Engineers The Engineering RNG's SERIOUSLY Need Adjustment!!!

[Zeeman]

It needs a complete rework, not adjustment. The ENTIRE FAIL-SYSTEM!

But FD have been steadfast in ignoring the community in this, and other areas including basic connectivity. Don't waste your breath on deaf ears my friend.

To be fair, I actually think there is a (roughly) 50/50 split on people for and against. Basing that on previous polls, and form memory, so happy to be corrected. I'm for an epic re-work of engineers, but, I have to keep my "devil's advocate" hat handy...

Z...

 

[Zeeman]

Yes, like we go to Engineers, to pre-order and measure up and we move the sliders to what we want, he then examines our ship and Umms and Ar's and scratches his head and Says, well son, thats gonna be difficult, in return i want 10 MEF, 25 Config componants, 15 Unexpected do dah's.

We then go away and grind his requirements out, go back, pay the dude and he fixes our Weapon/Drive/Sensor/Etc Etc.

To keep the FD desire to have us Grind, we won't ever know what he/she will randomly ask for, so no use storing stuff for instant payment!

Personally i would not mind grinding if i knew i was getting what i wanted!!!

Wadda you think??

Yes. Because - it's a game.

Secondly, and I'll try to make my case here, in a way that makes sense.

Basically, the ability to adjust sliders - and remember, moving sliders up means others go down - you can't have a perfect roll - means you actually have to put some thought into your build. Sure, a bunch of "cookie cutter" builds will pop up on Reddit and these forums, and wherever else, but... In the same way as Valentino Rossi had different settings to Maverick Viñales in the Movistar Yamaha MotoGP bikes for the last race weekend, because they have different styles, the "cookie cutter" build probably won't suit your style as well as it could.

I favour speed and manoeuvrability in my combat builts, other may prefer stronger shields, or more firepower, or cooler running... or whatever.

My point is this - if I can adjust the sliders myself, I can then actually think about my build. I can adjust the sliders based on my long term plan - if I get it wrong, it's on me, and you know what? I am happy to man up and take it on the chin when I get it wrong. In my real life work, I'll take it on the chin if I screwed up, and I'll do what needs to be done to fix it. Int he same way, if I need to re-roll because I got it wrong, I'll happily do it.

I can then set up my ship to actually suit me exactly - and it becomes a matter of skill. The Vulture, and FDL were excellent examples of this pre engineers. Speed/ shields, firepower - pick two. It was awesome. That was fun. I spent a long time getting my Vulture right, squeezing every last bit of power out of it to get the absolute most out of it. It required skill, thought, and honesty in terms of your skills and weaknesses.

RNG removes this, and just makes it a slot machine. It introduces more variation, yes - perhaps, but removes skill, and more importantly, fun.

Now, finally, you can still throw in the current "bonuses" (positive and negative) if you want to keep some variation.

Z...

 

[CMDR Ahab]

One thing I do hope the people clamouring for user adjustable sliders (of which I'm not one, I'm fine with it like it is) have realised. If they get introduced, on that day every single piece of 'God rolled' gear they own and a lot of the gear with rolls that people just consider to be decent will be lost and they'll be starting again.

Reason being, as soon as you have sliders that work on 'increase Y but decrease Y' a hell of a lot of the combinations people will have now simply won't be possible and there's no way FDev can go forward with players who own gear with stats that another player would find it literally impossible to match due to the new system.

If anybody doubts that, it's exactly what they did when they changed the parameters of some of the weapon mods - anything you had was automatically changed so that the proportions of the old roll fitted the new ranges, but you couldn't even do that with a slider based system taking the place of the rng.

Just as one very low value example, I have a grade 1 overcharged powerplant on one ship, can't even remember which but I just needed a tiny increase to overall juice on it, might be my FAS. Anyway that was a pretty cool roll (literally) because despite the changes to values that you can get with a grade one overcharged power plant being 2-12% increase in power output with the offsets being a 0-10% loss of thermal efficiency and 0-10% loss of integrity, mine has something like a 10% power output increase and actually increased thermal efficiency due to a lucky secondary.

Bring in sliders and lose the RNG that's gone. You're not going to be able to set a slider outside the maximum and minimum ranges for the attribute and there's no way I could keep that gear because it would be outside the possible parameters that a player could get for the gear from the point of the change.

I'd suggest people had a good look at their existing mods and see firstly just how many have a stat that is outside the stated parameters of the engineer upgrade due to secondaries.

Then I'd have a look at how many have rolls within about 75% of the 'best' value for two or more attributes because you'll be losing those too. If sliders allow you to increase X but correspondingly decrease Y, you won't be keeping that FSD upgrade that got a 45% optimised mass increase with only a 10% increase to power draw and a 20% mass increase. It won't be possible because to keep your optimised mass that close to the maximum, you're going to be jacking up at least one of the other two stats.

Here's the good bit. None of that can be automatically re-rolled like weapons were because some players would want to keep the mass low and take the hit on power draw, whilst others would couldn't take the power draw increase without wrecking their build and so would swallow the mass increase. FDev aren't going to argue about the 'best' way to do that, the mods will just be stripped.

Be careful what you wish for.

Well said commander, always good to see someone speaking sense on these type of threads instead of the usual old RNGineer spouting dinosaurs.

All I want is for the randomness to be reigned in a bit (should still exist but not as drastically as it does now) and to have the ability to manually add my own secondaries.

 

[Ethan Drake]

To be fair, I actually think there is a (roughly) 50/50 split on people for and against. Basing that on previous polls, and form memory, so happy to be corrected.
Z...

You count people talking on this forum, which includes the most no-lives and trolls, and forgets all the silent walkaways, which you can guess to be at least 1 speaking for 9 who don't naturally, and even then does not take into account the ones who have come to think that FD won't acknowledge the problem or change the conception.


@DelayedReality & Red Anders

Come on, Sliders don't need to have secondaries equivalents gone.


And please don't frame people not yet listened to for something consequent as dinosaurs, it's disrespectful and manipulative. The problem is not the dinosaur.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You grow fat on powercreep. The only cure is a lean diet.

 

[Red Anders]

And lastly, no, changing a slider based result to a new perameter is no different than changing an RNG one. So having to change a slider-created module is still just as easy on their part. It's literally as simple as knowing what percentages are.

Changing a single one isn't, no. However there are multiple stats which are changed with every engineer mod and as I said, the whole point of the RNG is that it allows you to roll high (or indeed low) on any or in lucky cases on all of them.

That's what you're not getting your head round - the whole point of any slider-based system is that it's effectively allocating points to attributes from a fixed pool of points. With the current system, the pool of points isn't fixed to begin with. If you take a God roll mod and change the respective attributes to their proportionate positions within the ranges, even with anything over the maximum value being caped to the maximum for the range you will STILL have mods that could not possibly be replicated in the game from that point onwards.

The only way you could do that is if the slider based system basically let you allocate enough points to max out say three out of five stats with the other two still not needing to be minimised to offset it. It would't because that would be just nuts, but without that it will simply not be possible to change some pre-exisiting mods to match the closest equivalent (including capping rolls to the maximum of the 'normal' range) with a slider based system and fixed pool of 'improvement points' to allocate.

 

[Wasp0]

Well said commander, always good to see someone speaking sense on these type of threads instead of the usual old RNGineer spouting dinosaurs.

All I want is for the randomness to be reigned in a bit (should still exist but not as drastically as it does now) and to have the ability to manually add my own secondaries.

Just because you happen to have a different way of thought on this, as you are entitled to, does not mean other ideas or the people who have them are 'Dinosaurs'.

I hope this thread does not deteriorate to a slanging thread again forcing the mods to shut it down, we need to try convince FD that what they have is not right, not popular, not wanted or not good.

I respect the people who love the system as is, but in the absence of the good ole forum polls, alas we are not going to know if i sit on the popular side of the fence or the unpopular side of the engineering fence.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Changing a single one isn't, no. However there are multiple stats which are changed with every engineer mod and as I said, the whole point of the RNG is that it allows you to roll high (or indeed low) on any or in lucky cases on all of them.

That's what you're not getting your head round - the whole point of any slider-based system is that it's effectively allocating points to attributes from a fixed pool of points. With the current system, the pool of points isn't fixed to begin with. If you take a God roll mod and change the respective attributes to their proportionate positions within the ranges, even with anything over the maximum value being caped to the maximum for the range you will STILL have mods that could not possibly be replicated in the game from that point onwards.

The only way you could do that is if the slider based system basically let you allocate enough points to max out say three out of five stats with the other two still not needing to be minimised to offset it. It would't because that would be just nuts, but without that it will simply not be possible to change some pre-exisiting mods to match the closest equivalent (including capping rolls to the maximum of the 'normal' range) with a slider based system and fixed pool of 'improvement points' to allocate.

Why would the slider model generate the same range of improvements? That wouldn't battle the insane powercreep.

 

[Red Anders]

Come on, Sliders don't need to have secondaries equivalents gone.

It's not an opinion mate it's maths, assuming that you don't mean you want secondaries to stay as RNG.

If you have a roll now with 5 attributes changed and all those changes are within 10% of the maximum/best outcome (which is entirely possible with the current RNG system) the only way you could replicate that directly using sliders and a pool of points is if the pool of points was large enough for you to be able to allocate enough to each attribute to take it to within 10% of maximum. Obviously it wouldn't be.

If you can't do that then any conversion process would have to involve proportionate reductions to stats on some pre-rolled mods. The problem lies in the fact that with the current system, every roll effectively starts with a different number of base points due to the RNG aspect. You simply cannot apply a proportionate reduction across the board that would reduce ALL stats for EVERY mod owned by EVERY player to be wholly within the ranges.

It would be impossible to do effectively (by which I mean fairly) even if the stats for each individual player's mod were calculated manually due to the fact that it's the balance of improvements between the individual stats that's often important with engineered mods not only the individual stats viewed in isolation, let alone with the kind of automated solution that FDev would have to implement.

 

[Red Anders]

Why would the slider model generate the same range of improvements? That wouldn't battle the insane powercreep.

Well mainly because hardly anybody has suggested changing the ranges themselves - if you look at the forum 99% of the butthurt about RNG can be translated as 'I can't roll my maxed out stat monster'. In fact the OP of this thread is one prime example, sorry but he wasn't rolling 30 DD5 rolls to try to get a 'decent' increase in speed, he was trying to max it out. I've literally never rolled a DD% that wasn't significantly better than stock and nor has anybody else.

I'm not saying the ranges should or should't change, I've never given it much thought to be honest and it's a separate issue to the one I'm talking about. However if the ranges did reduce downwards, it only exacerbates the problem of automatic conversion.

 

[CMDR Ahab]

Just because you happen to have a different way of thought on this, as you are entitled to, does not mean other ideas or the people who have them are 'Dinosaurs'.

I hope this thread does not deteriorate to a slanging thread again forcing the mods to shut it down, we need to try convince FD that what they have is not right, not popular, not wanted or not good.

I respect the people who love the system as is, but in the absence of the good ole forum polls, alas we are not going to know if i sit on the popular side of the fence or the unpopular side of the engineering fence.

Sorry, yeah that was uncalled for, I apologise. I just see red everytime I hear "that" word. Nothing more to say on the matter really.

"Walks away from thread"

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Well mainly because hardly anybody has suggested changing the ranges themselves - if you look at the forum 99% of the butthurt about RNG can be translated as 'I can't roll my maxed out stat monster'. In fact the OP of this thread is one prime example, sorry but he wasn't rolling 30 DD5 rolls to try to get a 'decent' increase in speed, he was trying to max it out. I've literally never rolled a DD% that wasn't significantly better than stock and nor has anybody else.

I'm not saying the ranges should or should't change, I've never given it much thought to be honest and it's a separate issue to the one I'm talking about. However if the ranges did reduce downwards, it only exacerbates the problem of automatic conversion.

It's very unlikely to happen. All the hours spent would be lost. One thing is wasting time by design - a totally different thing is wasting time deliberately.

As much as I'd want to see Engineers and their stupid powercreep be burned to the ground - it's been too long around and would screw players really over. The low number of hardcore engineer haters like me don't matter in that picture.

 

[b101uk]

I'm very familiar with this. I ride motorcycles, and I spent a bit of time tuning my CBR954RR for the track many years back. I invested in a full titanium exhaust system. Now, the stock CBR954RR produced about 130-136 rear wheel BHP. Note that gap... It's not even 5%.

Now, with the particular race exhaust in question (Arata Full Titanium system), with a programmable ECU add on, reached between 146-151 rear wheel brake horsepower. Mine hit 149.3 - still quite respectable by modern standards, considering it's a 2003 machine. Again, that's about 5%...

See where I'm going with this? If I'm going to be putting in potentially tens of hours, for heavens sake, don't make me regret it, it just "urinates" me off as a player, and makes me really resent the game.

Heck, everyones favourite comparison, the overclocking of CPU's, even then, you are not hitting anywhere near the tolerance differences that this game does.

Z...

we are NOT talking about states of tune from mere bolt-on external trinkets and very modest other changes, we are talking about significant increases, the equivalent of pushing your CBR954RR to well over >220hp at the rear wheel, where if you were unlucky and your bike had e.g. piston/bore gaps that were the smallest allowed by the manufactures tolerance, which would give it a long life potential at its normal state of tune, it would curtail its potential significantly and risk the engine detonating/seizing, because there would not be the room for piston expansion from the extra significant heat loading from all the extra power being produced, on the other hand if your piston/bore gaps were the largest allowed by the manufactures tolerance, then you could reach a much higher potential before reaching the same point of detonation/seizing, but to the layman the engines are the "same", but to the engineer/performance engine tuner/race team they are NOT and very small changes can make a huge difference between an engine that will last just a few mins at that power to one that will last many hundreds or even thousands of hours at that power.

 

[Zeeman]

Changing a single one isn't, no. However there are multiple stats which are changed with every engineer mod and as I said, the whole point of the RNG is that it allows you to roll high (or indeed low) on any or in lucky cases on all of them.

That's what you're not getting your head round - the whole point of any slider-based system is that it's effectively allocating points to attributes from a fixed pool of points. With the current system, the pool of points isn't fixed to begin with. If you take a God roll mod and change the respective attributes to their proportionate positions within the ranges, even with anything over the maximum value being caped to the maximum for the range you will STILL have mods that could not possibly be replicated in the game from that point onwards.

The only way you could do that is if the slider based system basically let you allocate enough points to max out say three out of five stats with the other two still not needing to be minimised to offset it. It would't because that would be just nuts, but without that it will simply not be possible to change some pre-exisiting mods to match the closest equivalent (including capping rolls to the maximum of the 'normal' range) with a slider based system and fixed pool of 'improvement points' to allocate.

This has already been dealt with, you can still have bonuses, but on the positive side, you don't end up with waste of time rolls.

Z...

 

[CMDR Cylixx]

As much as I'd want to see Engineers and their stupid powercreep be burned to the ground - it's been too long around and would screw players really over. The low number of hardcore engineer haters like me don't matter in that picture.

I kind of agree there, but dude, I have god rolls galore. It would not faze me at all to have all of those mods balanced and log in to find all my ships are running at 200% power use. The ONLY reason I have settled on these god rolls, is because they are OP, and so the rest of the ship is built around them in order to get the most out of them - this to me is fundamentally broken - the whole experience of it has been a complete chore and a waste of time anyway. All my efforts and hopes about making my own unique builds get shoved into the corner to make way for builds that maximize the utility of whatever the RNG gives me. While it has sucked, upgrading the ship has been really fun, and I would gladly do it all again - lose my OP mods - if I could just be given an element of control to make the builds I actually want.

edit* RNGineers as they are is literally satanism and we need to stop it.

 

[fossil]

OK so prob threads already exist on this. IDC!

The Engineering RNG's need adjusting badly. Given the amount of time investment for collecting the mats for G5 Rolls, they especially need adjustment.

I find it pretty ridiculous that out of 2 full weekends (around 48+ full hours of game time) of gathering extremely rare mats for around 100 rolls on Rapid Mods for Pulse Lasers, I received ONE roll that was borderline acceptable. ONE!! That ONE wasnt even very impressive!! That doesnt even take into consideration the fact that I spent nearly 3 full hours on the surface of a planet with a Technetium droprate of 1.4% without a single drop!! (This nonsense also needs adjustment)

That was nearly a month ago. Moving On..

This past week's episode of Engineering for Failz, included about 10 hours of gathering mats to roll G5 Dirty Drives. Lo and Behold I needed 1 decent G5 Dirty roll on a 5A Thruster Package. Out of 30 rolls, not a single acceptable roll. NOT ONE!! Oh but that @55hole Palin was more than willing to be more than generous with the useless Integrity Secondary Effects. Fully 80% of the rolls were contaminated with this unwanted huge waste of time and materials. The Integrity Secondary Effect needs to be significantly trimmed in its frequency across all modules. If I was interested in Integrity, there is a "Strengthening" or "Shielded" Modification category that boasts specifically that. (Perhaps I should spend the time gathering mats for Integrity and will receive the Multiplier & DPS enhancements that I seek).

I am not demanding guarantees for God/Banger rolls here. But, is it honestly too much to ask that the RNG's that are dependent upon RNG's that are dependent upon RNG's to be adjusted to be more rewarding for the arduous time and effort that goes into trying to modify our ships' modules to our preferences? Not even the early iterations of the Monster Hunter series were this kind of restrictive on giving up the goods!!

I am sorry for the rant, fellow Commanders. This is a frustration that has been brewing within me for sometime, and is directly aimed at the Developers. This issue needs to be addressed. This masterpiece of a game is a huge grind, and equally a time-sink. I have put my time in (Over 2600 hours), I avoid exploits (Monetary & Engineering), I am usually willing to help friendlies wherever that I encounter them (especially the New Players), enjoy all of the aspects of this masterpiece, and I am sure that it will continually become more thrilling as time passes.

Despite the minor cathartic effect that this rant serves to my personal interests (and hopefully many others, as well), I hope that it will be interpreted appropriately as feedback and motivation to the Developers to improve this essential aspect of an amazing game.

I have found few things, within Elite Dangerous, that are as satisfying as having a ship that has been successfully engineered to your particular preferences, strategies, and (of course) Objectives.


I Thank You All for your time, attention, and resulting replies.

CMDR J.Dubs

I have an instant cure for you.....

Reduce your opinion of "acceptable".

You are basically moaning because your definition of "acceptable" is beyond a reasonable expectation. Accept it. You have only yourself to blame.

The best results are generally obtained by people who are prepared to put the time in - are prepared to work at it. The game rewards that effort. If you don't think its worth it just don't do it. It really is that simple.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

I have an instant cure for you.....

Reduce your opinion of "acceptable".

You are basically moaning because your definition of "acceptable" is beyond a reasonable expectation. Accept it. You have only yourself to blame.

The best results are generally obtained by people who are prepared to put the time in - are prepared to work at it. The game rewards that effort. If you don't think its worth it just don't do it. It really is that simple.

Playing without engineers is just as unfun, because the spawns don't take that decision into account and happily throw pimpships at you. It just became tedious to fight enemies. A whole aspect of the game that was fun before gone to waste.

 

[Alexander the Grape]

I have an instant cure for you.....

Reduce your opinion of "acceptable".

My own personal definition of "acceptable" means exactly sweet adams when some exploiter/luckster is on my tail at 3km in a heavier ship but is gaining on me due to god-rolled drives

You are basically moaning because your definition of "acceptable" is beyond a reasonable expectation. Accept it. You have only yourself to blame.

The best results are generally obtained by people who are prepared to put the time in - are prepared to work at it. The game rewards that effort. If you don't think its worth it just don't do it. It really is that simple.

Nope, the best results are those who exploited (and there are plenty of exploits that went unbanned).

That or those who got obscenely lucky

 

[avow555]

Engineers is totally rubbish.

 

[xondk]

OK so prob threads already exist on this. IDC!

The Engineering RNG's need adjusting badly. Given the amount of time investment for collecting the mats for G5 Rolls, they especially need adjustment.

I find it pretty ridiculous that out of 2 full weekends (around 48+ full hours of game time) of gathering extremely rare mats for around 100 rolls on Rapid Mods for Pulse Lasers, I received ONE roll that was borderline acceptable. ONE!! That ONE wasnt even very impressive!! That doesnt even take into consideration the fact that I spent nearly 3 full hours on the surface of a planet with a Technetium droprate of 1.4% without a single drop!! (This nonsense also needs adjustment)

That was nearly a month ago. Moving On..

This past week's episode of Engineering for Failz, included about 10 hours of gathering mats to roll G5 Dirty Drives. Lo and Behold I needed 1 decent G5 Dirty roll on a 5A Thruster Package. Out of 30 rolls, not a single acceptable roll. NOT ONE!! Oh but that @55hole Palin was more than willing to be more than generous with the useless Integrity Secondary Effects. Fully 80% of the rolls were contaminated with this unwanted huge waste of time and materials. The Integrity Secondary Effect needs to be significantly trimmed in its frequency across all modules. If I was interested in Integrity, there is a "Strengthening" or "Shielded" Modification category that boasts specifically that. (Perhaps I should spend the time gathering mats for Integrity and will receive the Multiplier & DPS enhancements that I seek).

Ok, replying to your main post only, I flat out refuse to believe that 30 rolls didn't give one usable roll, I'd absolutely love to see those 30 rolls, because frankly the problem often is people's expectations, if it is better then what you had previously then it is 'acceptable' if it isn't what you want, that is an entirely different factor, and my experience says that people want the best rolls or nothing at all, when any roll better then what you have is generally a great improvement. So yeah...while I understand your frustration, what was your expectations, what rolls did you get? did you have G4? and the G5 wasn't better in all aspects? that is what happens?