The issue here is that before doing any grind I ask myself whether what I will achieve from that grind is worth the effort. I fully expect the grind itself will be boring and dull but if the outcome of the grind increases my enjoyment of the game I will still do it. Even when the ratio of grind to fun is 90% grind vs. 10% fun I will still do it if I am sufficiently motivated. If the outcome of that grind is later invalidated or changed, however, then I stop grinding because I can't trust the effort to fun ratio to be consistent. This is what happened with Engineers where all of my prior grind progress was invalidated to the point that I would have to start all over again with Beyond which is just not worth my time and effort at this point.
I'm sorry you feel that way, especially since the Beyond changes to Engineering were a huge quality-of-life upgrade for me. Doubly so, because when I converted the legacy G5 mods I had, the maxxed G4s under the new system were always an
improvement. I shudder when I imagine the amount of effort you had to put in for that to
not be the case.
Sorry but other than power plant mods (which in some cases are optimal with only a G1 or maybe G2 mod) you were nowhere near "engame" content if you didn't obtain G5 mods for your other modules. I'm referring here to G5 weapon mods, thruster mods, shield mods, FSD mods and power distributor mods. Those are really essential to have at G5 if you want to survive Open.
Elite: Dangerous has never had any "endgame," and I've survived in Open just fine without many G5 mods before Beyond came out.
That's exactly my point. They start at one extreme and then dial it back down. They should not dial it all the way down during Horizons and then suddenly send the power level of the Engineering blueprints through the roof with Beyond. That just tells me that they were never "balancing" anything to begin with, they were simply setting up another grind. There's also the issue that they fully applied all Engineering nerfs retroactively to previously Engineered modules, but for some reason didn't retroactively apply Engineering buffs retroactively. They seem to be just fine about taking away prior progress but won't recognize prior work appropriately when the Engineering ranges are increased. It's a self-serving system that sets up more grinds while devaluing the performance of what players have already achieved.
What does that have to do with making it much
easier, and a lot more
predictable, to mod under the new system?
Sorry I'm not buying that. You had no way of knowing that the Engineering blueprints would be dialed up to ludicrous levels in Beyond. That is my issue here, not whether they added a materials trader or changed the Engineering progression. The issue is that the new mods are so dramatically more powerful than the prior mods and they did that specifically to force players to repeat a grind they've already done.
That's fine. I've stated my opinion, but I don't expect you to believe it. I freely admit I was gambling on Frontier making Engineering much more user friendly, and lucky for me that was the case. If it hadn't, I would've started to do more engineering of G5 mods, though I doubt I would've done more than a single G5 roll per module.
Which is great, but it doesn't change the fact that it will still be a grind. Much less of a grind now than it was before, but again you couldn't have possibly known that at the time you decided not to get those ships. In the meantime I have been enjoying my Corvette and Cutter because I decided I wanted those ships enough to do the necessary grind.
There's a difference between deciding not to get a ship, and being content to wait for the ship to come to me, as opposed to ruining my game in pursuit of it. At the rate I'm going, I'll make Duke by the end of the year, and I won't have to grind to get access to it.
And you're going to suggest here that bringing Tea or cigars or grinding whatever local rep you needed was "fun" or was something you were "already doing" as part of normal gameplay?
How is that any different from the "Deliver X amount of goods to station Y" missions that are offered at stations, or a trade CG? I happen to enjoy the new locations those kinds of missions bring me to. Whole new systems where I haven't learned the quirks of local Witchspace yet.
As for "grinding local rep," I've never had to grind local rep. I just drop a couple of million in exploration data, most of which is gathered as a byproduct of normal game play. If I happen to be in the area for one reason or another, it's just a single jump out of my way,
and I get the experience of flying in a new system. Win-win in my book.
Yes, fundamentally Elite is a game based on shallow, primitive gameplay mechanics, and that's not going to change. Considering however that a large part of the "fun" in Elite is based on immersion, and not the actual gameplay itself, space legs and atmospheric planets would still provide quite a bit of self-driven "content" for players even in a rudimentary form.
Personally, most of the the
fun I get out of Elite is flying my space ships and SRV. Everything else in the game simply gives me an excuse to do so. Whether its the familiar shedding of speed at Jade as the
Emerald Dawn returns to MacKenzie Relay, flight-assist off shenannigans as I try to slip a type-7 full of weapons going to the brave freedom fighters resisting the Evil Galactic Federation, the wacky races of the Buckyball Racing Club, or leaning against the canopy of my DBX (I have room scale VR) as it flies towards a potential terraforming candidate, staring at the disk of the galaxy below me, it's all about flying ships in the Elite Universe, and all the varying, never repeating situations these "shallow, primitive gameplay mechanics" place me in.
