I agree op. I REALLY wanted to give fdev the benefit of the doubt when it came to knowing what they are doing, but after watching dev live-streams and comparing their view of the game with what it actually was it have become clear to me that they are suffering from a case of having their head stuck in their asp if you know what I mean. I remember at one point sandy said something along the lines of "the engineering system is generally a really good system but there are some areas where we could make it even better and that's what we are doing in beyond" as well as addressing the issue of powercreep by basically saying "I think a little bit of powercreep is ok because it's progression."
Another example is when everyone in beta told them that the new material drop rates were too low (boron, lead and rhenium) and they responded with "well they are set to be just as rare as the other materials so this isn't the case unless it's a bug" and refused to do any investigation of their own. Low and behold beyond was released and after mining over 1000 element fragments across 3-5 rings ranging from metal rich to icy to metalic, I have yet to find a single boron and have collected more cadmium (which is for all intents and purposes a g4 material due to engineering blueprints and rarity even though they brought it down to g3 to be inline with their crazy raw materiel trader) than rhenium. I have like 30 lead. By comparison I have maxed out my stores of all the other g1 materials multiple times. I submitted a bug report weeks ago and still haven't even gotten a response.
Yet another example is the whole material trader rates. Almost everyone in beta said that the rates for across category and up a grade were way to high, with myself and probably others going as far as to grind in the beta so we could engineer our ships just so that we could get an accurate feeling of how things would play out in the main game. They still dismissed all this feedback with one line during the livestream.
They are so slow to act on anything that negatively impacts player enjoyment in the game or hurts our progression. However I make a joke video about a novelty exploit and they remove an entire class of missions essentially removing mining from the game in terms of profit. The difference is staggering. They don't even acknowledge the existence of what they said was a bug because it wasn't reported as a bug and thus an entire group of materials are next to unobtainable outside of trading for them even though they had weeks to look into the issue, yet a tongue and cheek video with the phrase "clickbait but you'll click anyway" gets an entire source of income completely removed from the game because some people could have gotten too many credits.
Overall I get a sense that the devs are set in their ways and try to avoid admitting they made mistakes. Which really is a shame. The devs all seem like really nice people and seem pretty smart as well. If they were just able to admit that sometimes they do make mistakes, and major ones, the game would be so much the better for it. Honestly I think they would get a lot less hate if they DID admit that they accidentally screwed stuff up, because it's understandable. E
is a MASSIVE project with HUGE ambitions and the team behind it aren't experts in MMO design. It's understandable if not expected that they are going to mess up and severely break things from time to time. What differentiates between their mistakes being just growth pains that come with the game maturing and major fundamental issues is the fact that they double down and decide to try to keep marching forward instead of taking a step back to take two steps forward.
Engineers is a great example of this, instead of using beyond as an opportunity to revamp the wholes system, to remove the rng and make engineering about side-grading instead of upgrades with minor downside, they would have been able to make a much better game. One where there isn't an insane power differential between engineered and stock ships, rather the engineered ships were just much more unique and colorful than stock ships. One where players don't spend hours getting unlucky rng rolls while grinding and end up making little to no progress. Instead they doubled down and we still have RNG HGEs and the possibility of getting next to nothing for a roll. (granted it's better than getting a roll which is worse, but I digress) Not to speak of the powercreep, with the best shields being nearly 8x as powerful as stock and weapons getting a 70% damage bonus. (Theoretically the best gamage increase you could get would be focused S1 burst lasers with inertial impacts which would deal over 3.3X the damage they normally do to heavily armored targets' hull. This is an extreme edge case though)
Many aspects fo the game seem stolen from a f2p model
I really wish someone would tell the devs that f2p games are literally design to be just boring enough to make the player feel the need to spend money to skip the grind in order to have fun. Maybe if they knew that they wouldn't be so surprised that exploits are so popular since they are just taking the place of currency and booster store that the devs have unwittingly designed the game around.
Seriously, secondary, hard to obtain currency that can't be traded for with the main currency(mats), progression determined by rng, and long grinds to unlock content are not designed to increase player enjoyment. They are specifically designed to
impede it so that players will want to buy boosters, currency and grindwall bypasses.
Imagine if fdev sold a booster that doubled the amount of materials you collected for an hour, so that instead of getting 3 per drop you would get 6. Or a "Palin research bundle" that unlocked and autorepped pailin and gave the player 30 CIF, 30 pharmaceutical isolators, and 30 cadmium. Or a buy-able "premium rolls" booster that doubled the progress you made on your next 10 engineering rolls.
All those silly cash grabs fit right into the economy of E
and honestly the whole system makes more sense WITH them than without them because they atleast explain why the game is the way it is.
