News Content Recap - Beyond Chapter One Livestream (23.01.2018) - Part 3 Recap

I am confused here, I don't know about you guy, but my definition of a good roll is getting near 100% of the primary effect, an excellent roll is about 80% to 100% primary effect plus a secondary effect that boost that, and best roll is getting near the top on primary, plus big boost with the secondary. Now the best you will get is 100% on primary, which is ok, but I will keep what I have now and try to get more before the update.
Need clarification here, I am not speaking about special effect, that occurs only on guns. Take shield booster as an example, we can get 65% bonus now with secondary effect, without, it will go to 56% max.
 
Couple of questions here:

1. If I've unlocked an engineer to G5 on a few mods, with the new system should I bring another ship along for upgrading - do I still retain the G5 access? So.. in a way I wouldn't have to go through the grind of upgrading through 1 to 4 for the same type of mod?

2. COVAS - In association with HCS (and I understand there's no celebrity voices) can I use the voice packs I already have with the Beta - i.e. I have Eden already, can I select that voice as an option?

V2k.
 
30 ships, 30 FSD's...

Currently, G5 long range needs 3 materials each. Assume 3 rolls per FSD per ship, that's 270 materials.

In the future, to get a good G5 roll (I'll just assume 3 rolls), and 3 rolls to get to the next tier... That's 1080 materials if I did that correctly to upgrade 30 FSD's. And that's assuming 3 rolls on the G5 gets you a sufficient range improvement.

I don't see how it's 'ultimately easier' to get all the mats. Time will tell how this will play out, but as it stands now, it will absolutely require more time to collect all the necessary materials. Unless they plan to up the mission rewards and prevalence of materials/data, I'm looking at you Datamined wake exceptions, then I worry this is going to turn more people away from engineering than bringing people into it.

For the person with one ship, great, it's likely going to be quicker, but as you amass more ships, the grid is going to get exponentially worse.

How many would you need on the current version for 30 good fsd rolls? 1000 enough? 10000? Down to luck right?
 
I'm very disappointed by the changes in engineering. Basically the RNG layer was transformed into a thick layer of extra grind. And then even more grind was added by the materials broker because materials will be traded up at unfavourable exchange rates.

Also the absurd level of powercreep caused by the engineers was not addressed at all. Engineered combat remains broken both PvE and PvP. (And it still looks cartoonesque.)
 
30 ships, 30 FSD's...

Currently, G5 long range needs 3 materials each. Assume 3 rolls per FSD per ship, that's 270 materials.

In the future, to get a good G5 roll (I'll just assume 3 rolls), and 3 rolls to get to the next tier... That's 1080 materials if I did that correctly to upgrade 30 FSD's. And that's assuming 3 rolls on the G5 gets you a sufficient range improvement.

I don't see how it's 'ultimately easier' to get all the mats. Time will tell how this will play out, but as it stands now, it will absolutely require more time to collect all the necessary materials. Unless they plan to up the mission rewards and prevalence of materials/data, I'm looking at you Datamined wake exceptions, then I worry this is going to turn more people away from engineering than bringing people into it.

For the person with one ship, great, it's likely going to be quicker, but as you amass more ships, the grid is going to get exponentially worse.

It is ultimately easier because (a) You won't have to ditch mats & data so often, as there is now a 100 per mat/data limit; (b) It will be easier to gain the specific mats/data you want, as you can trade your "useless" mats/data for ones you actually want; (c) your collector limpets can now be filtered to only pick up the mats you want. Oh, I'm sorry, did my facts get in the way of your whinge?
 
Couple of questions here:

1. If I've unlocked an engineer to G5 on a few mods, with the new system should I bring another ship along for upgrading - do I still retain the G5 access? So.. in a way I wouldn't have to go through the grind of upgrading through 1 to 4 for the same type of mod?

2. COVAS - In association with HCS (and I understand there's no celebrity voices) can I use the voice packs I already have with the Beta - i.e. I have Eden already, can I select that voice as an option?

V2k.

Regarding the engineering, no and yes. Your rep isn't going to decay, but you have to work through G1-G5 for every module. You can't turn up with a stock module and go straight to G5.
 
Why is it that as dev's of a great game you are so hell bent on bandaiding deeper issues and in the process hurting a portion of the player base. Make a way to get credits faster if you have elite of any kind so that we can do other things in the game that we actually enjoy. I have several friends and fellow pvpers that have uninstalled and i can't blame them. We don't log into the game to go spend 3 days grinding credits for rebuys( because in our world the games actually dangerous and not elite carebears). I and maybe not all of the pvpers but most want to do combat. We log in even after getting the middle finger every patch from the devs to pvp. We get on forumns and take bashings and getting trash talked because we play how we want to play and yet again you bandaid the real problem of grinding credits? Have you guys ever wondered why so many people flock to these "exploits" which i call fdev screwups? Could it be because we bought the game to play it how we want? No couldn't be we have to do what you guys want us to do. I'm not mad about the fact you suspended credit grinds(which was still a major grind to get anyhwhere substantial to tide you over until the next one). I am mad because you guys never actually fix the problem. Why is board hopping still a thing? Why is task killing still a thing? I've had people combat logging or task killing against me in combat for a long time ago and you never fix it or take any action against it. But you suspend missions because of people doing it. For the love of god listen to your player base (the massive amount of commanders flocking to these "exploits") and implement a better way to make credits that is atleast 60 mil an hour capable of. If you don't you will lose the player base that are doing these things because they are doing it for a reason to play the game the way they want. I recently took a 3 month break i decided to come back then i see engineering changes, thats going to make my 3000+ g5 rolled modules obsolete. Then the only way to make credits relatively quick so that i can go pvp, die, rebuy, repeat. Not everyone plays the game the way others do. Stop flipping us the bird and actually FIX THE PROBLEM! or my next break will be the final break. I love the game it's amazing when there's ways to make credits like quince and smeaton orbital. Making credits faster isn't making me not log into the game seeing that i use everyone of these and i still play 35+ hrs a week depending on weekend plans. Also if someone progresses faster and gets an anaconda, they are going to have to rebuy that anaconda because of lack of skill. Let them do what they want, they will learn the hard way. If anyone doesn't like this post feel free to message me in game and feel free to meet me in the haz rez in San Tu, I welcome it.

What are you talking about, this is thread about livestream. People are hyped about new content and you bring the same whining we've been listening for years now, seriously?
 
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It is ultimately easier because (a) You won't have to ditch mats & data so often, as there is now a 100 per mat/data limit; (b) It will be easier to gain the specific mats/data you want, as you can trade your "useless" mats/data for ones you actually want; (c) your collector limpets can now be filtered to only pick up the mats you want. Oh, I'm sorry, did my facts get in the way of your whinge?
Heya Marc_Hicks I can see your sarcasm knows no bounds.
So, the number of rolls I'd need to do that compared to the 5 (at most) per module at the moment is monstrous. I don't need to trade my 'useless' mats, I dump 'em and go get the few (see that 'FEW) that I need.
Under the new system, nothing is useless, I'll need all grades of mats all the time on every ship for every set rolls. thousands of materials all told. I don't see how this can be easier.

Sorry, did the maths get in the way of your air of smugness?
 
Awesome stuff guys, material space and the traders thats just what I dreamt about. I have mixed feelings about the engineers changes but I am willing to give it a chance, especialy after seeing Sandro's enthusiasm :). Galnet audio is a nice touch, I hope it will bring more people to it and we will have more articles again ;-)
 
Perhaps you missed my earlier response, up to 5 G5 rolls. I'm not interested in 'God rolls'

In that case, have we seen the numbers of the new rolls vs the old ones? Do you need a G5 now to get the same as a G5 before?

Maybe a G4 or G3 will give you a ballpark bang for buck, since you’re not interested in God rolls.
 
In that case, have we seen the numbers of the new rolls vs the old ones? Do you need a G5 now to get the same as a G5 before?

Maybe a G4 or G3 will give you a ballpark bang for buck, since you’re not interested in God rolls.
The top end of a 5 under the new system is at the god roll level, the lower 5s will still be better than 4s. Honestly, my best bet is to rush my engineering now before I have to grind every level on every module.
 
I am a touch miffed about the decision to stick with the through-tier upgrading process. It reeks of artificially lengthening a process that is already fairly lengthy and not even all that rewarding (since power creep has made engineered modules the new baseline), and goes out of its way to screw people who operate multiple ships, or trade in ships frequently, like me. I have a mostly upgraded Anaconda, Python, Fer-de-Lance, DBX, Imperial Courier, Imperial Eagle and Sidewinder, plus am planning to acquire a Chieftain and Krait once they become available. My current crop have upgraded critical systems for my play style (drives, FSD, reactor, shield gen, boosters, plus between two and eight weapons, more if I am experimenting with builds). I am nowhere near being an extreme example, I have merely played casually since the Standard Beta and haven't even interacted with the engineers until after 2.2.03. I have around six hundred million in total assets to my name, mostly in ships, acquired by just messing around and doing whatever I felt like. Point is, I'm not by any means a hardcore player.

Upgrading that under the old system took me less than two hundred rolls in total (since I already have most of the engineers unlocked and levelling up with them can be done in a dozen or so rolls anyway. Under the new system, assuming the current statistical distribution of upgrades holds (average of four to six rolls per level, judging by the video) it would take me, assuming a perfect streak of god rolls, about a thousand upgrades, and more likely upwards of six thousand to achieve the same level of enhancement plus or minus a few hundred, and that's for partial system upgrades, not all-module upgrades, and not counting hull tank upgrades needed for fighting Thargoids or soloing wing mission NPCs. That means I'd be looking at an investment of between fifteen and thirty thousand units of materials, depending on an upgrade's exact requirements and the luck of the draw, not counting extra materials needed for trading, CGs, or the new tech broker, who draws from the same pool. And yes, I know my current modules will be transferred to the new system unchanged, but that's not the point, the point is comparing a bad system to an even worse one.

So tell me, how exactly is this fair to players who choose to, as the ever-so-obnoxious marketing materials put it, play their own way and blaze their own trail? There is only one group of players who benefit from this, the sort of people who, immediately upon starting a new Jameson simply grind passenger missions for twenty hours straight, park their rears in an Anaconda and never fly anything else, and then quit and complain about how there's no content. The kind of player most of us can't stand, in other words. The rest of us are having at the very least five times, and under real-world conditions closer to twenty-five times the amount of grind the engineers have up until now required forced upon us for no sane reason. The condescending response given by Mr Sammarco was the worst part. "People are afraid of change." Utter tosh, we're not afraid of the new system, we're disappointed by how infuriatingly stupid the new upgrading process is, smack in the middle of what is an otherwise flawless update.

I see two solutions to the issue:

Solution 1: ditch the through-tier upgrades, let us start at the highest unlocked tier, jack up resource prices to compensate. The highest unlocked tier is the only one anyone cares about anyway, and doubling prices would make acquiring upgrade materials more deliberate without forcing players to resort to material grinding to the exclusion of all other activities.

Solution 2: ditch the rolls. They are pointless in the new system anyway. Everyone knows what they're going to get, the only uncertainty is how long it's going to take to get there, making it indistinguishable from commuting through London at rush hour. Without the upgrade percentage uncertainty of the old system, the upgrade roll is reduced to nothing more than a randomly-allocated resource cost for a fixed-percentage upgrade. So get rid of it. Give each upgrade a fixed resource cost, plus our pick of additional effects for a further cost. If you want to keep controlled, minor uncertainty, well, we already have that in every other step of the engineering process - finding materials, unlocking engineers, doing missions for both, et cetera. Half of the upgrade's attributes are locked anyway (the negative stats), would it really hurt the game that much to lock in the other half as well? I really, really don't think it would.

There is no challenge to getting engineer upgrades, no test of skill, no obstacle to overcome by mastering the game's systems, they're hard to get because they're so obnoxiously obtuse and more padded than a Tolstoy novel in an insane asylum, and that's just terrible game design. You don't even need to be a designer to know that, you just need to play the game for longer than an hour at a time once a week while doing more than just bouncing off of station walls and crashing into landing pads. Rolling dice is at least compelling when the outcome is unknown, but when it is known, it's just an unnecessary time sink. So please, please change it, or at the very least reign in the number of rolls it takes to go up a grade. Three should be the maximum, not a rare-to-the-point-of-being-unheard-of minimum.
 
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