3.0 - What's the Final Opinion with Engineers People had in Beta?

[khaos526]

I don't participate in the Beta's at all and I know at the start there was quite a bit of angst before and during the start of Beta about the new mechanics and god-fathering and mats, etc. But then it kind of went quiet. Not sure if it was just beaten to death or if the new change in material storage above the originally proposed 100 max limit for all materials had something to do to make it a lot better?

So anyways just curious now that Beta is closed. How did people who gave it a real chance end up feeling about it in the end?

 

[Truesilver]

++ Applause ++ thread for Frontier's magnificent Beta responses

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/406454-Applause-thread-for-Frontier-s-magnificent-Beta-responses

 

[Frenotx]

The Positive:

• The new system is vastly better than the old one. Knowing what you're going to get, and being able to add / swap experimental effects as you see fit is a great change.
• The material trader is a wonderful addition. Makes all materials at least a little useful, and gives the player a variety of options when it comes to acquiring a given material. Don't like how the material you want is usually acquired? See if there's one with a good exchange rate that's more agreeable to gather, and go for those instead.
• The increased material storage, and the per-material cap is a long-overdue and extremely welcome change. As long as there's space for a material left, there's no harm grabbing. If you spend the time to gather a material, you'll never need to throw it out. A+

The Negative:

• Grandfathering modules was foolish.
  • In order to maintain a level playing field, FDev was had no choice but to buff the blueprints in the new system to meet or exceed the old engineered god rolls.
  • This ultimately means that grandfathering the modules was pointless, since they're being made obsolete anyway
  • Auto-converting to the appropriate maxed-grade would have saved players more time, and given FDev the ability to rebalance the blueprints as they saw fit
• Converting grandfathered modules to a maxed-out, but one grade lower version in the new system is lame
  • The whole point of grandfathering was to respect the players time and effort spent getting "the best stuff" in the old system
  • The new system makes that old stuff obsolete. You may get to keep the module, but it's not longer "the best stuff"
  • To return your modules to "the best stuff" state, you have to do MORE mat gathering and engineer rolling
• The insane powercreep and power difference between factory-spec and engineered ships was made EVEN WORSE
• The insane HP inflation was made EVEN WORSE

Overall, I'm excited for and looking forward to the patch. I am also, however, very disappointed in FDev, and a little concerned for the long-term health of the game.

 

[Truesilver]

Overall, I'm excited for and looking forward to the patch. I am also, however, very disappointed in FDev, and a little concerned for the long-term health of the game.

Fren, oldest forum friend, we've been doing what we do (in your case with perhaps more sophisticated style, in my case with perhaps more crude popular appeal) for long enough to know now that the only answer to the numbers is to make them all bigger. Forever.

I put my calculator away long ago. Now I have a balloon.

EDIT: OK, being serious for a moment, I agree with Ziljan's post below and hope that he is correct:

if you look at the new system in a vacuum, it's pretty awesome. Relatively easy material exchange makes mat grinding a breeze, easy rank ups, guaranteed progress, hot swappable experimental effects are a HUGE boon for customizing your build on the fly. Will flatten out the top tier power curve and make Open PVP more about skill.

I personally have nothing negative to say about it apart from the power creep issues, but these can be ironed out in a future "flattening" patch

I'm hoping we get the promised holistic combat rebalance in due course.

 

[Kubicide]

OP: I don't think anything really changes. Yeah, the mechanics are now different but they've added new grind elements and left other time sink elements untouched. So, yeah, maybe everyone can now get meta gear - thanks to power creep - but RNGineers is still a grind, and there's still plenty of RNG to keep things annoyingly luck and time based. But hey, it's FDev's game that they let us play.

 

[Mohrgan]

I found the actual Engineering process to be much improved. I didn't much mind the original system, but the 3.0 version brings a sense of order, and progression to the mechanic. It feels like you can anticipate where you'll be, based the mats you have and the options available to you when you head off to see an Engineer.

I did an experiment. I counted up which modules I would want to upgrade on a combat aChief. If I remember the numbers right, it turned out to be 15 in total. 100/15=6.66. So, I had 6 rolls available per Module. 1 'roll' per module was set aside for a special effect, leaving me with 5 rolls each. The results I got was surprising.

All of the modules ended up with a better than 50% through r3 outcome. Just 5 rolls each. To me that was more than just a pleasant surprise, it was down right encouraging. In my world of PvE combat, that r3 ship was a beast. PvP players may not be satisfied at r3 across the board, but the improvement over the A-rated aChief I compared it to was impressive.

No doubt some will still complain. Getting from +50% r5 to capped r5 was a bit agonizing, but that's as it should be really. It separates the wheat from the chaff. I am definitely the chaff. I feel sure that the new system will be a benefit to all who use it.

 

[Ra'Kaan]

I'm happy finally be able to "finish" engineering my fleet.

I could not bear the drudgery of weeks gathering mats just to roll worse stats over and over hoping for the elusive 'godroll'.

The new planets are gonna be awesome too! Once again it will be worth the time dipping into gravity wells to check out some groovy vistas!

The galmap trade info is a very welcome addition, and the dead sexy Chieften is going to be my dedicated 'hot ship'

The (undocumented) SRV changes are going to make driving (on said groovy planets,) while filling up the new mat storage huge fun! Even on icy worlds, 80% less spinouts haha

I could go on =P

 

[baqar79]

Overall, I'm actually pretty excited to try out some new builds I made in beta, and the system is going to give me far more upgrades than downgrades.

It's also a bit easier to plan ship builds, since the end results will be the same. It's also easier to consider what you could go up against with an opponent (not that I do PvP, but I found myself correcting my heat efficient FDL build, when I realized that with clean drives, anyone else in an FDL with dirty drives would make escape impossible).

But there are some things I still wish FD did to keep engineering variety in the game.

Currently there are modifications that don't really have any variation, either because one of the secondary effects is vastly better than the other choices, or you are after a particular experimental for a weapon. For example, the G5 FSD secondary "Mass manager" is mandatory if you care about a greater jump range on your FSD, basically reducing your choices to one. I would of much prefered if they integrated this into the base roll so that the other secondary effects were more worthy of consideration.

I've pretty much been playing the same tune for a while, but I think multiple secondary effects should be possible for each module, preferably as some form of reward after leveling up an engineering tier to keep the player invested in the entire engineering process from start to finish.

 

[Xious]

New system is ok and has some interesting aspects but I didn't mind the old system.

If they really wanted to change something, they should have actually given the engineers some personality and gotten rid of the place holder electronic voice.

 

[CMDR Corlas]

Basically everything Fretnox said, but with a bit less disappointment in FD and less long-term worry.

The new systems are great, but FD keeps shooting themselves in the foot by trying to please everyone. FD does an awesome job of listening to their players, and I appreciate that, but they also need to stick to their guns more often, I think, or we're going to end up with a design-by-committee mess.

By this point, I trust FD to listen and consider the issues we raise. I just want to encourage them to not be afraid to make changes, if they feel they need to be made, that will anger some people.

Gamers are going to always find something to be angry about. The overall health of the game matters more.

I think if FD doesn't want to make people feel bad by removing high-end engineered effects from modules, they should just buff the base stats of modules across the board, then modify the engineered percentages so that the high-end is the same but the gap between unengineered and fully engineered is significantly less. Aside from the ship speeds, the end result will be the same.

 

[Ziljan]

Most of the complaints people had about 3.0 Beta were really about the old 2.4 system and how it would fit into the new system. But if you look at the new system in a vacuum, it's pretty awesome. Relatively easy material exchange makes mat grinding a breeze, easy rank ups, guaranteed progress, hot swappable experimental effects are a HUGE boon for customizing your build on the fly. Will flatten out the top tier power curve and make Open PVP more about skill.

I personally have nothing negative to say about it apart from the power creep issues, but these can be ironed out in a future "flattening" patch by either reducing the max for ALL mods, or lifting up the stock A-rated ships power and keeping the 3.0 max where it currently resides as of Beta 3. From what Frontier has said, the power creep may experience an end-run attack by creating new tech lines that give people the option to create specialized builds that bypass the shield meta (presumably at the cost of other basic functionality like hull busting etc). Hence requiring teamwork and specialization to bring the soon to be ubiquitous god ships (<ahem> Cutters) down a peg.

 

[khaos526]

Good to hear a lot more positive responses than when a million threads about how horrible the new system was at the start of the Beta. My only big issue is all the ship I had G5 upgraded and shipped to Colonia will pretty much all be low class for the future since each ship is different and you can't pin every blue print and I have no desire to reship that entire fleet back to the Bubble to re-upgrade them to the current stats. So seems I wasted a lot of credits doing that for nothing.

As with the ships and stored modules I have in the Bubble, I think it'll make life a lot easier once I upgrade them as I won't really have to document every stat for every module for every ship to compare which G5 Long Range FSD is better in the long run or which G5 Overcharged MC will be the most useful as it seems now every G5 will pretty much be almost the same in the end...

 

[Ambroza]

Good to hear a lot more positive responses than when a million threads about how horrible the new system was at the start of the Beta. My only big issue is all the ship I had G5 upgraded and shipped to Colonia will pretty much all be low class for the future since each ship is different and you can't pin every blue print and I have no desire to reship that entire fleet back to the Bubble to re-upgrade them to the current stats. So seems I wasted a lot of credits doing that for nothing.

As with the ships and stored modules I have in the Bubble, I think it'll make life a lot easier once I upgrade them as I won't really have to document every stat for every module for every ship to compare which G5 Long Range FSD is better in the long run or which G5 Overcharged MC will be the most useful as it seems now every G5 will pretty much be almost the same in the end...

Nah, current G5s will not be "low class", they'll just be very marginally worse than the new maximums.

 

[CMDR Corlas]

From what Frontier has said, the power creep may experience an end-run attack by creating new tech lines that give people the option to create specialized builds that bypass the shield meta (presumably at the cost of other basic functionality like hull busting etc). Hence requiring teamwork and specialization to bring the soon to be ubiquitous god ships (<ahem> Cutters) down a peg.

I think you're right, and that worries me. In part because it just drives me further and further away from being interested in any PvP.

I think the best PvP is always the PvP that happens naturally, when you're otherwise just playing the game. If I need to be carrying specialized PvP modules though, that basically prevents this entirely and I just check out.

Ideally, ranked NPC ships are as "god-rolled" as any player can achieve, and the "counters" are less single-module hard counters and more soft counters that are spread across multiple different modules, so there's flexibility in loadout still.

 

[Drelthar]

Better than it was.

Pinning all grades of a blueprint at the same time saved it, without that, the remote workshop would have been entirely pointless.

Material trader should have better rates.

Will most likely have a lot more engineered ships, that are more engineered as well with the new system.

 

[zombieapocalypse]

I prefer the new method for engineering over the old, it's a bit more convenient, kind of makes more sense and at least you know what you're getting now (no more slot machine rubbish). But the power creep is still ridiculous and utterly pointless (made even worse by how FD dealt with the grandfathering issue). It merely serves as another unimaginative time sink with very little depth to it.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: engineer modifications should be interesting side-grades with huge trade-offs. The kind of things that encourage very different play styles, roles and tactics. Instead, what we have, is a series of uninspired incremental upgrades with trivial downsides. But I think I have to accept that this is probably how it's going to stay.

 

[Ziljan]

I think you're right, and that worries me. In part because it just drives me further and further away from being interested in any PvP.

I think the best PvP is always the PvP that happens naturally, when you're otherwise just playing the game. If I need to be carrying specialized PvP modules though, that basically prevents this entirely and I just check out.

Ideally, ranked NPC ships are as "god-rolled" as any player can achieve, and the "counters" are less single-module hard counters and more soft counters that are spread across multiple different modules, so there's flexibility in loadout still.

I agree. I guess we'll have to see what kind of new weapons they're talking about. Maybe we won't need to fully specialize to the point where generalized PVE/PVP 1v1 isn't possible. Maybe it will just be partial specialization that elicits a state effect like caustic damage, temporary shield malfunctions, shutdowns, etc. Stuff that works Ok in general situations as long as they are balanced properly, and I think Sandro was suggesting in the live stream that balancing them against regular weapons will be the key. Presumably there will also be specialized hard counters as well, and these may be what is needed in wing fights. And if they are true to their standard design protocols, then soft counters will likely also be available, since every specialized attack type seems to have several soft counters already.

I am also hoping that they change the general design of weapons so that almost everything becomes both AX and functional vs humans. I think bifurcating weapons was a mistake personally, and one that can be easily remedied in the lore. I mean, it's totally fine that seeker weapons and torps are easily defeated by the Thargoids' ECM devices, but we should at the very least be able to use AX bullets in normal MC weapons and also be able to synth AX missiles for standard dumbfire hardpoints. Having to use specialized hardpoints that are somehow ineffective vs human ships is a cumbersome and illogical hurdle to Thargoid content.

I was very pleased to see that most normal weapons are capable of damaging thargoid Scouts.

 

[Truesilver]

Most of the complaints people had about 3.0 Beta were really about the old 2.4 system and how it would fit into the new system. But if you look at the new system in a vacuum, it's pretty awesome. Relatively easy material exchange makes mat grinding a breeze, easy rank ups, guaranteed progress, hot swappable experimental effects are a HUGE boon for customizing your build on the fly. Will flatten out the top tier power curve and make Open PVP more about skill.

I personally have nothing negative to say about it apart from the power creep issues, but these can be ironed out in a future "flattening" patch

Agree with above ^^ 100%. Just hope we're right to anticipate a future rebalance.

I think you're right, and that worries me. In part because it just drives me further and further away from being interested in any PvP.

I think the best PvP is always the PvP that happens naturally, when you're otherwise just playing the game. If I need to be carrying specialized PvP modules though, that basically prevents this entirely and I just check out.

I agree. I guess we'll have to see what kind of new weapons they're talking about. Maybe we won't need to fully specialize to the point where generalized PVE/PVP 1v1 isn't possible.

I'm afraid I think that the organic epitome of flying around in a PvE ship, being interdicted and righteously defeating one's attacker is already pretty rare and in 3.0 will get rarer to the point of almost impossibility.

I mean, it does happen. I'm probably not the only one to have rammed that Vulture guy to death. But let's be honest, it's already dependent upon the attacker's near total incompetence. Almost everyone who looks for PvP post 3.0 will be doing it in a ship with every single module maxed to ceiling for PvP.

 

[Enderby]

Does 3 make it good yet?

 

[varonica]

Previously I never touched engineering, I am on my way back from 36kly out to do some engineering when 3.0 drops, enough said?