Engineering Under Threat - Open Letter etc

[VR SenseiMatty]

The only real effect of the Open Letter has been the delay of FC because FDEV was already supposed to work on bug fixes and improving the base game (wasn't 2018 and 2019 all about this already?).
So don't worry about engineering...

 

[Eliza]

I'm not sure what an "explorer" build actually is, honestly...

Spoiler

...a "racer" or something would make more sense for min/maxing.

Haaaaaa....what a Beaut!!!

 

[[VR] Mad Mike]

It's all about needing diminishing returns on armor and mj, and a bit stronger ones on resistance. This would kill all birds with a single stone, EXCEPT, it would make explorers and traders more vulnerable again (which was the original reason for the 1000% defense inflation compared to 200% dps inflation). The main benefit to this though (stronger DR on resistance and 'some' DR on mj and armor), is that at least you could carry some mission/utility equipment around and still be competitive (because adding that 5th HRP does almost nothing).

Perhaps explorer class ships need a rebalance then.. something which gives them an edge in explorers type things. This is kind of separate from OP which I disagree with , but IF the reason for defence inflation is partly because of explorers then give them a device unique to explorer ships. A camouflaged dispersion shield which is able to project 2 holograms of itself as well as continually prevent lock on but this uses so much power that offensive weaponry has to be dialed back massively... This could also remove the "anaconda best at most things in game" as the conda is an all-rounder not an exploration class.

Just spitballing... Either way tho personally I don't think ships in PvE should be indestructible and equally I do not want NPC's becoming engineered bullet sponges either as that is no fun imo.

PS for the record all else aside the attitude of OP stinks and is exactly the kind of player I have no interest in playing with.
Not only does he manage to attempt to say opinions of those not in open are not important he also attempts to take a dump on 80% of the hard working people in the world.
My dad was a builder and he worked his backside of working full time from age of 14 after his dad died , working far more than most people I know (including me), he had to work till be was 70 before he could retire and now he is physically broken and not in a position to enjoy his golden years like most people hope to.

 

[Aashenfox]

Perhaps explorer class ships need a rebalance then.. something which gives them an edge in explorers type things. This is kind of separate from OP which I disagree with , but IF the reason for defence inflation is partly because of explorers then give them a device unique to explorer ships. A camouflaged dispersion shield which is able to project 2 holograms of itself as well as continually prevent lock on but this uses so much power that offensive weaponry has to be dialed back massively... This could also remove the "anaconda best at most things in game" as the conda is an all-rounder not an exploration class.

Just spitballing... Either way tho personally I don't think ships in PvE should be indestructible and equally I do not want NPC's becoming engineered bullet sponges either as that is no fun imo.

Sure, plenty of workable alternatives. Considering the nature of this game, engineering grind isn't that bad once you learn the shortcuts and pin the right blueprints. I actually do support the adage that this game is a marathon, not a sprint. People who want all the goodies (or even more hilariously, expect to compete with people with 2000+ hours on the game) within 20 hours, just need to adjust their expectations, imo, and get their heads down.

 

[Han_Zen]

I get you. I took internal defence as HRP / MRP and external as shields.

Ideally the SBs could be removed to. Having all shield protection properties in the shield module and all hull and module protection properties in the armour module would make the balancing process far more manageable.

 

[Rubbernuke]

Ideally the SBs could be removed to. Having all shield protection properties in the shield module and all hull and module protection properties in the armour module would make the balancing process far more manageable.

Indeed. I always imagined engineers being pretty much all experimentals and no G1 to G5 so no wild outcomes. However, I think the horse has bolted now for that idea.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I stopped reading the OP at 'carebear'... An agenda was spotted

But, 'nerfing' engineering would be a retrograde step in my opinion, as - oddly enough - there is a lot of G5 engineering on my fleet that I'd miss.

Don't know what the rest of the rant was about, but I can imagine

 

[znôrt]

I dont think FD will touch engineering.
Just take a look at the history of engineering.
First the mods were just sidesteps. Just variations not upgrades, with massive downsides, and enourmous prerequisits. And everybody just ignored it, it simply wasn't worth the hassle.
I remember when I first visited an engineer, read 10 minutes to through all the options there, read an hour through the forum here... and left without makeing a single mod and didn't return until engineers 2.0 came.

Engineers 2.0 reduced the efford massivly, and toned down the sideeffects. It made engineering viable. But it also made 'Godrolling' possible, which totaly ruined the balance.

FDs solution to 'godroling' wasn't to tone it down, but to make it available to everyone, that was on purpose. And that where we are now. The main reason for that was, that retroactivly lowering the stats would have caused enough rage to alienate large parts of the playerbase.

With the current verion, most people are fine. There is no need to rebalance engineering. (Yes, I know. Some people are complaining. Someone is always complaining, no matter what you do)
Yes, you wont win fight with an unengineered ship against a heavily engineered ship. So what? You wont win a fight with a none-combat-oriented ship against a combat-oriented ship anyway. And surviving is laughable easy. Especially with a bit of engineering, and low level engineering is basicaly effordless.

engineering was first sold as customization and "ship variation" and yes, it turned out to be several levels of power creep fueling the skinner box (and no, at no point mods were side-grades. you wish. the boosts started out fairly high already (you know, in honor to good old skinner) and the downsides were usually negligible.

the power creep itself is no problem if you simply make it the new normal. which would blow the skinner box which is the actual problem.

see, if you have dozens of ships times several weapons times several mods times a few special effects that's just brilliant. if mods are sensible it makes for great customization or specialization and can foster experimentation and variation. however, having to grind your eyes dry in unrelated repetitive and pretty dumb activities for each and every combination you want to test out is just counter-productive. that's where i dropped the ball ...

now make all that instantly available at any workshop, for credits if you wish, so you can buy a ship and fit it out right away and off you are to find some mayhem to take part of, and we might talk. balance restored.

 

[Heater]

It's all TJ's fault!

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

I actually do support the adage that this game is a marathon, not a sprint. People who want all the goodies (or even more hilariously, expect to compete with people with 2000+ hours on the game) within 20 hours, just need to adjust their expectations, imo, and get their heads down.

This should be written in stone.

Edit: This approach, the fact that in ED you have extremely far away goals, is what it makes so different from the vast majority of the other games around. The concept of instant gratification is absent here.

In this aspect Elite Dangerous is really an old school game, and i think this trait should be defended at all costs.

 

[Hooplah]

TL;DR. Engineering is the balance between PvE and serious PvP combat. Frontier designed it that way. It also favors players flying together attacking a highly engineered ship versus 1-on-1. No worries.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

While I can accept that engineering should give you benefits, I don't think it should be on the ridiculous scale that it is. It shouldn't take 10mins to reduce someone's shields with engineered weapons and have it virtually impossible with non-engineered weapons.

It's not good at the moment. They should have been more side grades from the beginning with very slowly but upgrades.

 

[zimms]

I am completely against the ridiculously high benefits of Engineering and the scales of balance being tipped by the devs in favour of those who did not bother to git gud.

But don't worry, balance pass =/= bug fixing. I don't know why some people now expect reworks for CQC, PP, Engineering etc.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I am completely against the ridiculously high benefits of Engineering and the scales of balance being tipped by the devs in favour of those who did not bother to git gud.

I'd like to take offense at this remark but can't 'git gud' enough to do so...

 

[znôrt]

This should be written in stone.

while i agree i don't think we interpret this the same way

see if i invest 1000h in honing my fa-off, getting to know an area of the bubble, or mastering the fine art of throwing plasma balls around, then i agree.

if those 1000h are gone in collecting candy and cookies all over a map (relogging might be recommended) then you have progressed/learned exactly zero, but still got your oversized engine, your uber shield and your plasma thrower. are you a pro now?

Edit: This approach, the fact that in ED you have extremely far away goals, is what it makes so different from the vast majority of the other games around. The concept of instant gratification is absent here.

In this aspect Elite Dangerous is really an old school game, and i think this trait should be defended at all costs.

that's empty rhetoric. what does 'oldschool' even mean in this context? that when you die you pay back 5% of the value of your ship and are reborn straight away in it?

i'm all for effort and interesting/complex gameplay when it's meaningful. this isn't.

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

while i agree i don't think we interpret this the same way

see if i invest 1000h in honing my fa-off, getting to know an area of the bubble, or mastering the fine art of throwing plasma balls around, then i agree.

if those 1000h are gone in collecting candy and cookies all over a map (relogging might be recommended) then you have progressed/learned exactly zero, but still got your oversized engine, your uber shield and your plasma thrower. are you a pro now?

You can spend those 1000 hours doing both things mate. Engineering per se, as far as i know, does not require any gameplay activity that you don't already do while "honing my fa-off, getting to know an area of the bubble, or mastering the fine art of throwing plasma balls around"

 

[Sylow]

engineering was first sold as customization and "ship variation" and yes, it turned out to be several levels of power creep fueling the skinner box (and no, at no point mods were side-grades. you wish. the boosts started out fairly high already (you know, in honor to good old skinner) and the downsides were usually negligible.

The truth is in the middle. Some engineer blueprints at the start were along the line of "specialisation" and "finetuning". Some required the user to know what they were doing.

A classic example are the overcharged powerplants of old times: you upgraded only as far as you needed. The price of additional heat was significant, just going G5 and calling it a day was a bad idea. Especially if the rest of your setup also contributed to heat buildup. Many of my ships ran on a G1 or G2 overcharged power plant. Which of course, due to those materials being plenty, were rolled many times to get the optimal result.

By now that's nothing i really care about. Heat became much more manageable. (E.g. due to the -40% heat for railguns, as soon as you add a special effect and due to heat sinks being easily and cheaply replaced by synthesis, so you don't need to hold back and strategize on them as much any more as in old times. )

That being said, your observation is true for many blueprints: they were a direct and often very potent upgrade, right from day one. Many had downsides which were very easy to mitigate, up to some degree where they didn't matter any more at all.

So while examples to "prove" either side can be found, the end effect was what you describe: massive power creep right from the start. And while it gave some bored people something to do for a while, there's no real benefit for the game. It devalued plenty of content. It eliminated many formerly frequently uses builds from the game, due to engineering not supporting them and they thus becoming extremely weak in comparison. Even a number of ships, which formerly had a number of active users, were moved back to stepping stone status, as they could not compete any more. For the mere reason that you could not pack as many engineered items into them as into the alternatives.

If somebody is curious, just look up old time pre-engineer threads, which ships and builds people used. There are so many wild things in there, which had plenty of users and supporters. All of that is gone by now. These ships, formerly seen as good choices, by now are mere stepping stones. Would FD remove them from the games shipyard, people might not even notice it. When looking at the complete picture, engineers removed more from the active game than it added.

 

[znôrt]

You can spend those 1000 hours doing both things mate. Engineering per se, as far as i know, does not require any gameplay activity that you don't already do while "honing my fa-off, getting to know an area of the bubble, or mastering the fine art of throwing plasma balls around"

if i want to test a special effect i'll have to grind for it first, even before i know if it really suits me. not only that, i might have to sacrifice a previous special effect (i had to grind for) lest i want to test it on a new module/weapon which, know what, i'll have to grind up again. all this is before even getting started with 'git gud'.

i see your point but i don't really think that pottering around in my paper dbx taxi collecting stuff is going to teach me how to perform in, say, combat.

also, this is not a problem with elite only, this is endemic in nowadays' games. the freaking skinner principle. if anything, it has become even more sophisticated and oldschool games were much more naive at that.

 

[Old Duck]

For me, nerfing my engineered fleet and seriously lowering the bar of the game will pretty much end it for me, I most likely go find something else to play if it happens. It is not fair given all the effort I put in, and for all the CMDRs out there who did put the 100S OF HOURS together getting great ships that can survive and thrive in open and other areas its really a PUNCH IN THE FACE to make that kind of change.

Can I have your nerfed stuff? In the meantime I'll just block you so you don't have to be offended by my shieldless ships

 

[CMDR John Luke Paperbone]

if i want to test a special effect i'll have to grind for it first, even before i know if it really suits me. not only that, i might have to sacrifice a previous special effect (i had to grind for) lest i want to test it on a new module/weapon which, know what, i'll have to grind up again. all this is before even getting started with 'git gud'.

i see your point but i don't really think that pottering around in my paper dbx taxi collecting stuff is going to teach me how to perform in, say, combat.

also, this is not a problem with elite only, this is endemic in nowadays' games. the freaking skinner principle. if anything, it has become even more sophisticated and oldschool games were much more naive at that.

I've never used a dedicated ship to collect materials. When bounty hunting i collect materials from destroyed ship, and from POI's. When exploring i collect minerals from planets surface. While i play i do collect.

Never felt the grind. Not saying it should be the norm, as i said before i have only one ship that i can consider being near full engineered.

And nowadays you don't have to shoot in the dark when engineering ... coriolis and multiple discussions around the internet can point you in the right direction ( but i guess you already know that )