Would you prefer a material broker or the suggested "always better than previous roll"

[Viking84]

Was going to create a poll (I love polls!) but it seems that is no longer an option, so I will just ask a question instead:

Assuming the Engineers implementation is going to be changed to make life easier, what would you prefer:

a) Sandro's suggested solution - every roll is better than the previous roll. I assume this to mean that regardless of what your current stats are, a new roll even at the same grade will result in an improvement, up to some maximum.

b) Leave the Engineers as they are, but implement a material broker (NPC, not player to player) where you can swap unwanted materials for those you want. This would probably entail some loss (either a 2 to 1 ratio of materials, or credits or something similar) but would allow you to acquire materials in whatever way you want. No more dumping large amounts of materials because your storage is full, just head out to the broker and start trading them in for stuff you need.

 

[Aashenfox]

Material broker please, so farming is more fun and I get more rolls. Also please address diminishing returns on resistances from HRPs and shield boosters. Also dial down the special effects. That would do it for me. I can see why pvpers who need to be able to fit optimal ships more quickly want the former, but pve has no such requirement, and is a far more important part of this game so, I'd prefer to keep the random rolls, means there's always something to aim for and always a little variation, even among meta builds.

Also material broker should be player to player trading so current intrinsic values are overwritten by players knowing for example that cif is harder to farm than cadmium. A bot would be easily abused.

 

[Stealthie]

Ideally, neither.

Material Brokers mean that people will always be able to farm something and then go and trade it for the thing they want.
If you're going to do this, you might as well just get rid of all the different mat's and just replace them with 5 generic "materials" of escalating difficulty to obtain.

Progressive engineering means that there's absolutely no chance of doing 3 or 4 rolls and getting a reasonable result.
Instead you will definitely get a mediocre result from your first few rolls and only start to get reasonable results after doing a number of rolls.
As a result, everybody will HAVE to collect sufficient mat's to do however many rolls are required to obtain a reasonable result.


What I'd really like to see is additional gameplay which yields mat's as an assured reward; missions and tip-offs in stations and directly from engineers which give you ALL the mat's required to obtain certain upgrades from a particular engineer.
For example, you get a tip-off from Felicity Farseer saying that one of her supply ships has gone mission in some system. You go to the system and locate the ship (either crashed on a planet surface or adrift in a USS), collect all the cargo and, upon delivering it to Farseer, you are rewarded with the mat's for 5 G5 rolls.

 

[GraXXoR]

No. They should just make the special effects the point of engineering..

Heat dump beam level 1-5
System Disruptor level 1-5
Corrosive ammo level 1-5 etc.
then adjust all the other stats as secondary. Energy use, heat gen, damage, weight, integrity etc.
that makes far more sense than.... Ooh look here, I was just ing around with this here rail gun and wham... you don't need ammo anymore. That was lucky.

 

[Apos]

"always better" option any day.

Sorry, but if you can't collect USS for a few minutes and have a road trip, you have a really low tolerance for actually searching for something and I dread anyone with that kind of mentality being the driving force for changes within the game. This is probably the same group of people who want the game to hand guide them to magnificent discoveries and still call them "discoveries". Most of the outliers like exquisite crystals, crack and modified embedded are also much easier available now.

There's an argument to be made about pharmaceutical insulators and chemical manipulators, but that's an issue with those materials in themselves and not the system.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick with what Sandro said. He said an upgrade will alway be better then the last upgrade. A grade 5 upgrade will always be better then a grade 4 upgrade. If you re-roll a grade 5, you are basically removing and re-rolling your upgrade. It will not necessarily be better then the upgrade you already have.

What is obvious though, is that the RNG will be reduced. Material broker I can still see being there.

 

[B1rdy]

"always better" option any day.

Sorry, but if you can't collect USS for a few minutes and have a road trip, you have a really low tolerance for actually searching for something and I dread anyone with that kind of mentality being the driving force for changes within the game. This is probably the same group of people who want the game to hand guide them to magnificent discoveries and still call them "discoveries". Most of the outliers like exquisite crystals, crack and modified embedded are also much easier available now.

There's an argument to be made about pharmaceutical insulators and chemical manipulators, but that's an issue with those materials in themselves and not the system.

I don't think I can follow you. "Searching" for materials in USSs are more like waiting for something to spawn, which applies to pharmaceutical isolators. You can barely call that activity "playing". Finding the other materials actually involves some game mechanics.

@OP: A mix of a) and b) would be cool. But the broker needs to be well balanced between material spawn rates.

 

[Lateralus]

I think there should be an alternative to RNG which would allow you to configure a specific blueprint (using the primary roll bars as sliders) depending on your rating level... If you configured a very high-level build, it would require a larger, more dynamic list of mats & data.

Least that way we would know we are definitely getting the build we want with the mats we've got...

I would prefer this over a material broker... Although player-to-player material trades could be an interesting alternative.

 

[Viking84]

I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick with what Sandro said. He said an upgrade will alway be better then the last upgrade. A grade 5 upgrade will always be better then a grade 4 upgrade. If you re-roll a grade 5, you are basically removing and re-rolling your upgrade. It will not necessarily be better then the upgrade you already have.

What is obvious though, is that the RNG will be reduced. Material broker I can still see being there.

You might be right, although I don't really think so as he specifically said "always better than what you have currently got", with no reference to grades. That said, the question still stands - do you want the engineering process changed, or the material gathering process changed?

For anyone wondering, I would prefer option b). Gathering materials is hideously dull in some cases, anything that could let me gather them by doing what I enjoy as apposed to scanning wakes, or hunting USS's that never appear, would be highly appreciated.

 

[Starbreaker]

Just give me per material storage and I'm happy.

 

[Viking84]

@OP: A mix of a) and b) would be cool. But the broker needs to be well balanced between material spawn rates.

At the moment I think the spawn rates are a bit of a mixed bag (see CIF/MEF and Pharm. Isolators). But if a broker was introduced, with a 2 to 1 ratio, then at least if any item is more than twice as hard to obtain than another item of the same rarity it would no longer be necessary and could simply be traded. This would prevent any outliers from ruining your day.

In my case I have LOTS of very rare materials. None of them are Pharmaceutical Isolators though... I imagine a system were I could trade two rare materials for one rare material that I want. Or 4 rare materials for 1 very rare material that I want. Or 16 standard materials for one very rare material that I wannt. Or... you get the picture. Factor of two internally in a material grade, or 4 between grades.

This way those who enjoy the current system will still be doing things the most efficient way. Those of us who feel a seething hatred every time we have to scan a wake will, finally, have a way to avoid this, albeit at the cost of efficiency.

 

[zverochert]

Yes. But more i will prefer both broker and Sandro's idea. But why are you talking about npc broker? Player to player material broker would be a great feature. It will impove Engineers experience much, and will add more ways of making money for newcomers.

 

[Dan Diplo]

What I'd prefer is just to increase spawn times for the rarer materials or add some more logic into locating them. The random spawn USS ones are a particular pain. There should be more than one way to get most materials. I'd also bump up storage a little, too (or at least allow you to sell materials on black market or something so you're just not throwing away stuff).

One idea I think would be nice would be to "register" what materials you are looking for and then enable factions to create missions for them. The rarer the material, the tougher the mission. The random spawn generator could also take this into account, so it knows what you are looking for and skews the RNG a little in your favour.

 

[Stealthie]

I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick with what Sandro said. He said an upgrade will alway be better then the last upgrade. A grade 5 upgrade will always be better then a grade 4 upgrade. If you re-roll a grade 5, you are basically removing and re-rolling your upgrade. It will not necessarily be better then the upgrade you already have.

The issue is more about the current range of possible improvements.

I can, for example, currently do a roll for G5 FSD range upgrade and get anything between +20% and +50%
Within a couple of rolls I'll probably get +48% or better.
With this new system, my first roll is going to get me around +20%, my next roll might get me +30%, then +35%, then +40%, then +43%, then +46%, then +48%.

You will know, for certain, that you will HAVE to do a heap of rolls to achieve what you can currently achieve with 3 or 4 rolls and a bit of luck.

People seem to be immediately saying "Yay! Down with the RNG!" without properly considering the consequences of the alternative.

You almost certainly WILL have to gather more mat's and do more rolls than is currently the case.
The only difference will be that a willingness to grind rolls will yield a better result.
Effectively forcing everybody to grind mat's, even if you currently don't.

 

[Aashenfox]

without properly considering the consequences of the alternative.

This is so symptomatic of this community.

 

[Crank Larson]

"always better" option any day.

This. What's the point in a materials broker if you then use the materials to roll worse upgrades?

With rolls only improving, I can see me spending a lot of time at the engineers. Materials are not hard to find.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Both? Why can't we have both? Or neither?

Tell me, why did we need engineered overpoweredness in the first place?

 

[Aashenfox]

At the moment I think the spawn rates are a bit of a mixed bag (see CIF/MEF and Pharm. Isolators). But if a broker was introduced, with a 2 to 1 ratio, then at least if any item is more than twice as hard to obtain than another item of the same rarity it would no longer be necessary and could simply be traded. This would prevent any outliers from ruining your day.

In my case I have LOTS of very rare materials. None of them are Pharmaceutical Isolators though...

Pharma isolators are literally the single easiest grade 5 to farm. go to an independent system in outbreak, fly up (relative to orbital plane) or down from the main star til you are between 1500 and 2000ls distant, then start watching for USSes. 50% will be HGE, and ALL will contain between 9 and 15 isolators.

 

[Crank Larson]

I think people are getting the wrong end of the stick with what Sandro said. He said an upgrade will alway be better then the last upgrade. A grade 5 upgrade will always be better then a grade 4 upgrade. If you re-roll a grade 5, you are basically removing and re-rolling your upgrade. It will not necessarily be better then the upgrade you already have.

No, if you re-roll you do not remove your current modification - that option is only provided after you have the new module parameters (so you can decide to keep it or stick with existing one). Has Sandro clarified what he meant anywhere, or are you trying to interpret what he said at the Expo?

 

[Viking84]

Pharma isolators are literally the single easiest grade 5 to farm. go to an independent system in outbreak, fly up (relative to orbital plane) or down from the main star til you are between 1500 and 2000ls distant, then start watching for USSes. 50% will be HGE, and ALL will contain between 9 and 15 isolators.

Did that for two hours straight on Saturday. Not a single HGE. Th-th-th-that's RNG folks...

Yes. But more i will prefer both broker and Sandro's idea. But why are you talking about npc broker? Player to player material broker would be a great feature. It will impove Engineers experience much, and will add more ways of making money for newcomers.

Any player to player trading is a whole different can of worms, NPC broker with fixed exhange rates (2 to 1 in same grade, 4 to 1 for one grade above) would avoid any exploits or farming and still solve the issues of forced gameplay loops.