Engineers Engineers RNG is stupid

The RNG is absolutely stupid, wasting some rolls on all negative effects, how immersive and realistic is that? Simple answer...it isnt at all. Noone in their right mind would pay for a negative upgrade and no engineer in the world(galaxy) would put their name to a negative upgrade. Okay FD, its time to remove some of this RNG from items it doesnt work with, fine if you want it, but at least make the main upgrade result only slide in the positive otherwise whats the point?
 
I agree, and would add, that having to get friendly with a faction, then get a permit mission, then find x number of items to give to the engineer, is, well stupid. Engineers is the most stupid thing I've seen being strapped onto a game.
 
It is only 'stupid' when things don't go our way. The rest of the time, there are no complaints.

As to realistic? In the real world, we don't all win the lottery, every day. Life is often, one major disappointment after another.
 
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The RNG isn't stupid, it's just terribly bare bones. There are many ways in which meat could be added to those bones.

For starters, they should remove random weapon special effects, & make them obtainable only via tbe calling in of favours.

Secondly, it should be possible to use the favour mechanic to tweak other aspects of an upgrade.

Thirdly, material quality should be a factor in upgrade outcomes (if the material you use is 'rarer' than the one being asked for).

Fourthly, getting the same engineer to upgrade the same ship, multiple times, should start to shift upgrades more in the player's favour.

Lastly, favours should be useable to recover one or more materials when you trash an upgrade (recycling).
 
The RNG isn't stupid, it's just terribly bare bones. There are many ways in which meat could be added to those bones.

For starters, they should remove random weapon special effects, & make them obtainable only via tbe calling in of favours.

Secondly, it should be possible to use the favour mechanic to tweak other aspects of an upgrade.

Thirdly, material quality should be a factor in upgrade outcomes (if the material you use is 'rarer' than the one being asked for).

Fourthly, getting the same engineer to upgrade the same ship, multiple times, should start to shift upgrades more in the player's favour.

Lastly, favours should be useable to recover one or more materials when you trash an upgrade (recycling).

special effects aren't exactly random, youc an for soem ranking buy them basically, but the basic randomness is whats the worst.
 
I'd point out that in the real world, high tech engineering processes are also often rolls of dice for the extra edge. Take CPU chipsets for example. The intel i3, i5, and i7 all are built the exact same way in batches. However they each have - by accident - different heat tolerance and other properties because at that scale of things it is hard to have exact results, and are later sorted according to their quality. That could be the same thing at work here.
 
special effects aren't exactly random, youc an for soem ranking buy them basically, but the basic randomness is whats the worst.

The RNG on grade 5s were toned down and mostly give good results so it isn't an issue. It took me 2 days to farm all the materials I need to buy the ship (FAS in this case) and mod it out with above normal limit rolls. This is a total non issue unless you go there with 1 or 2 rolls and expect the best roll possible.
 
I'd point out that in the real world, high tech engineering processes are also often rolls of dice for the extra edge. Take CPU chipsets for example. The intel i3, i5, and i7 all are built the exact same way in batches. However they each have - by accident - different heat tolerance and other properties because at that scale of things it is hard to have exact results, and are later sorted according to their quality. That could be the same thing at work here.

Yeah... not all things come out the same even in mass production.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4sLDvMlfMs
 
special effects aren't exactly random, youc an for soem ranking buy them basically, but the basic randomness is whats the worst.

Yes, I know they allowed people to "buy" them with favours. My point is that it should be the ONLY way to get special effects. I've only once gotten a special effect randomly, & I turned it down.....'cause it felt like I was cheating ;).
 
The RNG on grade 5s were toned down and mostly give good results so it isn't an issue. It took me 2 days to farm all the materials I need to buy the ship (FAS in this case) and mod it out with above normal limit rolls. This is a total non issue unless you go there with 1 or 2 rolls and expect the best roll possible.

Some of the blueprints are ridiculously bad. And the RNG ranges in general are still too large. I'm happy with the RNG representing manufacturing tolerances but there's a reason that there's legislation ensuring that when a company claims to produce 100g chocolate bars that each and every bar has to fall within a normal distribution. I went and put a G4 Overcharged PP upgrade over a G1 Overcharged recently and it was worse in all categories! That's just dumb.

Yes, I know they allowed people to "buy" them with favours. My point is that it should be the ONLY way to get special effects. I've only once gotten a special effect randomly, & I turned it down.....'cause it felt like I was cheating ;).

Nope special effects would be more special if they were random. Part of the problem with stupid meta-build war is that FD broke down to the demands that people be allowed to choose them, hence we now have stupid heat builds, corrosion builds, phase builds. The only good part was that they allowed people to remove special effects because some of them are just plain bad (hello inertial impact).
 
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OP has gone but I'd bet my hat that they had done a roll with the same mod at either level 4 or level 5 which means the positive bar is smaller as the start point is further to the right. Then doing a level 5 and wondered why it went negative when instead of a 20<->40% positive the option was -15%<->5% chance.
 
The RNG is absolutely stupid, wasting some rolls on all negative effects, how immersive and realistic is that? Simple answer...it isnt at all. Noone in their right mind would pay for a negative upgrade and no engineer in the world(galaxy) would put their name to a negative upgrade. Okay FD, its time to remove some of this RNG from items it doesnt work with, fine if you want it, but at least make the main upgrade result only slide in the positive otherwise whats the point?

In what way were your upgrades negative?
RNG doesn't like me, but I never encountered that.

Or were you just redoing a role?
Every role starts from zero.
Otherwise every next role for the same modification would always improve the modification until it reaches max, which would just be a weird mechanic in this setup.
We all would want that of course. We would then simply reroll a few times and stack the rolls until we are all maxed out.
 
OP has gone but I'd bet my hat that they had done a roll with the same mod at either level 4 or level 5 which means the positive bar is smaller as the start point is further to the right. Then doing a level 5 and wondered why it went negative when instead of a 20<->40% positive the option was -15%<->5% chance.

I agree.
I am 100% sure you are right.
 
There needs to be a lot more "science" involved with the upgrades. It also should not be possible for a poor G5 upgrade to basically be on par with a great G4 upgrade. Which if I am to be entirely critical, is not too far from how it stands.
We should be able to adjust blue-prints to manipulate outcomes, different materials for different attributes rather than jus throwing them all into an industrial blender and hitting the on switch.

The concept of pre-paying is interesting too. If I consult a mechanical engineer on a project, I will pay them once they have served their purpose and not a minute earlier. If that engineer comes to me with a product that is not fit for purpose they will not be paid for their services until it is. This is just a simple fact of life. How Fdev seen fit to structure this game mechanic as they have is entirely contrived IMO.
 
Every recipe needs need solid guaranteed result with RNG elements for bonuses only
There is nothing more annoying about the whole rng thing than having to spend multiple g5 rolls just to get an slight improvement over a g3 mod currently on your module
 
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