After the much lauded (by FD at least) so-called improvements to RNGineers in Beta 3.0, the fact is that FD have failed miserably to address one of the most negative aspects of engineers; that being the fact that some engineers are locked behind other engineers and then require a ridiculous amount of 'hoop-jumping' in order to access their services.
Whilst appreciating the fact that Sandro and his team have to account to shareholders for the number of hours players are logged-in, it is a disgrace that the above engineers merry-go-round has not only not been addressed, but also the fact that it appears not even to have been considered in Beyond. In fact, it has not been mentioned in any streams or posts by FD.
Going back as far as 2016, one of the biggest complaints about engineers was the fact that to unlock them was - and still is - a real pain, and continues to be so. And before the white knights and good old Max Factor - whose posts can sometimes be informative and whose opinions I respect - start to tell me, "You don't have to engineer if you don't want to...", let me just say that without engineered modules, most of the ships in ED will get blown out of space much sooner than later; something of which new players become aware very quickly.
I fell into the trap of engineers early on but have never progressed beyond G3 Dirty Drives or a G1 power plant and G5 FSD, etc, simply because to unlock Palin or the others seems to me to be a pointless time-sink and very disrespectful of the limited time in which I have to play and enjoy ED.
The fact that this aspect of engineers had not been improved in Beyond (instead we have material brokers with exorbitant exchange rates) is imo a disrespectful slant on those of us who have spent more than a thousand hours in game but who still have the integrity to avoid being forced by FD into certain activities in which we have no desire to participate.
As always, 'Sandro's law' says, "Play the game your way, blaze your own trail...as long as it is the way and the trail of which we approve and which we sanction."
Your thoughts please..even white knights!
OK I'm not a white knight and I've had my share of frustration with unlocking the engineers, but much of the hassle is actually getting allied with the required factions like Sirius. With a couple of notable exceptions like the two mining engineers, which are real time sinks, the actual engineer requirements are not that bad.
People complain about doing 5kly for Palin, but that actually only takes an hour or two to do when using a 60ly range JumpaConda and the neutron star highway... It's only about 25 jumps!
When I purchased a second account at the tail end of November last year I was dreading having to unlock all of the engineers again! In reality it took me 2 weeks of playing to get my ships up to G5 modules (fully modded). Which is a reasonable period of time really.
Knowing how to do all of it I guess counted for a lot... A new player wouldn't know many of the short cuts like Dav's Hope for materials, going to a Distribution Centre for DWEs or the crash sites with UAs scattered about, where to find Soontill Relics or where to find barnacles, or to just go to Darnielle's Progress in Maia and buy a ton of mata alloys. If I was a newbie, unlocking and getting to G5 everything in two weeks would seem laughable!
In fact one of the longest grinds was getting up to Dangerous in combat rank to unlock Lori Jameson (getting to Elite in trade for access to Shinrarta Dezhra was easy, I did that within the first few days of getting my 2nd account by doing the Palin missions, which have sadly ended now that OO has been attacked). The account is intended for exploration but I wanted access to the mods that Lori offers.
So while the engineers has its grindy moments (the mining requirements being the pain in the side for me), it's actually not as bad as people some times make it out to be. Hopefully, the new setup in 3.0 will make some of it easier. My main worry is obtaining level 5 materials like MEF that can be traded down to CIF. In the current 2.4 game, MEF is fairly readily abundant (I gathered 50 of them before I went into hospital recently). In the 3.0 beta I found that the mission rewards that included MEF (and other grade 5 materials) were much rarer... 3.0 seems to have rebalanced the drop rate of these items. Hence, it's worth grabbing these mats before 3.0 goes live.
How did that come about?
