Yes! Let's go for realism, since people never complain about traveling times, ship delivery times, dark sides of planets being too dark... You know that Elite compromises a lot with realistic concepts in favor of gameplay, right? And now, since game mechanics are not in your favor you play the "realism" card? I'd love to buy all the nice materials as well, because that would be realistic, but would just ruin the engineering system, which is created to be a bit by bit improvement thing, not a "I buy a better ship" thing.
So if realism is a good thing in this game now, I want superdark dark sides of planets and a realistic flight model and since we're at it, we all turn to paste when boosting...
I didn't play any realism cards, there isn't even realism in Elite. So what would be wrong with buying Engineering related things? it wouldn't ruin engineers. It would only ruin them if buy costs would be too cheap. But yes given how missions are imbalanced we shouldn't expect FD to create them balanced. I would simply buy those I don't wanna grind and can collect those not beeing that boring. Or even if FD weren't too lazy with excuses, would give us player trading we could trade materials for materials. But delivering boring side currencies (and thats all materials are) is the lazy MMO's devolpers answer to a badly implemented economy, where they lost control about the value and scale of their primary currency.
So much bitterness.
You appear to be another one who thinks "blaze your own trail" translates as "do whatever you want and everything will come to you."
Sometimes "blazing your own trail" might mean you don't get to see everything in the game. This is fine and entirely satisfies "blaze your own trail."
Wanna just mine? That's fine, but accept you'll not get the things you get by doing other activities.
Wanna just explore? That's fine, but accept you'll not get combat elite etc.
What's next Lily? Demanding that via stunts in SRVs you should be able to get powerplay weapons? C'mon. This is just silly.
Wheres that bitterness? It is simply fact that if you choose a specific way that 80% of the remaining content is kinda locked, because evertyhing is in it's own rails.
Why can a Miner not make money and buy modules?
Why can a miner not support a major power with his doings and get PP points because mining in a power owned system increases the wealth and powers income from that system should rise, in whichs return he gains points at the power? This makes sense by a proper universe and allows to go off rails without missing all the content because a lot content is accessable in multiple ways now.
So why are these two specific examples pressed into such extremely tight rails? Because FD desigend every part in this game as an own module that never connected to the whole picture or making the game a whole? I haven't said to get evertyhing, but you basically miss most of everything.
Nearly everthing in this game is kinda an own minigame basically just connected that we sit in our ship doing these elements in it, but it happens on these extremely narrow defined pathes.
But yes I would demand that when I run my SRV and scrap alliance bases it should affect powerplay and affect Undermining/reinforcement states. But nope instead delivering nude magazines, ehhm, I mean propaganda matieral is totally the only way in the elite universe how systems get reinforced or undermined.
if you ever played some more complex 4X games you would understand that Elite could have such a better immersive whole universe and it wouldn't bleed FD out, yet grant us so much more freedome to truly do things the way we want. But I bet currently 90% of the players have probably spent 80% of ther time the exact same way just in different places. Thats not the deifnition of "your own" thats the definition of "everyone elses". The remaining 10% are mostly those explorers having enough time at hand running across the universe, those PvP freaks and their hardcore pvp attitude or those playing minor factions for their player made faction. But getting an own minor faction up is a chore of submitting an email hoping to get selected instead of having an ingame way to start one.
