So let me get this straight...

Probably the most ominous thing I'm seeing here is the frightening amount of PvE players who barely know what a secondary is much less what is possible on the higher end rolls, and if Fdev is listening to these people and relying on their input, it's going to be a disaster.

The following statement is basically what I meant when I wrote the above line:

PvP is very small fraction of player base.

Just to give you context to understand why FD might listen to PvE players more.

Yes Eagleboy, I'm aware of the mathematical facts of the differences between the relative size of the various player groups. Nor am I surprised by your own attitude: "I only play this game casually and I have no interest in PvP so who cares."

That's a fabulous basis upon which to develop a major cornerstone of the game.
 
Looking like weapons will be the most problematic under the new system with grandfathering. Since the old secondary effects are now in the same list to choose from with the special effects. Can only have a secondary or special, not both.

I suggested earlier that one potential solution here would be to allow two experimental effects on a module. To avoid excessive power creep, this could be limited to at most one "special" (i.e. the list of current weapon experimental effects) and one "secondary" such as reduced heat output. I'd be happy with this even if the material cost for dual effects is pretty steep.
 
I think the new system makes some significant improvements while introducing some critical issues, but on the bright side I think it's fixable.

Good points include that it's much more predictable, and the top results do seem to be better than the old system's normal range based on the limited numbers I've seen in the stream. For example, at 27m16s in the stream you can see the G5 Overcharged multicannon mod values, compared to the blueprint range on Inara: https://inara.cz/galaxy-blueprint/57/

DPS/Damage: +55% (Old: 35-45%)
Ammo clip size: -14.44% (Old: -16-25%)
Distributor draw: +35% (Old: +25-50%)
Thermal load: +13% (Old: None?)

(Edit: In case you're worried about the higher distributor draw, compare to the G4 new mod at 27:15 in the video. That has damage +48% which is better than the high end of the old G5 range (ignoring secondaries for now, but see below for that), with distributor draw +30%.)

So for bonus points, who remembers when they nerfed overcharged weapon mods including multicannons because the DPS was just too high? :D
 
PvP is very small fraction of player base.

Just to give you context to understand why FD might listen to PvE players more.

lol. You think this has anything to do with PvE players?

No we're going to get Engineering for the millenial generation. Where every roll is a winner and nobody ever loses. Here come the cookie-cutter maxed out builds with zero variety between them.

"That's excellent" said someone to that after the stream "because then PvP is about who has the most skill not the best weapon".

<sigh>

It's not for the PvE players. It's about helping those who have the need to max out their PvP builds regardless of how many clicks it takes -they just need that guarantee that they can have the same toys as the other player. You can already see them complaining about the grandfathering in this thread... "it's not fair, someone will still have an advantage boohoohooo"


Meanwhile the rest of us (WHO DON'T GIVE A FLYING FIG ABOUT PvP!) will be left with a boring, mindless grind fest to click our way to the top - should we choose. No exciting secondary roll that turns a dull result into a super one. No chance that the engineer drops a plum at the last moment and breaks a fantastic result. No, none of that variety.

Totally the wrong direction to go. We should be getting rolls that always apply to the module, so adding some risk that if it started out good it might get broken... and maybe modules should literally be broken in extreme cases.

The problem has always been, and by the looks of it remains to be finding the materials and gathering enough of them due to the dreadful spawn rates.
Driving over mile after mile of featureless planets to find the next look-a-like stone to shoot ... nope not what I need ... drive on... nope... repeat, repeat, repeat...
Flying aimlessly in deep space hoping that the right kind of USS will spawn, and if it does that it has what we're looking for... nope... keep on flying... 10, 15 minutes and this is still not the USS you are looking for....
^^THIS^^ is why people hate engineering. If there was some fun, challenge and consistency to gathering the mats - and it didn't take hours of mindlessly staring at the screen, drooling, waiting for something to happen ... well people might find it was worth doing. And if we weren't wasting hour upon hour trying to find stuff, people would care a lot less about chasing that slightly better build and risking what they currently have.

But no. FD instead of addressing the gathering issues have come to this bonkers conclusion that it's better to make the engineering part as mindless and boring as the rest of the process.

Completely the wrong way to take it, completely the wrong issue to focus on.

Oh well I guess I better go buy a load of bi-weave shields, thrusters and FSDs and G5 engineer the hell out of them until beta ends. :D
 
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The really sad part is they only need to tweak the old system. It had horrible flaws but they were fixable. Creating a entirely worse system where it's possible that there are people with advantages that can never be obtained from people who got lucky with the old system...wow.
 
It doesn't sound promising, I'll give you that.

I need to start grinding FSD drives right now from the sound of it.

I guess it's pretty clear why they're not interested in expanding module storage.

I'm not sure it's worth the effort of torturing yourself now just to try and stave off future tedium for a little while though.
Sooner or later we're all going to have to embrace the new paradigm so why fight it?

Besides, there's always the chance they might think again after release, in which case you'll kick yourself for grinding out all those G5 modules.
 
PvP is very small fraction of player base.

Just to give you context to understand why FD might listen to PvE players more.

While those that never leave Solo, and who don't participate in any abstractly competitive activities (time trial races, reaching/putting their name on distant star systems, etc) where ship performance matters, won't encounter situations where what they have relative to anyone else matters, plenty of people do just those sort of things and anyone who enters Open, or a more permissive private group, will likely encounter hostile CMDRs at some point.

PvP and PvE don't mandate separate balance considerations, and something working better in one area than the other is often indicative of a problem with both.

Here come the cookie-cutter maxed out builds with zero variety between them.

There was plenty of variety before engineers, it was just variety that had few hurdles between conceptualization and implementation. I thought of something I wanted to try, and I tried it.

With the Engineers we have now, I can conceive of something I know is well within the realm of possibility and it could take me a year or more to implement because I'm a slave to the rarity of secondaries.
 
I haven't followed the proposed changes very closely, but from what I'm hearing in this thread I'd say people who are even remotely interested in PvP have good reason to feel a chill of disquiet; if previous secondaries are grandfathered in without a means to unequivocally obtain a roll as good or better, the new system will be a major fail. To the extent that I would just uninstall the game from my hard drive kind of fail.

If it turns out that we have a means to easily obtain secondaries similar in potency to before, then crisis averted. Probably the most ominous thing I'm seeing here is the frightening amount of PvE players who barely know what a secondary is much less what is possible on the higher end rolls, and if Fdev is listening to these people and relying on their input, it's going to be a disaster.

Well, that wasn't patronising at all [rolleyes]
 
Besides, there's always the chance they might think again after release, in which case you'll kick yourself for grinding out all those G5 modules.

There's two different kinds of grind people are doing now.

I think it's fairly reasonable to do some "single G5 roll" upgrades now on a bunch of modules. The goal is to convert these to a top-of-G4 module in the new system as a shortcut for future improvements to avoid the G1-G4 grind for them. In fact, I think it's quite likely that the new top-of-G4 may well end up being better than a bad (or even average) G5 roll, so you may get an improvement even without any additional engineering. I've been doing some of this, mainly DD5 thrusters, FSDs, and PDs for existing ships, plus stored ones for future Chieftain + Corvette builds.

The other type of grind is trying to get god rolls now for grandfathering in the new system. That seems well beyond what I'm personally willing to do, especially since here there is a good chance that this will turn out to be wasted effort. It took most of my available recent gaming time just to get materials for a couple dozen rolls, doing hundreds of rolls for just one module seems crazy.

I did end up making a class 5 shield with +9% optimal mass so that it works in my Cutter which normally requires class 6, since it's unclear if this will be possible in the new system. Hey, it's 32T extra cargo capacity, why not. It took me about 30 G1 rolls to get it. Later, when outfitting my Cutter, I was surprised to see that I had two class 5 shields to choose from. Turns out the single G5 thermal resist roll I did on a different shield generator had also gotten +9% optimal mass, and I hadn't even noticed while rolling. Ah, RNG ;-)
 
I haven't followed the proposed changes very closely, but from what I'm hearing in this thread I'd say people who are even remotely interested in PvP have good reason to feel a chill of disquiet; if previous secondaries are grandfathered in without a means to unequivocally obtain a roll as good or better, the new system will be a major fail. To the extent that I would just uninstall the game from my hard drive kind of fail.

If it turns out that we have a means to easily obtain secondaries similar in potency to before, then crisis averted. Probably the most ominous thing I'm seeing here is the frightening amount of PvE players who barely know what a secondary is much less what is possible on the higher end rolls, and if Fdev is listening to these people and relying on their input, it's going to be a disaster.

Elite: Democracy
 
Good points include that it's much more predictable, and the top results do seem to be better than the old system's normal range based on the limited numbers I've seen in the stream. For example, at 27m16s in the stream you can see the G5 Overcharged multicannon mod values, compared to the blueprint range on Inara: https://inara.cz/galaxy-blueprint/57/

DPS/Damage: +55% (Old: 35-45%)
Ammo clip size: -14.44% (Old: -16-25%)
Distributor draw: +35% (Old: +25-50%)
Thermal load: +13% (Old: None?)

Normal range doesn't say much.

This is a good, not best, roll for an overcharged G5 MC in the current system:

IFLPrEk.jpg


Damage is close, but not quite better than a good damage secondary.

Distributor draw is quite good, but that's rarely an issue with MCs regardless.

Other values, like power consumption, will likely never be as good under the new system, except for efficient, lightweight, and similar mods...which is the sort of thing (secondaries unrelated to the primaries or the effect) that may well make certain modules and combinations of modules that are very useful now impossible to attain later.
 
Normal range doesn't say much.

This is a good, not best, roll for an overcharged G5 MC in the current system:

Damage is close, but not quite better than a good damage secondary.

(From the picture: that's power draw -12.7%, DPS/Damage +58.3%, distributor draw +78%, and ammo clip size -23.3%. Auto loader upgrade added on top.)

The values I quoted from the stream were base values, you can still add an experimental effect on top of that, and I think there were some available that boosted damage. For example, Multi-Servos at 19m11s adds 3% damage at the cost of 5% power draw, and that's roughly equal to the 58.3% in your screenshot.

Other values, like power consumption, will likely never be as good under the new system, except for efficient, lightweight, and similar mods...which is the sort of thing (secondaries unrelated to the primaries or the effect) that may well make certain modules and combinations of modules that are very useful now impossible to attain later.

I agree, and I think that's the core issue. In the old system you could combine a lucky secondary effect with a hand-picked experimental effect, this basically gave you two upgrades on top of the base roll. If the new system only allows a single experimental effect, it'll be hard to compete with that.

Also, I think FDev is looking too much at the core stat increase, and not the often much more important secondary effects which can negate downsides or provide other important improvements. Personally I don't care much if somebody's legacy weapon does 3% more damage, but being able to fire a super heat efficient railgun twice as often does matter a lot. Also, some of the current experimental effects are very valuable, for example feedback cascade or super penetrator on a railgun, so having to choose between that and a secondary stat improvement is tough.

Should we embrace the power creep and just allow combining multiple secondaries? I'd like a combined feedback cascade + plasma slug for PvE in small ships - I don't care as much for DPS, but being able to take down ships with SCBs without running out of ammo would be nice.
 
Frontier and feedback have a terrible history. After the nightmare stupidity of ship transfer delay they should give up.

Having said, it is a bit poor to ask and then ignore. Because they asked they have a moral obligation to at least provide their design logic behind it. Get Dav Stott to do the livestream he's not easily intimidated.
 
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