EDIT: tl;dr The worst aspect of the grind in 2.4 was the HGE and g5 grind. Other than a few special cases, finding g3 and g4 mats was a cake walk compared to HGE hunting for me. Nothing in beyond addresses this, since the prices for trading up and across are so bad they might as well not be there.
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.
