That solves very little, the secondaries are what people roll for.
Sandro Sammarco: Each Engi upgrade/roll will be better than the next
- Thread starter her3sy
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That solves very little, the secondaries are what people roll for.
That solves a ton! Okay, still using DD5's as an example, people want improved optimal multiplier and improved optimal mass numbers primarily. The problem currently, is to achieve a godroll, you need both the slider to be max, AND to get the secondary you want. The best possible optimal multiplier secondary is around 9%. But if you get that 9% secondary on a 125% instead of a 130% roll the difference is huge. Popping those numbers into my pvp FDL is a boost difference of 30 m/s and a ton of maneuverability.
This new system essentially takes the primary roll out of the equation after the few rolls so -all- you have to worry about is the secondary. It will make achieving the rolls you want sooo much easier.
As far as the "but then eventually everyone will have the best rolls" goes, eventually that was going to happen anyway. After all nobody keeps a worse roll, they throw it out. So ratcheting rolls just speeds up something the player was already doing manually.
The point of Engineers was never supposed to be "get a god roll that you can lord over the unlucky/less persistent plebs". The point was supposed to be customization, something that can be achieved without any RNG at all as long as there are some meaningful choices to make.
Current RNGneers uses the RNG to hide the fact that most of the time there are no meaningful choices, just a single upgrade on each module that you want to roll as high as possible.
I'd rather have no RNG at all, but instead have a variety of viable choices that have enough meaningful tradeoffs that the answer to "which mod should I get?" is "That depends, what do you want to do?"
The point of Engineers was never supposed to be "get a god roll that you can lord over the unlucky/less persistent plebs". The point was supposed to be customization, something that can be achieved without any RNG at all as long as there are some meaningful choices to make.
Current RNGneers uses the RNG to hide the fact that most of the time there are no meaningful choices, just a single upgrade on each module that you want to roll as high as possible.
I'd rather have no RNG at all, but instead have a variety of viable choices that have enough meaningful tradeoffs that the answer to "which mod should I get?" is "That depends, what do you want to do?"
No. The bonus is additive, not multiplicative, the best bonus you can gt is 12%, the best slider you can get is 30%, currently, rolling a top slider is not the issue, we can do that all day long, the problem is the 12% bonus being rarer than rocking horse poo.
If that's true, (the math works out the same way either way, capping at out around 142%) now you will only have to roll for the 12% instead of worrying about getting your 12% secondary on a 125% roll.
If longevity of PvE upgrading enjoyment is the issue here, could you perhaps draw comfort from the idea that everyone could once again have not just one max-specced ship, but a whole stable of them?
I mean, from 1.0 to 2.0 it was taken for granted that, with enough creds, you'd have a variety of A-ranked ships, one (or more) for each task relevant to you.
With 2.1, that went out of the window. I have spent hundreds of hours of upgrading to make one apex RNGineered ship, which has never even had one single god roll (so isn't really 'apex' even after all that). Morbad has posted on here that with thousands of hours of RNGineering he has just two high-end ships.
With these changes, admittedly (I hope) one apex ship should be reasonably easy to make but cannot the longevity be found in making many?
Well now I'm starting to feel bad having rolled that the very first DD5 attempt.
I'm not at home at the moment but IIRC it had some downsides on the other variables but still an excellent roll. Now do I waste time/mats to improve? Or roll a different drive or save for a different ship?
These choices make it interesting in my opinion.
With the progressive system everybody could get that eventually and in reality within a fixed number of rolls. No compromises would have to be taken as you progressively get there and then just keep rolling to improve the secondaries. This negates the hard laborious task to achieve these, if you want them. They were meant to be rare and hard to achieve and I don't find any of the mats that hard other than Cadmium(I'm throwing PI's out)so if anything I would go with a market but I'm fine the way it is. You want a god roll well it's hard to do or just plain lucky. I would rather not see min/maxed ships trivialized.
Some people win the Lotto others work hard to get there, such is life.
And what is better anyway? If I'm planning on ramming I could be rolling for heavy. How do you address that?
From an engineering standpoint well it's pretty dumb but it's a game.
Leave as is or a market would be my vote.
Mate. You complain on bug reports when people make too many credits from missions.
Why is it you love one kind of grind and not others?
Not sure about that.
I suspect that the vast majority of players have some idea of what a reasonable outcome will be, make a handful of rolls and then accept the first roll which meets their expectations.
Conversely, there's a small number of players who obsess over engineering and will make hundreds of rolls until they get that "god-roll".
The thing is, once those people get that "god-roll", that's what they're going to apply to their module and call it a day.
With an incremental system, they're still going to be chasing that "god-roll" but then they can also make incremental improvements to it.
Fundamentally, it'll either be a case of accepting any initial roll and then building on it incrementally or it'll be a case of rejecting an initial roll and starting again to obtain a better initial roll.
People will figure out which method is more efficient and use that method - and then they'll continue to build on the result incrementally.
The end result will almost certainly be an even larger imbalance between the players who accept a "reasonable" roll and those who pursue upgrades relentlessly.
Firstly, I think the imbalance will reduce - perhaps vastly - but I won't repeat myself on that.
Secondly, I see no reason to believe that the blueprints' hard maxima will change and by definition a god roll is touching or within a sliver of the absolute hard cap already. A god roll by definition won't be able to go up by much, at all.
Turning to your underlying concern, though, I'm not really sure what the hypothetical scenario is within which your concern manifests itself.
If you're talking about a gank: civilian goes to CG, gets pulled by pack of FdL's ... you can bet your bottom dollar that those FdL's are almost certainly within a few % of max spec on all key PvP modules already. We've been doing this since April 2016, any serious PvP-er's main ship is already upgraded to the hilt. Newer guys are led by the hand through the RNGineering min/max by more established group members.
Yes, those upgrades could go up a couple of per cent, but not by much. In a 4v1 gank, honestly, that fine-tuning is just irrelevant.
If on the other hand you're talking about apex duelling, here such differences can indeed be relevant if pilots and ships are otherwise very similar, but there are very few who drag a low-grade g5 rust bucket to that type of encounter. Random casual fights yes but nothing major. Again I don't see the hypothetical situation. If you're flying a rust bucket in duelling, the odds are already stacked against you. Being 17% not 15% behind your opponent again makes little odds.
I think the real point is this: anyone who has put any effort into PvP and has been in game since before 2.1 now already has at least one really seriously rolled ship. Those things might be tuned up a little by this (mine could be) but the difference shouldn't really affect any casual player who happens to encounter a build 1.023 times better than it was before.
What this improvement should really help us / everyone to do is to make a greater variety of ships of high-spec, much more quickly than before. Personally I see it as my way to having two good PvP ships, not one. Heck, let's push the boat out. I used to have ten, before 2.1. Maybe now I can have three.
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A fair point.
I guess those who fly "normal" ships are just going to be exploded a few seconds sooner (at the hands of a player in an apex ship) as a result of the new system compared to the current one.
In practical terms, the difference probably won't even be noticeable.
I'm just not really comfortable with the divide between "normal" and "apex" increasing.
I'd rather they found a way to decrease it, somehow, without nerfing everybody's existing mod's.
I'd like to think that PvPers would like that too, since it'd make the "arms race" less of a chore.
However, being the cynical old git that I am, I suspect there are a significant number of "PvPers", more commonly known as griefers, who absolutely relish the idea of being able to crank up their PAs to 99.9999999% efficiency so they can blast defenceless ships into oblivion slightly faster.
And I'd rather not give them the satisfaction.
omigod yes this +rep
In principle, here we agree.
I'm failing to see the connection between Snoop Dogg and garage...
A fair point.
I guess those who fly "normal" ships are just going to be exploded a few seconds sooner (at the hands of a player in an apex ship) as a result of the new system compared to the current one.
In practical terms, the difference probably won't even be noticeable.
I'm just not really comfortable with the divide between "normal" and "apex" increasing.
I'd rather they found a way to decrease it, somehow, without nerfing everybody's existing mod's.
I'd like to think that PvPers would like that too, since it'd make the "arms race" less of a chore.
However, being the cynical old git that I am, I suspect there are a significant number of "PvPers", more commonly known as griefers, who absolutely relish the idea of being able to crank up their PAs to 99.9999999% efficiency so they can blast defenceless ships into oblivion slightly faster.
And I'd rather not give them the satisfaction.
I don't understand why you see it as increasing the gap?
The extent to which a module can be engineered is finite, isn't it? If so then those with god rolls will reach the finite cap sooner and those without god rolls will reach it more slowly, but ultimately everyone reaches the same cap? Maybe I missed it if FD said they will allow modules to be engineered further than the current ceiling of god rolls, but assuming that the range of results stays the same then is it not the case that there is no difference between the apex and normal under the current system or the proposed one (because the range of results is still the same all that differs is how players "climb the ladder"), or have I missed something obvious?
If it's easier for players to get better rolls within the range would that not reduce the gap as you want, or are you talking about players who never engineer at all?
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This, more so, even than the better rolls. I'll gladly take a nerf on some god rolls for some balance.
I'm not 100% sure what you mean (and this is my first MMO, so I may not have understood properly) but in essence I'm playing a game with 2.75 million online players. OK, they're not all on at once ... but I'm playing a game with an absolute mass of online strangers.
I can't control how they outfit their ships. Only the Developer can, and only then via hard caps. Everything other than a hard cap is just a time gate.
I don't want a single build advantage over anybody else except one gained via build intelligence (not pre-grind). I just don't want others to have significant pre-ground build advantages over me.
Hence, I have no choice but to RNGineer as high as possible. It's just an arms race. I didn't make it but I can't turn my back on it except by ceasing to participate in ED Open-world PvP.
It's clear from the above and other comments that you think that those in my position are doing something wrong, but I don't understand how you think we could do it right? Max-speccing isn't a philosophy, it's a fact, same as a Formula 1 team has to make their car as good as they can, or find a different sport. You say that we should get comfortable with getting rid of a concept - but if the concept is that you play a motorised sport with the best machine, I don't understand ... how?
What I would like the Developer to do is to reduce the height of the hard ceiling, or to make the hard ceiling easier to reach. Either of those reduces the time PvP-ers will need to spend on PvE acquisition. It looks like Frontier are going for the latter option.
Personally (in PvP or PvE) I think diversity should come from having a very wide range of ships and weapons, all (in their own way) really good and interesting. That is, diversity via player creativeness in how we stack the lego blocks. Non-random tools and materials, diverse outcome via diversity of human choice. Put another way, painted portraits are not random, but they're not all the same.
I don't see a random distribution (build what you want with your lego, but you have to take each piece from a bag unseen and then roll a dice to see where you can put it) as providing a diversity I personally would appreciate. Or put another way, we all like a bit of Jackson Pollock but randomised paintings soon get dull.
Furthermore, although matters have improved a little, one of the many ironies of 2.1 was that it actually reduced build diversity, as some customisations were so obviously better than others. Far from creating an interesting spread of unique ships at CG's, the RNG produced cookie-cutters by an order of magnitude more than we saw in say 1.4, under the non-random A-ranked module system.
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'Fraid not. In spite of Sam Colt supplying guns to both sides, equality was never part of the equation.
Indeed, cookie-cutter builds exist because most modules only have one mod worth taking 90% of the time.
Dirty drives for example, no other mod is worth taking on most ships. Clean drives don't provide enough heat reduction to matter (mostly because about 70% of a drive's heat generation comes from its power draw, which clean drives doesn't affect). Lightweight is pointless even on an explorer unless you're really that desperate for 0.1LY of extra range, there are much better places to shave tonnage. Shielded/Hardened, also pointless because the little extra durability they offer is not worth the drawbacks (same reason nobody uses B rated modules).
RNG doesn't do anything about that situation other than make my Imperial cookie Cutter better than your Imperial cookie Cutter because I got lucky and you didn't.
We shouldn't be using RNG as a crutch like that. Reducing RNG is at least a step in the right direction. I am a bit biased of course, I dislike RNG in general and only tolerate it where it is actually necessary. Even then, I typically build to avoid it as much as the system allows by either stacking flat bonuses or using large numbers of small dice to force results toward the average. I don't like surprises.
Dirty drives for example, no other mod is worth taking on most ships. Clean drives don't provide enough heat reduction to matter (mostly because about 70% of a drive's heat generation comes from its power draw, which clean drives doesn't affect). Lightweight is pointless even on an explorer unless you're really that desperate for 0.1LY of extra range, there are much better places to shave tonnage. Shielded/Hardened, also pointless because the little extra durability they offer is not worth the drawbacks (same reason nobody uses B rated modules).
RNG doesn't do anything about that situation other than make my Imperial cookie Cutter better than your Imperial cookie Cutter because I got lucky and you didn't.
We shouldn't be using RNG as a crutch like that. Reducing RNG is at least a step in the right direction. I am a bit biased of course, I dislike RNG in general and only tolerate it where it is actually necessary. Even then, I typically build to avoid it as much as the system allows by either stacking flat bonuses or using large numbers of small dice to force results toward the average. I don't like surprises.