I did something similar with my MEF thread and actually did enjoy that part of the game, but much of that time I spent wasn't really efficient in terms of contributing to game progression.
I don't care about "efficiency." If being efficient means I don't have fun, I'll choose fun every time.
Which is, I suppose, the key difference between our two philosophies towards this game.
That being said, I do have a few ships that are
very efficient at performing the parts of the game I most enjoy.
Emerald's Dawn remains the flagship of Stevenson's Whirlwind Adventures for a reason.
"Stevenson's Whirlwind Adventures, we define adventure the old fashioned way: someone far from the comforts of home, about to have a
very bad day. Our motto: if you're not willing to trash your ship, you're not really in a hurry. Come visit our main office at MacKenzie Relay above Emerald, and book your very own customized Adventure."
Stevenson's Whirlwind Adventures is not responsible for loss of property, limbs, or life during your Adventure. Please check with your physician, to ensure you're fit enough to engage in hazardous activity. Please be aware that internal temperatures over 50oC, billowing clouds of smoke, and sudden accelerations up to 10G are perfectly normal events during your Adventure, and Commander Stevenson knows what she's doing.
So are you basically telling me that you essentially didn't do much Engineering before Beyond launched? If so that is basically my point here. A massive amount of the grind I've done has been to collect mats and Engineer my fleet of 30 ships. If you didn't do that grind, well, then you didn't do that grind. It doesn't mean the grind wasn't there.
I did plenty of Engineering before Beyond launched. I simply didn't do the whole "spend 20 hours to get enough mats for 100 G5 rolls, in the vague hope of getting one 'god mod' " thing. I discovered quite early that G1 and G2 "god mods" were, IMO, more fit for purpose than many regular G5 mods, and the mats for
those were easily obtained.
The issue here is that we had no indication that FD was going to completely invalidate the prior Engingeering mods. If anything they successively nerfed the power of those mods throughout Horizons since 2.1 launched, claiming they were "too powerful". There was every expectation that putting that grind into Engineering at the time was "endgame" content. Then with Beyond they dialed the Engineering mods back up to 11 and attached an entirely new grind to it. Anyone who chose not to grind earlier was basically choosing to not play that part of the game because we had absolutely no indication FD would do that.
You mean, besides Frontier's
long history of introducing new game mechanics in a "Nintendo Hard" state, then dialing them back when the player base complains?
I mean, here's a short, and by no means exhaustive, list of things whose relative difficulty and/or effort has been decreased:
- Economic Sim - Neutered, IIRC, in Alpha 5, due to players complaining they don't want to "haul biowaste to buy tea." As a result, most of the cheaper economies might as well not be there, because their original purpose was effectively commented out, causing trading profits from trading to skyrocket.
- Supercruise - Due to players using the "forum recommended technique," or, as I like to call it, "How to waste time and get repeatedly interdicted on your way to the station," mass shadows were heavily nerfed. This had the effect of reducing the amount of time the least efficient Supercruise technique took, but also paradoxically increased the amount of time those of us who used good technique took.
- Powerplay - Again due to players complaining about getting interdicted, NPC Powerplay raiders were effectively removed from the game, allowing players.
- Material Gathering - IIRC, after Horizons were released, not only did the amount of materials from meteorites and other nodes increase, but so did the frequency.
- Finding Materials - You don't need to land and take surface samples to find out the material distribution. This is a tragedy IMO, even though I agreed that such data shouldn't require a spreadsheet to retain.
- Monty Haul Campaign - A gradual increase of credit rewards, from the first days where you legitimately worried about not making enough money to cover fuel and maintenance costs, to today's mission rewards that continually trip my "You could buy your own ship for that!" detector.
Many of the changes to Engineering in Beyond, especially the material exchange, seemed inevitable in my eyes, so I felt it was a safe bet to not use my G5 materials unless I had a
very good reason to.
Again, that's basically choosing to not do the Naval Rank grind. We had no indication whatsoever that FD would change this to the point that the earlier grind was going to be made dramatically easier with Beyond and doing that grind was the only way to get a Corvette or Cutter. Choosing not to do that grind does not make it "not a grind". You didn't get the "endgame" rank-locked ships by having "fun", you simply accepted that you were not going to get them.
See above. Choosing fun over efficiency is a perfectly legitimate alternative to grinding, and given Frontier's overall trend of making the game easier in general, I had very little motive to put my nose to the proverbial grindstone, when there were more fun things to do. And as with almost all things in this game, it's not a question of
if, but
when I'd get that naval rank.
How many Engineers did you unlock having "fun" exactly? I've unlocked a total of 18 Engineers and have used 12 of them for the Grade 5 mods required for Engineering my ships so far. I had to specifically accomplish certain tasks to unlock them, their unlock requirements did not just "happen". I couldn't have obtained the Engineering mods I needed without doing that which, again, was a form of grind that was required for game progression.
All but Ishmaak, Tarquin, Dekker, Jameson, the Sarge, and Turner, which are, coincidentally, those who are unlocked by gaining ranks with the Federation (which I won't do), via combat (which I don't particularly enjoy), or via the Alliance (who I don't have any particular reason to work against, and thus get friendly with them).
My issue here is that the we don't need more shallow grindy game loops. We need more actual content and the playerbase apparently needs to continually put pressure on FD to actually develop space legs and atmospheric planetary landings even in a rudimentary form because otherwise all we will get is more delays and disappointment. Until I can walk around my cockpit and set foot on a planet's surface the game is not going to provide sufficient immersion because there's only so long you can look at a ship HUD or station menu. Until I can land on an Earth-like world I discovered and see basic flora and fauna there isn't much point in going back out exploring just to see a planet from orbit. Elite needs new game mechanics that expand the scope of gameplay, not just new grinds to waste more of our time on.
I agree with you here. At the very least, I want to be able to land on atmospheric planets, primarily because they'll provide a novel environment to fly my ship in, and flying a wide variety of ships in a wide variety of environments is why I play this game in the first place. And I'd also love to get out of my ship's cockpit and visit shady bars to meet contacts that don't use the Pilots' Federation's vetted bulletin board system, either for an off the books mission, or just to not pay the Pilots' Federation a cut of my income.
But if certain segments of the player base act true to form, after they've learned the new game mechanics, they'll once again deride them as "shallow grindy game loops," because apparently
anything that can be done more than a few times is, by their definition, a "grind."
