takes far too long to roll 150 G1 mods to rank up engineers. I'd rather just be able to turn up and shout "shut up and take my phosphorous!" and have a friendly engineer. The donation list would also likely depend on the specific engineer, as not every engineer would care about all materials, commodities and data types.

Thirdly, a poster on here suggested before that we should be able to pair weapon mods, so we can spend double the materials to modify two weapons at the same time to have matched mods. This could be expanded so that we can use two favours at the same time, likely driving us back down to rank 1 for the engineer, but we would at least have a pair of identical modded weapons with our desired special effect.
 

BostromNZ

BostromNZ
Shogouki said:
What about creating a favor pool for an engineer? Lets say that as you do tasks for them and make upgrades that favor pool will fill up. In order to buy special effects you'd need to spend favor from that pool. This way you wouldn't lose rank but you'd still need to work for their willingness to make those special upgrades.

Maybe they could also make it so that by donating engineering commodities and materials and data that a specific engineer uses that could also generate favor?
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A separate favour pool is a good idea, at least then you can keep crafting G5 mods which would add to the favour pool along with donated commodities and materials.
 

Moritz Norman

Moritz Norman
With nerf cycles it has become even more important to lessen the burden of weapon mods. Eliminating favors is the most obvious solution; they add needless grind every time you want to do a grade five weapon.
 

BostromNZ

BostromNZ
Moritz Norman said:
With nerf cycles it has become even more important to lessen the burden of weapon mods. Eliminating favors is the most obvious solution; they add needless grind every time you want to do a grade five weapon.
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Exactly. I'm fully expecting to have just finished crafting all my G5 overcharged mods just in time for the nerf that Sandro mentioned is coming.
 
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