Missing HGEs in Alliance systems
- Thread starter AceMcKool
- Start date
I agree it's off-putting for sure, every time I decide to go mat farming, I end up doing something else instead because it's more fun.
Not a single HGE to be found in any Alliance system or faction state in the last 2.5 hours.
Seriously, this stupid grind for materials is beyond frustrating.
And no, imperial shielding IS NOT THE SOLUTION. It is still an excruciating grind.
Final tally after over FIVE HOURS of scouting HGEs for these materials:
Seriously, FDEV, you need to do something to fix this. This is ABSOLUTELY RIDICULOUS.
Right. You just MUST grind the hell out of the game to have full stores of certain high grade mats and finding other ways of obtaining them via trading, when you actually need them is out of the question. Because we need 100 Proto radiolic Alloys every day.
The materials grind is horrible and I really wish they'd do something different with it. There's just too much "dead" time involved without enough payoff.
It doesn't even feel like something you'd need to do to get them. I mean blowing up hundreds of ships to get their parts seems like a strange way of going about it when in "reality" you'd just buy a few junkers and strip 'em down for parts, or go to a scrap yard, or check the classifieds in Spaceship Trader. The truth is, none of these materials should be rarer than ships, and ships are everywhere.
Maybe Materials Traders could direct you to likely targets for given materials via missions. Anything would be better than what we've got.
It doesn't even feel like something you'd need to do to get them. I mean blowing up hundreds of ships to get their parts seems like a strange way of going about it when in "reality" you'd just buy a few junkers and strip 'em down for parts, or go to a scrap yard, or check the classifieds in Spaceship Trader. The truth is, none of these materials should be rarer than ships, and ships are everywhere.
Maybe Materials Traders could direct you to likely targets for given materials via missions. Anything would be better than what we've got.
I found the best way to grind HGE's is to not grind them.Not a single HGE to be found in any Alliance system or faction state in the last 2.5 hours.
Seriously, this stupid grind for materials is beyond frustrating.
And no, imperial shielding IS NOT THE SOLUTION. It is still an excruciating grind.
I just strapped a collector to my bubble taxi and whenever I visit a high population system I quickly collect everything on the fly and go back to business. They rapidly pile up while doing this, and I have to cross trade them for the rarer stuff quite often.
Might also be lucky with my home system choice: whenever I return to it, it spawns several (up to 6) HGEs of the common federal stuff. (Proto Radiolic Alloys, Core Dynamic Composits, Proto Heat Radiators, Proprietory Composites, Proto Light Alloys... and I sure missed some more types)
I'm not doing it "wrong". I'm just doing it differently.
1) I don't do assassination missions; too much flying around for meager rewards.
2) I only do combat for bounty hunting CGs, my combat builds do not include cargo racks+limpets, and manually scooping stuff (specially in a Corvette) is inefficient.
3) I don't fly around aimlessly hoping to find something interesting to do. I plan my gaming sessions carefully, undock with a specific purpose in mind, and gear up accordingly, in this case gathering materials. The proverbial "pick up as you go" suggestion does not work for me since, again, I don't fly around with cargo racks and limpets unless I absolutely have to.
I'm not completely dismissing your suggestions. They might work for some people. All I'm saying is they don't work me, and they are workarounds to the underlying problem: the grind for materials is unnecessarily hard.
So you're ignoring most ways of obtaining materials, yet you claim that something is wrong with the game?
F.ex. If you don't include cargo and limpets in your combat build, then maybe you should reconsider it? How is this game's fault that you leave tons of mats behind every time you destroy a ship and complain that you can't quickly find exactly what you're looking for when you finally decide to start looking?
If your idea of gameplay is to do one thing only, while ignoring other things you might do at the same time, then don't complain about the grind - you're the one that's turning your game into one.
I have 13 (going on 14) fully engineered ships on my carrier and I've played Elite for six months. Elite Trade and Exploration, combat Dangerous.
10 billion in the bank, not counting carrier balance.
Enough materials to fully engineer another Vette, Conda, AND Cutter.
What's your point?
My point is, AGAIN: the grind for materials is unnecessarily hard.
Yes, there are ways to go around it and get stuff done. That doesn't make the grind any less hard. It's still a grind anyway you look at it.
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PS: I never said YOU were aimless. YOU chose to take it personal.
Why spend hours in Alliance space for HGEs? After 3 our 4 alliance systems with no HGE sources, you should have spent 5 min jumping to Fed space to search. I know that the alliance space SHOULD have HGE but why torture yourself? That's not normal!Not a single HGE to be found in any Alliance system or faction state in the last 2.5 hours.
Seriously, this stupid grind for materials is beyond frustrating.
And no, imperial shielding IS NOT THE SOLUTION. It is still an excruciating grind.
G5 mats are exclusively for maximum effect in terms of engineering a module.
I agree with Op that the current system is broken not working as intended, or perhaps as intended, like selenium not being available in the crystal forest, hard if not impossible to find some mats. Being told we can find a certain mat in a certain area within right conditions only to find a drought, is frustrating. I get that.
We wanna enjoy building ships. Engineering them in the current regime is far from fun.
Does need a review and rethink.
o7
I agree with Op that the current system is broken not working as intended, or perhaps as intended, like selenium not being available in the crystal forest, hard if not impossible to find some mats. Being told we can find a certain mat in a certain area within right conditions only to find a drought, is frustrating. I get that.
We wanna enjoy building ships. Engineering them in the current regime is far from fun.
Does need a review and rethink.
o7
Okay, I also know the pain of proto radiolic alloys, but that's only because I unlocked Etienne Dorn and had a fleet of two dozen ships to be putting G5 life support on, as well as a few collectors I wanted to lightweight.
I just didn't bother grinding for them. The gains over G4 on lightweight blueprints are pretty marginal so I just did them whenever I could be bothered because I really don't like having to put down what I want to do in order to grind out materials that can only be obtained through some arcane method that doesn't actually form a part of any gameplay loop - given that some of those materials can only be obtained by hunting HGEs, it runs into the very thingDB railed against - players being forced into doing one particular thing and that thing only in order to gather resources.
You know what's not annoying? Biotech conductors or exquisite focus crystals, modified embedded firmware and so on, since those show up as mission rewards. Not in huge quantities, but they trickle in over time while you're just playing the regular game. Same with shield scan data, just doing the game will cause you to passively gather it over time if you're just looking at other ships. Wake scan data not so much unless you're regularly in the habit of following other ships.
I just didn't bother grinding for them. The gains over G4 on lightweight blueprints are pretty marginal so I just did them whenever I could be bothered because I really don't like having to put down what I want to do in order to grind out materials that can only be obtained through some arcane method that doesn't actually form a part of any gameplay loop - given that some of those materials can only be obtained by hunting HGEs, it runs into the very thingDB railed against - players being forced into doing one particular thing and that thing only in order to gather resources.
You know what's not annoying? Biotech conductors or exquisite focus crystals, modified embedded firmware and so on, since those show up as mission rewards. Not in huge quantities, but they trickle in over time while you're just playing the regular game. Same with shield scan data, just doing the game will cause you to passively gather it over time if you're just looking at other ships. Wake scan data not so much unless you're regularly in the habit of following other ships.
Proto Radiolic Alloys, Pharma Isolators, Core Dynamics Composites, Exquisite Focus Crystals, Proto Heat Radiators, Imperial Shielding and Military Grade Alloys are also fairly common in wreckage from high-end large ship pirates. Shooting down mission and tasty cargo pirates fills up my reserves of those easily enough.
Military Supercapacitors and Improvised Components I think are the only ones which require HGEs.
Sure, that's available to people like me and I always check contacts when I blow up one of the big three, but I'm aware that not everyone in the game likes or wants to play the "let's stack as many pirate assassinations as possible, get some wing ones in there, and see how many people I gan get to show up to the fight" game.
(there's no accounting for taste)