i.e. go here, do that - get rare.
Push button - get rare.
Think it through, you're just repeating what I said. It absolutely has to rely on those things or it's not rare.
Where Elite Went Wrong, or: How NOT to craft a Sandbox Experience
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Push button - get rare.
Think it through, you're just repeating what I said. It absolutely has to rely on those things or it's not rare.
There are a few more things that seem to help:
System population: The higher this is, the more likely USS seem to spawn in my experience. For some states, it's easy to find systems with high pop (boom, and Fed/Imperial control are the easiest) Others, like civil unrest, not so much.
Position: You probably know you want to be in deep space, but where in deep space you are seems to effect things. Deep space close to planets and stars seems to spawn Convoys and weapon fires a lot more. Deep space really far out seems to spawn degraded and encoded a lot but very few HGE. There seems to be a sweet spot for HGE, and depending on who you are asking it's anywhere between 800lys to 5000lys from the main star. (I don't know if it is the same if the closest object is a planet)
Speed: Speed SEEMS to effect USS spawn rate in my experience. I may be wrong about this though.
Even if you do everything right though, RNGesus may just decide you haven't earned a HGE and it can still take a long time to find them.
And all that still doesn't make up for the fact that the game forces you to do the SAME boring activity or nearly every g5 recipe with NO alternative. the mat trader might help, but the rates are not high enough to really make a difference.
Eh, I just wish I could find things as consistently as other people seem to be finding them. It's disheartening to take hours to find what people say they find in minutes. Could they be pulling my leg? Possibly, but that doesn't help my situation much.
Well, when you put it that way it really sounds stupid - job well done for making me sound like an idiot.
BUT
To me rarity of a material should not depend on a chance of getting it through completely randomized process, because you can't look under the hood and see if whatever you're doing searching for it is right.
Instead, I would rather find this material myself. Scan systems in search for planet that has a better chance of having said material. Let's call it geologically-probable.
Then, once I locate it, scanning the surface to establish area of increased material's concentration.
Then search said area by means of low-altitude, high-speed flyovers looking for it visually.
Then, and only then, should I be presented with rocks that have a chance of giving me what I need.
See the difference? If not, short summary:
Currently, the system's spine IS RNG, and it really makes it crap.
Whereas the way I see it a lot relies on player's patience and skill, which also increases with experience, then - and only then - should he be presented with RNG that should be SUPPORTING core mechanics, instead of being their backbone.
Sounds reasonable?
Yea, you seem to essentially know everything I've read about already, yet somehow a lot of twiddling still happens for me. Maybe it's confirmation bias, maybe because I find it boring to begin with, it's just automatically going to be a chore, while others don't mind it so much so the time aspect isn't something they pay attention to.
I'm fine with rare's and very rares being hard and a bit time consuming to get, but I want them to be so in an engaging way. Most very rares are only obtainable through game mechanics that would otherwise be ignored because they are tedious, poorly implemented and generally do nothing to enrich the experience of the player. That is the big issue here.
Those things don't sound like patience and skill so much as buying the right scanners then pushing the button.
Plus it sounds quite slow and people will want it to be massively quicker than that - I'd estimate what you've described there would probably on average take as long as the current search process.
This is highly subjective. We've had people arguing that exploring planets isn't valid gameplay already, let's not do that again.
That's about it. Boring and unreliable don't go well together.
How would you then change this random crap system to be somewhat more skill-based instead?
Lol, someone is going to get CPS called on themselves leaving their children in an over-crowded sandbox for too long 
My best advice, accept things for what they are. If there is only sand in your sand box, and you are bored, find something else to do. Or, being that you are a human being capable of thought, use some imagination and what you actually do have to enjoy yourself (assuming you are being held captive in a sandbox with no buckets or shovels...) Have you ever watched the artists that make sand sculptures/drawings? Some of that stuff is beyond amazing and created with very little outside the human and the sand.
Elite in my opinion is fine. It's a game. What do you want? No game out there includes every genre of game for when you get bored. GTAV may come the closest, but I cannot fly a space ship and land on foreign planets in GTAV, so I have Elite. Elite doesn't have FPS mechanics, so I have Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1 doesn't have an "arena" mode, so I have PUBG. PUBG doesn't have cool abilities, so I have Overwatch. Overwatch doesn't let me race cars, so I have Forza. Forza doesn't let me play football, so I have Madden. Madden doesn't let me slay dragons, so I have Skyrim. Skyrim doesn't let me rob banks, so I have GTAV. GTAV doesn't let me fly space ships, so I have Elite... Some days I play card games. Some days I play board games. Some days I don't play games at all (gasp).
Make of it what you will. If it isn't "for you", why is that a bad thing? At a certain point in your life you know what you do and don't like. Nobody else really cares.
Fly safe, or just don't fly. o7
My best advice, accept things for what they are. If there is only sand in your sand box, and you are bored, find something else to do. Or, being that you are a human being capable of thought, use some imagination and what you actually do have to enjoy yourself (assuming you are being held captive in a sandbox with no buckets or shovels...) Have you ever watched the artists that make sand sculptures/drawings? Some of that stuff is beyond amazing and created with very little outside the human and the sand.
Elite in my opinion is fine. It's a game. What do you want? No game out there includes every genre of game for when you get bored. GTAV may come the closest, but I cannot fly a space ship and land on foreign planets in GTAV, so I have Elite. Elite doesn't have FPS mechanics, so I have Battlefield 1. Battlefield 1 doesn't have an "arena" mode, so I have PUBG. PUBG doesn't have cool abilities, so I have Overwatch. Overwatch doesn't let me race cars, so I have Forza. Forza doesn't let me play football, so I have Madden. Madden doesn't let me slay dragons, so I have Skyrim. Skyrim doesn't let me rob banks, so I have GTAV. GTAV doesn't let me fly space ships, so I have Elite... Some days I play card games. Some days I play board games. Some days I don't play games at all (gasp).
Make of it what you will. If it isn't "for you", why is that a bad thing? At a certain point in your life you know what you do and don't like. Nobody else really cares.
Fly safe, or just don't fly. o7
I wouldn't change it, I don't think it's crap - I think it's funny seeing kids get all impatient because they can't get what they want immediately.
Remember you're not meant to be out specifically farming these things. That was never the intention. You're meant to find loot as you play: flying somewhere "ooh look a USS, oh it's a thing - hey exciting I can do a mod now" - instead y'all are determined to turn it into one big grindfest to get to Level 100 and 10,000XP with the fairy sword THEN play - it's madness.
The thing is, I have actually enjoyed surface prospecting and hunting for HGE, but the majority of the time I have spent doing either has been frustrating. I woudn't mind the mechanics as they are right now if they were something I had a choice to do or not. If I could say "Oh look, I need more Military super-capacitors, what do I feel up for, a CZ run or some SC scavenging?" and then choose whichever I was more inclined to at the time, the system would be much less aggravating. But it's the fact that I have no other option than to go HGE hunting to get the super capacitors, even if I had just spent 2 hours previously in SC looking for different mats.
The big issue I have with both surface prospecting and HGE farming is that they are extremely shallow experiences. They get old and stale extremely quickly. They aren't that bad if you only have to do them for short periods of time on occasion, but once you start doing them regularly and/or for a long period of time they become a chore.
Which. Is. Why. We. Should. Have. More. Than. One. Way. To. Collect. Materials.
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For fans of his oeuvre I can heartily recommend:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/350536-Intentional-Inconvenience-is-Killing-Fun
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...s-Design-Intent-Why-the-design-Creates-Tedium
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/400698-Still-as-Inconvenient-as-Possible-to-Play
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...ns-Three-Years-in-Still-a-Terrible-Experience
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/350543-Why-Does-Elite-Intentionally-Waste-Our-Time
Anyway, OP is deeply flawed as anyone who played Skyrim knows. As a TES fan with 1000+ hours in Skyrim alone, you dont get all stuff you need for crafting 'playing it your way'. You dont get all the cool loot by just hacking people in half. Or by being just a miner. It is simply not true. Which is fine. Because it allows you to replay in a totally different role and get different rewards. OP just doesnt like a ton of stuff in ED. Which is fine, but he is just posting over and over very lengthy OPs that basically just say "I dont like stuff that isnt fun to me, FD should add more stuff that I like so ED is more fun to me." Not that there is anything wrong with that notion...
All these long posts saying how the the OP finds everything in the game bad, but never a single suggestion on how any of those bad things could be better...
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In that case I could very likely not ever find anything based on mining or surface prospecting. It's based on the assumption that everyone likes to do everything all the time, which is faulty and goes against 'blaze your own trail'. Let's stop with the 'kids' and 'impatient' strawman. I promise you the lack of enjoyment I experience while hunting for materials has nothing to do with either of those things.
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Forgive me if I've read the OP wrong but are you saying that despite the 'Mile wide, inch deep' description, that all this is simply about you wanting it easier to find materials so you can upgrade your ships ?
If so then, the mere fact you are narrowing your gameplay into just upgrading ships, is making your own game a mile wide and an inch deep.
Elite isn't just about the upgrade of ships (i.e. engineering) and credits (despite what most think). We survived perfectly well before engineers.
That being said there is still a wealth of untapped potential in Elite Dangerous that can flesh out the gameplay. If it's just focusing on engineering/ship upgrades/combat then it's a narrow field of play.
Anyway in Beyond, the material gathering is eased a bit with the traders and engineering is less time consuming despite the G1-G5 per module process which is not ideal.
Lastly, you can no more play Elite 100% 'your way' than you can live life 100% your way. Sometimes you have to do stuff you don't want to in order to get to what you do want.
If so then, the mere fact you are narrowing your gameplay into just upgrading ships, is making your own game a mile wide and an inch deep.
Elite isn't just about the upgrade of ships (i.e. engineering) and credits (despite what most think). We survived perfectly well before engineers.
That being said there is still a wealth of untapped potential in Elite Dangerous that can flesh out the gameplay. If it's just focusing on engineering/ship upgrades/combat then it's a narrow field of play.
Anyway in Beyond, the material gathering is eased a bit with the traders and engineering is less time consuming despite the G1-G5 per module process which is not ideal.
Lastly, you can no more play Elite 100% 'your way' than you can live life 100% your way. Sometimes you have to do stuff you don't want to in order to get to what you do want.
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No it's not based on that assumption at all, it's based on an intent to get you to try lots of things rather than just hammer one or two things.
Where does this fundamental misunderstanding of "blaze your own trail" come from - it reeks of desperate reinterpretation to take that as "everything will come to me even if I refuse to do everything apart from this one bit" - and that's why "kids" and "impatient" stay in there.
Nah, and being stroppy about it only speaks of yourself.
Yes after 23:00 finishing my last mission of the day.
What an amazing argument.
Ok I can see where this is leading. I was after a particular MAT (rare) forget which one. I tried all one day. Then gave up (looked at I-player instead). Next day I was tripping over them I was in the same location on a planets surface I just saved from the day before. Restated 12 hours later.
While on the subject of things not happening. You do these Assassination missions and you get to the target system do the Scan, then the message pops up go talk to Joe Bloggs in xx-yy. You go then wait get this 35 minutes for Joe to show up. Yes Scan system look at the Nav Beacon. Still nothing.
Engineers and materials gets me into the buggy and doing things in the game that I would not normally do. That's a good thing.
However the experience is in no way feeling rewarding. There is a lot of grind and tedium built into the system. And that's a bad thing.
I play this game for a few weeks, then I sit down to collect some material, the RNG decides to give me the finger and I end up wasting 2-3 hours looking for something that never spawns. I then quit the game in disgust and play something else.
This game is predictable gameplay with unpredictable rewards. It should be unpredictable gameplay with predictable rewards.
Have you completely forgotten this is a video game intended to let people escape from real life?
However the experience is in no way feeling rewarding. There is a lot of grind and tedium built into the system. And that's a bad thing.
I play this game for a few weeks, then I sit down to collect some material, the RNG decides to give me the finger and I end up wasting 2-3 hours looking for something that never spawns. I then quit the game in disgust and play something else.
This game is predictable gameplay with unpredictable rewards. It should be unpredictable gameplay with predictable rewards.
Have you completely forgotten this is a video game intended to let people escape from real life?
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