You know, I really enjoy elite but it is 6:20 am, I started playing at 12:00 am and do you know what I did? Guess....guess what I did in those SIX AND A HALF HOURS. I reconfigured and re-engineered my weapons on my cutter...that's right. I.did.nothing. I wanted to try and do some combat missions for fun and to raise my combat rank but what I ended up doing instead was spending over 6 hours reengineering my guns having no clue it would take that long. How did it take that long? I honestly still don't know. My guess is travel time between engineers and material traders. Oooh, man I just realized all the time I spent COLLECTING materials too. God if you factor that in....sigh....and I actually have more time to play the game than my friend does. And it's still this bad....
Look...I want to ACTUALLY play the game. I want to explore, I want to go to different systems, I want to do combat, I want to do odyssey stuff. But I'm realizing how utterly RIDICULOUS the amount of prep time is before I can comfortably do any of that. Sure, I could set out to explore with the cheapest ship, anybody could. But you're gonna have a real short trip at worst and at best not a good time if you don't properly engineer and buy at least SOME of the components to make things better.
So my official suggestion is to CUT THE GRINDY CRAP! Cut back drastically on engineering mats required, BRING ALL THE ENGINEERS CLOSER TOGETHER or something...JUST.DO.SOMETHING. I wanted to fight and do combat and now I don't know when I'll get to play again. Maybe tomorrow night, but probably not. For the love of god, I just want to play the game. Money isn't hard to make, THAT IS GOOD. That's a good first step. But everything else needs to be faster too. This is the kind of crap that pushes me away from games. The views are fantastic, the ships are beautiful, the galaxy is out there, the planets are awesome. I just want to be able to experience that stuff. Less bouncing back and forth between systems that are 100-300 LYs apart, less running around spending cumulatively DAYS grinding for mats, less working constantly on reputation just to unlock a ship that you have to spend even more time getting ready, less spending hours upon hours upon hours prepping to do something AND MORE OF JUST.DOING.THAT.SOMETHING!! PLEASE!
Look...I want to ACTUALLY play the game. I want to explore, I want to go to different systems, I want to do combat, I want to do odyssey stuff. But I'm realizing how utterly RIDICULOUS the amount of prep time is before I can comfortably do any of that. Sure, I could set out to explore with the cheapest ship, anybody could. But you're gonna have a real short trip at worst and at best not a good time if you don't properly engineer and buy at least SOME of the components to make things better.
So my official suggestion is to CUT THE GRINDY CRAP! Cut back drastically on engineering mats required, BRING ALL THE ENGINEERS CLOSER TOGETHER or something...JUST.DO.SOMETHING. I wanted to fight and do combat and now I don't know when I'll get to play again. Maybe tomorrow night, but probably not. For the love of god, I just want to play the game. Money isn't hard to make, THAT IS GOOD. That's a good first step. But everything else needs to be faster too. This is the kind of crap that pushes me away from games. The views are fantastic, the ships are beautiful, the galaxy is out there, the planets are awesome. I just want to be able to experience that stuff. Less bouncing back and forth between systems that are 100-300 LYs apart, less running around spending cumulatively DAYS grinding for mats, less working constantly on reputation just to unlock a ship that you have to spend even more time getting ready, less spending hours upon hours upon hours prepping to do something AND MORE OF JUST.DOING.THAT.SOMETHING!! PLEASE!