From pure personal experience, I this morning completed my 100% hard-ceilinged PvP better-than-god-rolled ship in a total RL time taken of almost exactly 10 hours.
I repeat: 10 hours of my RL time to go from vanilla to full min/maxed
I am chuffed for you, really.
However compare experiences. I've been trying to get hold of abnormal compact emissions data. This data was always one of the most massive pains to get in 2.4 and so far in the brave new world of 3.0 I have spent six hours on this. Total obtained in that time = 0.
Before Captain Strawman jumps in again, this isn't to '
upgrade 18 ships in a week'. It's to convert a
single module for
a single ship, which is already at G5 from 2.4 to the new G5 in 3.0.
Based on the fact that so far it's taken me between 9 and 11 rolls to fully max out a module on conversion I will need four drops of the data and I have not had one in six hours of play. That's without even mentioning the mind-crushing tedium of the things that you can actually do to get the chance of a drop, which is flying around scanning ships, dropping into a CZ to sit there scanning ships and flying around looking for encoded USSs. The thrills!
I've eventually given up. That's six hours of game time completely wasted.
Instead I have gone to a tech broker and have exchanged virtually every other piece of top-grade data that I possessed for them. That's trading like-for-like top ranked data at an exchange rate of 6-1 (
6-1!! for grade 5 to grade 5!!!!) because the game makes one kind of data practically impossible to obtain even after spending six brain-melting hours looking for it.
I
had to trade in my other top-ranked data because after already trading in my level 4 ranked data in the same upgrade path, also at a rate of 6-1, the trade-up from grade 3 to grade 5 is
36-1, meaning that unless I fancied trying to get hold of
252 units of unexpected emissions data, cross-trades were all that was left.
A G3 to G5 trade up of 36-1 is an utter joke.
A cross-type trade of top-tier materials at 6-1 is an utter joke.
The fact that I've had to pretty much wipe out all of my top-tier data just to upgrade a single module, meaning that I'll now need to go through different iterations of this same hellish crapfest if I have the audacity to want to convert any more modules, is an utter joke.
I mean seriously, my Corvette alone has
26 engineered modules. I've spent six hours making literally zero progress towards upgrading a single module on one of my ships and eventually after giving up, burned pretty much every high tier piece of data that I had, not even to escape spending that time but to avoid me having to spend two or three times more, still with the possibility that I might have ZERO progress to show for it. That is also an utter joke.
Material brokers 'reducing grind' and reducing the hours spent praying to the RNG gods is an utter joke.
Whoever dreamed up these trade-in rates, seriously hang your head in shame because you have absolutely no concept of what they mean in terms of player time and engagement with this game.
A joke. A complete and utter joke.
The one thing that I wanted to be addressed about engineering in 3.0 was the fact that it was possible to spend hours on looking for materials and/or data and at the end of it, not only not have what you needed but to have not even made any progress at all towards getting it. 3.0 addresses none of that, in fact if anything I would say it is worse.
I actually used to like engineering my ships. I can't see any way at all that I'm going to be doing it now, I mean I can't face even thinking about what it would take to re-do my Cutter of Corvette.
Oh best of all? Now I get to go and look for the other material I need for the same upgrade. Yeah still not done even after spending 6 hours on it
and ing away all my best data, now I need some materials too.
Did I mention what a complete joke this is?
I really hope you see this Sandy. Some actual analysis of just what this offers.
