Beyond did literally nothing to help the grind.

[Enrogue]

Yea.... To me the problem always was, HGE hunting. Especially when the loot tables have always been bugging one item or another. Not so much the RNG in upgrade generation, but the fact you actually couldn't generate upgrades, at all, if you didn't find a specific HGE.

That's been fixed, after a fashion. I've always felt what is the biggest grievance with engineering is the rotting in cruise. It is still problematic (as we can see) and honestly think Elite would be a lot better game if the hunt didn't exist. As such, I mean. I think it's silly signal sources are so rare. I think it should be so you go to appropriate target system (boom, famine, war, etc) and then you should get to pick what USS to enter, they should spawn like frogs during rain. Not like this. Sometimes an hour isn't enough to find a signal source you want (which necessarily doesn't even hold the material you're after, but rather... Proto Heat Radiators! Yay!).

We should be able to sort through a large selection and take our pick of signal sources to enter. The way it's been designed; you have to rot in cruise in certain places flying around in certain fashion, and it still might take you more than a day's session to get just a few materials, is nothing short of inhumane and cruel. As far as advancing game progression goes.

On the traderates: 1/6 isn't probably going to work for what this thing was intended for. Go 1/5 or 1/4. Should do it.

 

[dm0815]

Finally some HGE spawns

A followup on my last post (#80):

So I did a quick test and it might be coincidence but I got consistent HGE spawns in the G 203-47 system with a population of 31 billion in deep space (Federal jurisdiction in boom state at the time of this writing).
Haven't found what I'm looking for but picked up some Proto Light Alloys and Proto Radiolic Alloys in two HGE. Didn't bother to go for more.

I wonder what the breaking point for HGE spawns is. Guess I'll do another test with a population of 10 billion.

On a totally unrelated topic: How would one go about infecting a system with a devastating disease with billions of people in it?

 

[Truesilver]

Yeah, the hive-mind xp of me and my former PvP group buddies seems to suggest that billions pop = good for HGE spawn.

 

[Red Anders]

18 ships? You just want to click a few buttons and upgrade 18 ships? Some people took a year and a half to get a single Anaconda let alone A rate it

I fear you’ve lost a little sense of perspective and have fallen into.

“I want it all and I want it now”

OK, being constructive now... Try focusing on one ship and enjoying it for a bit rather than Scattergunning between all your ships. You can pin blueprints so there really is no need to Upgrade multiple ships simultaneously while you’re in the vicinity of the engineer anymore.

Seriously, how in the name of God do you get that from what I wrote?

It's not like I hid my point beneath a load of obfuscation or anything - I am literally just saying that the material brokers fail at alleviating the intense boredom of flying around in dead space for ages waiting for the game to throw you a bone with a high grade emissions USS, due to the fact that the trade-up rates from lower tier mats are so high that you'd have to spend more time (and boredom) collecting the hundreds of mats needed to do that.

Thats it. Literally the whole point I am making - that they do absolutely nothing to address one of the most mind-numbingly tedious and agency-free gameplay experiences I have ever experienced.

I know it's going to take a long time to convert all my ships and I have absolutely no intention of doing all of them immediately, that's not the way I play the game and never has been. My plan is actually to get my Orca up to new G5 spec (which is almost done) and then head off into the black to enjoy the new planets for a while since I completely lost the urge to explore during the beige year.

None of that changes the fact that flying around in circles in supercruise for ages praying for the game to decide to give a high grade USS spawn is utterly pathetic gameplay and material brokers do absolutely nothing significant to alleviate it because the number of lower-tier materials that you would need to trade up to the required number of higher tier materials means that collecting the lower-tier materials would also be extremely time-consuming and just as boring. You're not getting the number of materials you would need to do that from just running a few missions and picking up the occasional drop from a degraded or encoded USS.

No perspective lost here whatsoever. If I had actually expressed the opinion you suggested you'd be right, but I haven't. Not even close. Don't take a very specific point that I made clearly and strawman it into me being some entitled clown who's throwing his toys out of the pram because I can't re-engineer my fleet in an afternoon. Always had a lot of time for your posts, it's a bit disappointing to log on and read something aimed at me that misses the point so badly.

 

[Blackcompany]

Seriously, how in the name of God do you get that from what I wrote?

It's not like I hid my point beneath a load of obfuscation or anything - I am literally just saying that the material brokers fail at alleviating the intense boredom of flying around in dead space for ages waiting for the game to throw you a bone with a high grade emissions USS, due to the fact that the trade-up rates from lower tier mats are so high that you'd have to spend more time collecting the hundreds of mats needed to do that.

Thats it. Literally the whole point I am making - that they do absolutely nothing to address one of the most mind-numbingly tedious and agency-free gameplay experiences I have ever experienced.

I know it's going to take a long time to convert all my ships and I have absolutely no intention of doing all of them immediately, that's not the way I play the game and never has been. My plan is actually to get my Orca up to new G5 spec (which is almost done) and then head off into the black to enjoy the new planets for a while since I completely lost the urge to explore during the beige year.

None of that changes the fact that flying around in circles in supercruise for ages praying for the game to decide to give a high grade USS spawn is utterly pathetic gameplay and material brokers do absolutely nothing to alleviate it.

No perspective lost here whatsoever. If I had actually expressed the opinion you suggested you'd be right, but I haven't. Not even close.

Oh its the "you just want it all now" reply. Thats from Page 3 of the White Knight manual. Right after " The game isnt for you" on page 2, and "grind is only in your mind" on page 4. Just put them on ignore and move on, they have nothing to offer the discussion.

 

[Red Anders]

Yeah, the hive-mind xp of me and my former PvP group buddies seems to suggest that billions pop = good for HGE spawn.

It does, high pop has always been the way to get the best chance of them. Having said that I flew around Lhou Mans for 25 minutes yesterday before getting my first one. That's after spending ages on the galmap trying to find a high population independent outbreak system to begin with since they're hardly common. 25 minutes flying in circles in supercruise does not make for a thrilling experience.

Currently I'm looking for pharmaceutical isolators, no luck with the HGE spawns so far.

Check if Lhou Mans is still in outbreak, it should be. That's where I ended up getting mine yesterday.

 

[dm0815]

It does, high pop has always been the way to get the best chance of them. Having said that I flew around Lhou Mans for 25 minutes yesterday before getting my first one. That's after spending ages on the galmap trying to find a high population independent outbreak system to begin with since they're hardly common. 25 minutes flying in circles in supercruise does not make for a thrilling experience.



Check if Lhou Mans is still in outbreak, it should be. That's where I ended up getting mine yesterday.

Yeah I've been to Lhou Mans yesterday and had no luck (flying in circles around the star for almost an hour). Guess the population count is still too low. I'll do something else until an independent system + high pop + outbreak pops up in eddb.io or the galaxy map. Maybe some laboratory will have a happy accident soon ...

 

[Blackcompany]

It does, high pop has always been the way to get the best chance of them. Having said that I flew around Lhou Mans for 25 minutes yesterday before getting my first one. That's after spending ages on the galmap trying to find a high population independent outbreak system to begin with since they're hardly common. 25 minutes flying in circles in supercruise does not make for a thrilling experience.



Check if Lhou Mans is still in outbreak, it should be. That's where I ended up getting mine yesterday.

Fdev cannot seem to grasp that materials gathering is pathetically unfun. Its barely even game play. Stuff like this, is why this game is such a laughing stock in wider gaming circles: its mostly just waiting, as opposed to playing.

 

[xondk]

I spent a decent amount of time during the beta playing the game as I would on the main server in order to get a feel of how the changes would impact my experience when beyond went live. I said pretty much the same thing am going to say in this thread, but it was all dismissed by sandy when he said on the livestream that they weren't going to change any of the exchange rates despite the almost universal feedback to do so because they wanted to see how things would play out on the live server. Well the game is live and lo and behold, we're running into the exact same problems myself and others ran into during beta. It's almost like the purpose of an open beta test is to get player feedback on how the update impacts their game or something. That all being said, let's begin.

First, the material traders DO help in some areas. Namely in getting unusually hard to get g3 and g4 materials like cif. They also definitely make it easier to afford the prerequisites to for g5 rolls as you can trade down for those materials. However, both of those pluses are mostly canceled out by the fact that we HAVE to roll the previous grades. This is not a bad thing, but it does mean that there is a large gap in the grind reduction of engineers, namely when it comes to getting g5 materials.

I'll explain why with an example: I was doing a lot of lightweight mods. This meant I needed a lot of proto light and proto radiolic alloys. I ended up running out of both, partially due to the fact that I had to roll so many g4 upgrades in order to even unlock g5. No big deal I thought, I'll just go HGE hunting in a boom system.

Oh how I was wrong.

I found a high pop boom system, but it was imperial. I spent quite a while in that system, and I got several HGE, but the either had proto heat radiators or imperial shielding. So I moved on to a independent system, I got more proto heat radiators and HGE were spawning less frequently because it had a lower pop. So I moved on the an ultra high pop fed system to pick up some core dynamics composites while I was at it. About 45 minutes later I had gotten 3 proto heat HGE and 2 fed HGE, but STILL no proto alloys. When I had started I had 30 proto heat radiators. Now I have 100.

The big issue here, other than the amount of time it took me to find these mats, is the huge amount of RNG involved. I know I could have stacked the odds in my favor a bit more by avoiding fed and imp space, and I'm sure the "git gud" parade is going to point that out below, but that doesn't change the fact that I came across half a dozen proto heat HGE's and NO proto alloy HGE's. I just got bad luck. Now I'm not anti-rng, but the amount of rng in this process is massive, and it leads to a very negative experience if you get the short end of the stick.

The rng wouldn't have been as much of an issue if I could have converted some of the excess imperial shielding or proto heat radiators that I got for proto alloys. But I can't, at least at an acceptable rate. That 72 proto heat radiators that I picked up? I would get just 12 proto radiolic alloys for that. That's 1 mid sized HGE's worth. Maybe enough for 2 or 3 g5 max outs if I am lucky. And that would mean giving up a lot of efficient weapons rolls, and even more heat exchangers and heat vanes that I could trade down for, both of which aren't exactly easy to come by.

The material trader's biggest attraction was the fact that it would give players a way to mitigate rng. Yeah, you got a few bad drops in a row and didn't get what you were after, but you got enough other stuff that you can trade it in for what you are after. But the 6:1 rates kill that. ANYONE who plays the game could have told the devs that, and many of us did. Yet the devs ignored it all for some reason.

It's pretty frustrating. It feels like pulling teeth to even get frontier to acknowledge a problem, and then when they finally do they don't bother actually listening to our feedback on their supposed solution and it ends up not actually changing much.

That was a bit of a rant, but I felt that I needed to get the conversation started.

So what you are talking about isn't really the rng, but the fact that it is unclear what can be gotten where, and that getting that is so random it is frustrating?

Because that I can definitely agree with, the 'grind' itself has been helped a lot with a lot more storage, material traders, and engineers being worked over, so yeah...

But the thing with not finding x stuff where you expect to find it from tooltip? yeah that I definitely can agree can be frustrating.

 

[Red Anders]

Yeah I've been to Lhou Mans yesterday and had no luck (flying in circles around the star for almost an hour). Guess the population count is still too low. I'll do something else until an independent system + high pop + outbreak pops up in eddb.io or the galaxy map. Maybe some laboratory will have a happy accident soon ...

No the population count can't be too low because like I said, that is where I collected my pharmaceutical isolators from yesterday. HGEs definitely spawn there. You said flying 'around the star' though - I was out in deep space. I saw the patch notes entry about them 'increasing' the spawn rate for HGEs in shipping lanes but since I've literally never seen one there before I assumed that meant an increase from a 0.000000000001 % chance to a 0.0000001% chance and didn't even bother trying it. Apologies if you meant 'around the star' but 1200ls above it or something.

Let's face it, its still dogs eggs as far as gameplay is concerned.

 

[galahad2069]

I've been SCing in a high pop independent civil unrest system for at least half an hour now, but no sign of Improvised Components yet.

Wish me luck.

 

[jasonbarron]

I've said numerous times before that my biggest problem with engineering was that the material gathering process was the weakest link in a pretty weak chain. It isn't fun. It isn't interesting. It's not skillful. It's just monotonous and boring. If you're like Grax and you just engineer whatever modules you happen to have the materials for (but if you don't have them no biggie, I'll just do them some other time!) then great, but if you're goal oriented it's the opposite of fun.

One thing that Fdev should have figured out by now; if you're going to have a system in place that by it's very nature is monotonous, at the very least remove the rng from the material gathering process.

 

[Audaxxx]

You can pin blueprints so there really is no need to Upgrade multiple ships simultaneously while you're in the vicinity of the engineer anymore.

Unfortunately pinning doesn't allow you to add experimentals so this point is mute. The only blueprint worth pinning is the FSD range to allow you to get to the felicity that bit easier and add the experimental.

 

[Red Anders]

I've been SCing in a high pop independent civil unrest system for at least half an hour now, but no sign of Improvised Components yet.

Wish me luck.

#prayforgalahad2069

 

[Vasco Sapien]

I dont understand this obsession people have over Grind.

What is Grind? I think it means different things to different people and any game that has a play wall infront of you and the results you seek could be argued away as a grind.

Im currently playing Stardew Valley... The game is basically work... I dig holes... i move mud... i plant seeds... i water the plants one by one... I sow the harvest... I manage my money..... And so on and so forth... over and over again.

If i want the largest house in game i have to grind the dirt for 50 to 60 hours.... Boring right? Yet people obviously love the game.

I'm sure there are people where that kind of gameplay isnt appealing to them. SO... why play it.

I dont think ED is a Grind... anymore than any other games i play.

 

[w3bbo]

FD are never going to remove an activity that may shorten the time players stay in game and potentially shorten the lifespan of the game itself.

Keep the grind - keep the players.

This is clearly the tactic FD are employing along with a sprinkling of new content every now and then to keep the player base interested enough to grind a little more, a little longer. All of this will continue despite the incessant whining about it on the forums by the player base. Clearly FD have no interest in shortening the grind - why else would you need 40+ of 4 different mats/data to unlock new content which is achievable by......yup, grinding away repetitively!

You could of course take your time and arrive at the same end game naturally which would take hmmm, 500 years or so discovering things accidentally - sounds like fun huh?

 

[Darty]

I updated the OP with a tl;dr so hopefully we'll get less fanboys suggesting that I downgrade g5 materials to get the g5 material that I am looking for.

 

[lovely lovely]

I've been SCing in a high pop independent civil unrest system for at least half an hour now, but no sign of Improvised Components yet.

Wish me luck.

Have spent 2 days looking for these - been bouncing around systems - have got only 60 in total and will need more as no doubt will need 70-80 to get 7 shield gens completed.

All that's been implemented is a net zero grind.

You get mats traders
You need more mats to complete g5

 

[dm0815]

No the population count can't be too low because like I said, that is where I collected my pharmaceutical isolators from yesterday. HGEs definitely spawn there. You said flying 'around the star' though - I was out in deep space. I saw the patch notes entry about them 'increasing' the spawn rate for HGEs in shipping lanes but since I've literally never seen one there before I assumed that meant an increase from a 0.000000000001 % chance to a 0.0000001% chance and didn't even bother trying it. Apologies if you meant 'around the star' but 1200ls above it or something.

Let's face it, its still dogs eggs as far as gameplay is concerned.

I believe you What I meant was that the population count while being high enough is still too low to spawn HGE consistently. In G 203-47 (pop. count: ~31 billion) I just hit the deep space region and got 3 HGE spawns mere minutes apart. So while a population count of ~4 billion people is enough (Lhou Mans), the chance of actually have one spawn is still very low it seems. And I don't feel like flying around in deep space for hours, that's why I'd rather wait until a better opportunity arises and stockpile those things as soon as possible.


The HGE spawn in shipping lanes and around planets seems to be true, as I've encountered one already (got Imperial Shielding from it), but it seems that this type of USS is just added to the existing pool. Unless it is proven that the spawn rate is higher in these places I'll stick to deep space regions, because anywhere else there is just too much noise to actually find a HGE (distress calls, convoy dispersal patterns, ceremonial comms, weapons fire detected, etc.).


I should have clarified the flying around the star bit it seems. Yes I made sure I was in deep space. I'm using the star as my point of reference. Sorry.

 

[Red Anders]

If i want the largest house in game i have to grind the dirt for 50 to 60 hours.... Boring right? Yet people obviously love the game.

50-60 hours eh. Big whoop. I have approaching 3,000 hours in E D.

I really can't understand why people struggle to grasp the concept that it's not about how many hours you play the game for, it's about the fact that the layers of RNG remove a player's ability to influence how effectively they are spending their game time with regard to achieving their desired targets.

See that's the thing with a sandbox game - I like them precisely because I largely have to set my own targets, but in E D some aspects of the game are specifically designed in such a way that any meaningful player agency is removed from the process of achieving them.

I haven't played Stardew Valley by the way but I think the story of the game and how it went from being one guy's bedroom project to over 3.5m sales with a 97% positive rating on Steam and being nominated for best PC game at the 2016 Golden Joystick awards is one of the coolest things I've ever seen in gaming.

I believe you What I meant was that the population count while being high enough is still too low to spawn HGE consistently. In G 203-47 (pop. count: ~31 billion) I just hit the deep space region and got 3 HGE spawns mere minutes apart. So while a population count of ~4 billion people is enough (Lhou Mans), the chance of actually have one spawn is still very low it seems. And I don't feel like flying around in deep space for hours, that's why I'd rather wait until a better opportunity arises and stockpile those things as soon as possible.


The HGE spawn in shipping lanes and around planets seems to be true, as I've encountered one already (got Imperial Shielding from it), but it seems that this type of USS is just added to the existing pool. Unless it is proven that the spawn rate is higher in these places I'll stick to deep space regions, because anywhere else there is just too much noise to actually find a HGE (distress calls, convoy dispersal patterns, ceremonial comms, weapons fire detected, etc.).


I should have clarified the flying around the star bit it seems. Yes I made sure I was in deep space. I'm using the star as my point of reference. Sorry.

No worries and yeah, I see what you meant now. You had pretty much exactly my experience from yesterday by the way; none for 25 minutes then three in the next 12 minutes I do exactly the same thing using the star as my reference point too, get out of my head!

Interesting re: the HGE around planets and in shipping lanes - I may give it a go next time I need to farm some tedium.

FD are never going to remove an activity that may shorten the time players stay in game and potentially shorten the lifespan of the game itself.

Maybe one day they'll work out just how backwards they've got that. It's actually the only thing that does shorten my time in-game because I get sick of it and also lose motivation to do other things because I haven't been able to do the things I wanted to do during my session.