Should materials be buyable with cr

[Watcher]

Materials can be quite the pain to obtain, from blowing up ships for manufactured materials that somehow still work to driving around a planet all day looking for raw materials.

If we were able to buy these materials then there would be less of a grind and it means more people would be able to participate in pvp etc.

Your thoughts

Well, it would probably make sense in world.

How that works in terms of game balance on so on though, more difficult to say.

I wouldn't object to it really.

Though, perhaps if they were to do that we should also go back to much smaller number of materials in reserve and perhaps even have mat loss on ship loss as a thing. That would also be much more realistic.

Actually, if we do go down that route, you could have some ships have larger and smaller mat capacity and have more limited capacity on the SRV - so you can effectively mine with the SRV and bring back to the ship which itself as a limit. If you have ships with different capacities you provide some not so subtle hints as to base role of the ship. If we want to get funky have a mat bay module for ships to increase capacity.

Then perhaps have different ships have different capabilities in terms of available synthesis, maybe give everything the base sets (or maybe not) and then provide differentiation based on expected role. So an Asp Explorer can do grade 3 jump synthesis but an Vulture couldn't but, vice versa, the Asp couldn't do high level weapon synthesis but the Vulture could. Yay, ship role specialisation. You can do anything in any ship but some ships are better at certain things than others (more than now). Again, go an provide a module for providing improved synthesis options if you really want.

This is fun, I could keep on coming up with more ideas about how to change all this... Over to the suggestions forum?

 

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

Lol nice sarcasm

No scarasm - believe it or not I do actually enjoy collecting some mats from time to time. Though I will say collecting for me is very few and far between since all of my ships are all engineered already. I could see it being monotonous if you had to engineer all 38 ships all in one go. I took my time over the years and just engineered as I went. Following CMDR Exigious' guides made for a far faster experience.

Despite all this though, purely from a realistic sense, one can argue they should be bought and sold by both players and NPCs.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Absolutely. I can't be arsed to run their crappy little hamsterwheels for pixels.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

FD likes to call up your money for DLC and then they just waste people's time who hope to see what they paid for by nickel and diming the content out with ridiculous lab rat jobs.

 

[WR3ND]

I don't make many credits in the game compared to most, but I also don't make many Engineered modules either, so...

In practical terms, I'm not a huge fan of the meta progression game-play in this game and generally just get along doing what I care to, so I wouldn't mind having other options for getting the ship gear I might be after.

 

[Thepirateorc]

No scarasm - believe it or not I do actually enjoy collecting some mats from time to time. Though I will say collecting for me is very few and far between since all of my ships are all engineered already. I could see it being monotonous if you had to engineer all 38 ships all in one go. I took my time over the years and just engineered as I went. Following CMDR Exigious' guides made for a far faster experience.

Despite all this though, purely from a realistic sense, one can argue they should be bought and sold by both players and NPCs.

Right, you enjoy the grind, fair enough but why say no to something that wont affect you then?

 

[Arindor]

The game is a time suck so yes, any opportunity to make the best of my time if I want to engineer stuff and to spend the billions I have without resorting to FCs can only be a good thing in my book.

 

[Stealthie]

Materials can be quite the pain to obtain, from blowing up ships for manufactured materials that somehow still work to driving around a planet all day looking for raw materials.

If we were able to buy these materials then there would be less of a grind and it means more people would be able to participate in pvp etc.

Your thoughts

I think people shouldn't always expect instant gratification without commensurate effort.

I also think that if FDev do decide to provide additional sources of mat's, they should make the effort to create new gameplay to provide them.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Spending hours and hours and hours and hours scanning wakes to get datamined wake exceptions (or not) is fantastic gameplay and in no way boring.

 

[Stealthie]

Spending hours and hours and hours and hours scanning wakes to get datamined wake exceptions (or not) is fantastic gameplay and in no way boring.

Or necessary.

Course, spending 15 minutes scanning the beacons at the Jameson crash-site isn't any better but at least it's reliable and quicker.

 

[GloatingSwine]

I think people shouldn't always expect instant gratification without commensurate effort.

It isn't really effort though.

There are easy ways to get consistent G5s of every category, and they can be traded down to the lower rates easily.

 

[varonica]

Right, you enjoy the grind, fair enough but why say no to something that wont affect you then?

But it will in the end if making everything pay to get by degrading the game and maybe even contributing to an early demise. It will almost certainly affect the game negatively, I have seen it happen in other games I have played, and if it affects the game negatively then it affects people who play the game.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

If credits were actually in any way meaningful, it might be worth discussing, especially if buying materials cost a lot.

But as things stand, they'd have to make grade 5 mats cost tens of millions to make people think twice about whether to buy or earn.

Having said that, mining and other extreme payout activities aside, FD clearly assign a credit value to data/materials, as you can see when you look at the rewards for missions. So, let's say you have a 5 million passenger mission as the first choice, but the third choice might give you 1 million and 3 grade 5 data, indicating FD think grade 5 data is worth over 1 million each (numbers just for example, not exact).

 

[WR3ND]

I think people shouldn't always expect instant gratification without commensurate effort.

I also think that if FDev do decide to provide additional sources of mat's, they should make the effort to create new gameplay to provide them.

So long as it isn't arbitrary and a time sink for the sake of it. I don't mind taking my time doing stuff in the game, but I don't care for doing things I don't care for doing that don't make sense for my Commander's character in the game, beyond of course the meta.

 

[WR3ND]

If credits were actually in any way meaningful, it might be worth discussing, especially if buying materials cost a lot.

...

By the same token, is the meta really worth anything in the game other than progression? It would be nice if it were, but to me it just seems like jumping through hoops for the sake of it. Maybe that's how some people get their kicks, zoning out playing in their off time or something.

 

[[DOOK] Droogie]

Or necessary.

Course, spending 15 minutes scanning the beacons at the Jameson crash-site isn't any better but at least it's reliable and quicker.

I thought you only got adaptive encrypted captures from that. That means using the materials trader at 6/1. So only 16 per run after flying to the nearest trader. 6 trips to get a full 100...

Fantastic gameplay and in no way monotonous or boring.

 

[Danieros]

No!. Not in a million years. Mats are easy to find already and mat. traders make it even easier. Just because FDev allowed people to brake the game and acquire billions and FCs in days, doesnt mean they should give them free engineering as well.
That is the purpose of mats as a currency for engineering. To act as a barrier to billioners and urge you to do diverse gameplay to gather them.
Your proposal has no logic because, if you could buy mats with credits, then why not directly buy engineering with credits? That is their sole purpose of existence.

I'd say engineering mats loops are as broken as painite mining. You can boil down the mats to resetting a few sites for encoded data, finding one high grade USS for manufactured and relogging to essentially dupe it as fast as you can before its timer expires and going for the known crystalline sites for raw mats. All those three methods are giving very reliable rates of the "very rare" stuff, which can be traded for everything else through a material trader.

 

[Jmanis]

I mean you do you and go enjoy your mat grinding however the implication of buying mats with cr will not effect you in the slightest and who knows, maybe you might use it too at some stage.

But this is the problem right? Some fantasy that materials are hard to get, that some shortcut is a necessary compromise for "those who can make money but not much else" because "getting mats are a grind".

You've said " enjoy your mat grinding however "; what mat grinding? I've never had to put my mind to an activity to explicity get materials except for raw... and even I'm willing to admit that maybe if I mined a bit more often, say, for some mining missions, then I'd do that.

But mining missions are a joke, because mining is a joke, because of how absurdly broken high-end minerals still are. 45t of Osmium for 8m? Yeah right, Painite will come much easier, and get much more.

And that's the crux of the issue right there. This is absolutely not a "me do me" thing. To throw out my usual Diablo example, this isn't a request to add a 2-4 cold damage with a slow debuff into the options of 4-6 fire damage or 1-8 lightning damage . This is a request for an option of 80-100 Omni-damage to be thrown into that mix, trivialising the entire equation and making it a no-brainer. Then people complain "the game's too easy, we need something that out 80-100 omni-damage builds can offer a challenge to" and suddenly we end up with all the other options being rendered useless a-la the 5b FC pricetag.

But hey, I'm not going to be a stick in the mud here. Let's make purchasing materials an option, once:

• A cutter full of painite takes weeks of effort, not hours.
• Stacking massacre missions is nerfed;
• Smuggling is fixed
• FCs are knocked down to the 1b credits they should cost

... and every other aspect of this broke-ass economy is fixed. Then, and only then, can we talk about buying materials. Because right now, there is no sane price that you can affix to materials that makes sense in this.

 

[smiths121]

Spending hours and hours and hours and hours scanning wakes to get datamined wake exceptions (or not) is fantastic gameplay and in no way boring.

Or you could do it as you go along, whilst doing other activity. Accept my apologies if your an explorer out in the black for months on end As that requires a certain number of hours focussing on datamined wake exceptions in the bubble.

Simon

 

[CMDR Jayce MacLeod]

Compromise Proposal:

Allow the free sale of all engineering materials (Raw, Encoded and Manufactured) from and to NPC and between players.

Engineering materials will rise in cost from cheap (thousands of credits) for G1 to very expensive (millions of credits) for G5. You will still be able to harvest/collect/mine them like you already do. (thus making them "free")

Engineers will now charge credits in addition to requesting materials.

G1 upgrades will cost 1,000 credits per "hit" or "roll", plus materials
G2 will cost 10,000 per roll
G3 will cost 100,000 per roll
G4 will cost 1,000,000 per roll
G5 will cost 10,000,000 per roll.

And yes, all credit costs will also inflate the value of the ship, thus increasing the rebuy.

End proposal