Materials and Engineers

[z993126]

Why is it that manufactured engineering materials can't be bought on the open market?

Because they're not being manufactured any more. All technology in Elite: Dangerous is nth-generation recycled scrap. There's no such thing as a new pharmaceutical isolator. You can only find them by scavenging antiquated machinery.

So now you know.

 

[MoonRacer]

Why is it that manufactured engineering materials can't be bought on the open market?

Because they're not being manufactured any more. All technology in Elite: Dangerous is nth-generation recycled scrap. There's no such thing as a new pharmaceutical isolator. You can only find them by scavenging antiquated machinery.

So now you know.

Because magical things cannot be bought. Only grinded. Or 'found'. And they are magical. They stay with you even if you loose the ship. There you have it

 

[Factabulous]

Now can you explain why I can buy gold or copper, but have to find zinc and lead?

 

[Omukai]

The angle of argument is wrong. There are no realistic reasons, it's a design decision, same as "why can't i rent commodity storage on stations" or "why can't I place buy orders".

 

[avow555]

Why is it that manufactured engineering materials can't be bought on the open market?

Because they're not being manufactured any more. All technology in Elite: Dangerous is nth-generation recycled scrap. There's no such thing as a new pharmaceutical isolator. You can only find them by scavenging antiquated machinery.

So now you know.

When dork dev make bad design decisions, they go all the way.

 

[kurush]

The only reason is to make you grind more and come up with whatever rationalization you want.

 

[Brrokk]

The only reason is to make you grind more and come up with whatever rationalization you want.

It's not working then, I don't grind; I just carry a few limpets all the time.

 

[Mugur]

Yes, I've always been disappointed by their approach. A more consistent naming scheme (and a logical one, not a random Mendeleev table read) would have been much better. Like I can mine gold but I have to carry iron fragments in my pockets, no more that 300 pieces at a time... [big grin]

And it wasn't hard, you know, to come with an exotic substance name with trace elements, etc. to make the whole thing more plausible. Also add them in miligrams or allow you to store them and lost them if you lost your ship while carrying them.

The materials versus commodities list was not thoroughly thought from the beginning...

And, of course, it would have been normal to be able to buy some of them. I understand the convenience of weightless materials and the lack of commodities in blueprints, I don't want to make engineering harder than it already is (on the contrary), but I'm sure that many people on this forum would have been able to come with a better arrangement than the current one. You don't have to be a game designer to put up a logical and clear BOM.

As a person that likes to engineer each ship to the teeth and also as a casual player (like 1500h since Nov 2015), I'm all for streamline the engineering. Making it a more logical process meanwhile, it would have been great also.

 

[Factabulous]

And it wasn't hard, you know, to come with an exotic substance name with trace elements, etc. to make the whole thing more plausible. Also add them in miligrams or allow you to store them and lost them if you lost your ship while carrying them.

Not a big fan of the way it's ended up, but I can see how it did.

They could have made the materials trace elements, but then the percentages would need to get really low - and people on the forums would have ended up complaining 'why do I only get trace elements when I blow up meteorites? Shouldn't then contain mostly other stuff?'.

Or they add cargo-type materials into meteorites, in which case people would be annoyed because SRVs can only carry 2T, and this would probably dilute the drop rate of the trace elements (certainly should).

So they decided not to care, and just mix things up, because the people who worry about classification issues will be annoyed either way

 

[znôrt]

Because they're not being manufactured any more.

the more reason to be available on the black market. why not?

 

[Stealthie]

Why can I accept a mission to haul 100t of, say, Ceramic Composites but not just steal them and use them to create mod's? [sad]

 

[Factabulous]

Why can I accept a mission to haul 100t of, say, Ceramic Composites but not just steal them and use them to create mod's? [sad]

Bad example - as you can actually buy Ceramic Composites, and they're not used for engineering as they are cargo

But it would be nice if there was a larger range (and number) of engineering mats available as mission rewards. I'd like all the high grade mats to be available from missions, and higher level missions should spawn more / better mats.

I had great fun yesterday doing Salvage missions at an attacked station, but it was really noticeable that I started the session as Neutral to the factions, and they offered 1-2 G1/2 mats. And by the end of the session I was Allied with the factions - and I was getting offered 1-2 G1/2 mats. It would be far nicer if as you got closer to the factions you started getting maybe up to 10 G5 mats.

I'd certainly prefer that to stealing Ceramic Composites

 

[Stealthie]

Bad example - as you can actually buy Ceramic Composites, and they're not used for engineering as they are cargo

That was my point.

The stuff that goes in our hold is, apparently, different from the stuff we use for mod's.

 

[Shiro Akai]

I wanted to make a witty comment but thinking about how dumb the whole system is... I lost any incentive.

 

[Old Duck]

It's been a long time since I've played ESO, but aren't materials in that game available to buy and sell? If I remember correctly, I can gather mats (iron, cotton, wolf hide, etc) and sell them, but the profit is measly. If I craft weapons and armor and sell that, the profit is much better, which incentivizes me to gather these materials for the purpose of crafting. In reverse, I can buy materials, but cost of the material to buy is high enough that I prefer gathering them myself. I also find picking flowers and culling wolves in ESO to be more rewarding gameplay than shooting rocks and scanning wakes

ED tried to copy the crafting system used by other games yet totally missed the mark on what makes for a good crafting system. For me, "crafting" in ED is a necessary evil, not anything I consider enjoyable or even slightly sensible. Thankfully I own very few ships and I only engineer to a modest amount. As for gathering materials, I'm mostly an explorer these days, so gathering iron and sulfur and whatnot from rocks feels a bit more "logical", as I'm all alone out here, living off the land (synthesis / repairs).

 

[MoonRacer]

It's been a long time since I've played ESO, but aren't materials in that game available to buy and sell? If I remember correctly, I can gather mats (iron, cotton, wolf hide, etc) and sell them, but the profit is measly. If I craft weapons and armor and sell that, the profit is much better, which incentivizes me to gather these materials for the purpose of crafting. In reverse, I can buy materials, but cost of the material to buy is high enough that I prefer gathering them myself. I also find picking flowers and culling wolves in ESO to be more rewarding gameplay than shooting rocks and scanning wakes

ED tried to copy the crafting system used by other games yet totally missed the mark on what makes for a good crafting system. For me, "crafting" in ED is a necessary evil, not anything I consider enjoyable or even slightly sensible. Thankfully I own very few ships and I only engineer to a modest amount. As for gathering materials, I'm mostly an explorer these days, so gathering iron and sulfur and whatnot from rocks feels a bit more "logical", as I'm all alone out here, living off the land (synthesis / repairs).

I think the materials in ED are a form of 'second currency'. It would be only logical to be able to buy and sell materials at the material trader. But they decided to use the grind and the fact that you can neither sell nor buy materials as a sort of second currency, because the game suffers from massive inflation of Credits. The alternative currency also behaves like currency! You do not loose it, if you loose your ship. This fact is completely logical with a bank account, but illogical with materials. The grind is there to stop players to have a fully engineered ship after two weeks in game. And IMHO it is also a (bad) replacement for non existing game content. And with game content I do not mean new things. I mean game content that is fun and makes sense. No big 'save the world' quests, no heroes. But small things, that actually make sense. For example in USS you often find drifting remains of a ship and several materials and sometimes cargo. So - what happened? A small message like 'the power plant is acting up again' or something like that would tell a small story. Things like that are real content, not new graphics and atmospheric landings. These things are nice to have, no doubt, but the game has no story content. The big Elite Story and Background is enough, but smaller stories and achievements are missing. The game has no Game Direction, everybody fiddles around with it, but there is no visible direction.

IMHO the entire material grind is there to give players 'something to do'. The missions are quite nice if you look at them at the mission boards. But also reading the bug report forum takes away any wish to try the more complicated missions, because either they bug out completely, or do not really work as intended.

The entire Thargoid story line is part of a bigger story - but the player cannot participate. Fighting them may be nice, but involves weeks of grind to have the equipment and ship you need. And fighting them has no effects on the story line. Helping in other ways - like saving people from burning stations - is implemented sloppily and without care, just to have it. It cannot be that while saving people at your own risk you get fines for pad lingering, and as a result have to fly off again to pay them because you cannot take people. This shows clearly that things are done in a slapdash way without game direction. This is the same as calling an ambulance for grandma, and when they come they receive a parking ticket, and then we tell them 'Hey, you cannot see or treat grandma or take her to the hospital, you need first to drive to the police station and pay your fine...'

The entire material grind is not even done in a very inspired way, as you mentioned. One of the first things you get as a new player are two engineers and the FSD range increase. For this you need to sit in front of a busy station wake scanning for hours. I know it, I did it...

There must be other ways to limit the access to engineers...

 

[Factabulous]

IMHO the entire material grind is there to give players 'something to do'.

ED is a computer game. The purpose of the entire game is to give players 'something to do'.

 

[Old Duck]

The entire material grind is not even done in a very inspired way, as you mentioned. One of the first things you get as a new player are two engineers and the FSD range increase. For this you need to sit in front of a busy station wake scanning for hours. I know it, I did it...

There must be other ways to limit the access to engineers...

If I were building a crafting system into ED from scratch, I'd have blue prints these "secret things" that we have to find, perhaps by running special missions that lead us to "dealers" who sell us the blueprints (yes, for credits). We the CMDRs would be the ones improving our ships, so we could do so in any station with outfitting facilities, and we would have to "practice" to improve our abilities, which in turn would allow us to improve our gear more. As for materials, we would need exotic things that are not common. I actually don't mind shooting rocks, but iron should be sold by the ton and Palladium should be a controlled substance that one cannot just buy (like Uranium IRL), and that's why we need to go get it ourselves.

As for ship parts, these too should be "controlled" components, not common Radio Shack parts. A RL example would be silencers for guns, which you're not going to buy at the local sporting goods store. If I want a silencer, I'm going to need to take it off someone else who has one, like an assassin (which could also be linked to missions in ED).

And finally, data scans should be once and for all. I get needing them, but data is data - copy and paste. If I want to improve my FSD, then I should have to scan someone else (NPC) who has an engineered FSD to have a baseline to calibrate my own. Heck, we could add a little extra challenge by making it size-specific, I need to find a ship with a A-grade size 5 FSD if that's what I want to engineer for myself. BUT, like Guardian Blueprints, once I have that data, it's mine forever.

There, see? In just a few minutes I've thought up a system far superior to what FDev conjured up during however many hours they spent brainstorming. I give Frontier permission to use my ideas in "The New Era". You're welcome

 

[Bayaz]

That was my point.

The stuff that goes in our hold is, apparently, different from the stuff we use for mod's.

As Pyrex is to Riedel, so Ceramic Composite (hold version) is to Ceramic Composite (not-hold version).

They're both composites of ceramic, but I guess that's where the similarities end. I mean, you wouldn't bake something in a Riedel wineglass, and you wouldn't drink wine out of a Pyrex baking dish oh wait no I have a photo of myself doing almost exactly that hold on...