6 months of poor G5 manufactured materials gathering. Disappointing.

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
So here we are, 6 months after the 3.3 drop (actually nearer to 7), and manufactured materials gathering is still in a dire place.

I appreciate that fd made an effort to increase spawns a few months ago, and that did make a small difference. Perhaps 15% better, but the problem is that 15% extra on a sample of 1 or 2 does not make another whole number, so the difference is EXTREMELY hit n miss (mostly miss).

The main problem continues to be the unreliability of places to farm specific materials, and the INACCURACY of the flavor text of where that material is supposed to be.

Ever since the system state, er, system, was changed, you cannot reliably find certain materials. Moreover, the system state of a federal or imperial system is totally irrelevant. In fed systems you will find 90% proprietary composites REGARDLESS OF STATE, which are not even a G5 material, and 10% core dynamics composites. In imperial systems, imperial shielding the same.

To compound matters, even in an independent system, when the HGE is owned by an independent faction, if there is a federal faction in the system, you still have a high chance of getting proprietary composites and Cdcs. This is totally ridiculous.

Please, PLEASE FD, please fix this in the next minor patch.

The materials which have problems are the following...

Military grade alloys (war and civil war)
Military Supercaps (war and civil war)
Improvised components (civil unrest)
Pharmaceutical isolators (outbreak)

A suitable temporary workaround would be to provide either additional methods that spawn these, or make sure that they do spawn where the flavor text says they should, REGARDLESS OF superpower!
 

Sylow

Sylow
Hmm, yea. I currently don't engineer much any more, but the problem does exist.

It's not without reason that i by now usually fly from a place with material trader. Whenever one of my storage gets full, i trade towards something of the mentioned materials. But while that works for me, who already has plenty of engineered ships and just fells up his stocks, the current situation quite certainly is unbearable for somebody trying to catch up.

Fixing this really makes sense.
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Factabulous said:
Pretty sure fdev are more into the 'play the game and collect stuff you see' method of play than the 'I am staying here until this bin is full' method. But restoring the drop logic would be nice.
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Alas, I've always thought this to be the case.

I'd bet that originally FDev's idea was that people would be able to collect up random debris and think of it as a "nice little bonus" when they discovered they have enough stuff for an upgrade.

Trouble is, of course, that a lot of upgrades have an impact on stuff like how much power your ship uses, or how much heat it generates, which means you then need to make other upgrades immediately or you can't continue to fly your ship.
Given the pitfalls of engineering, we're bloody lucky to have sites like Coriolis and EDShipyard which we can use to predict what effect a given upgrade will have on our ships before we waste mat's or find ourselves trying to launch a ship which can't fly after an upgrade is applied.

But, yeah.

Ideally (as I've said before) I'd like to see the entire range of gameplay associated with mat' gathering improved.
Give us little quests which yield a bundle of mat's or give us co-op gameplay that yields bundles of mat's etc.

If FDev do plan on improving this stuff, however, I suspect it'll be quite a long time in the future so, in the mean-time, it'd be handy if they could do something with the G5 mat' spawn-rates just so people can proceed with their engineering, even if it's just a stopgap measure that gets revoked when a "proper" improvement is implemented.

I swear, I must have collected thousands of Potato Radios over the last few weeks, just so I could trade them for a handful of things like PIs, ICs and MSs.
I also have a reserved parking space at the Jameson Crash site.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
Stealthie said:
it'd be handy if they could do something with the G5 mat' spawn-rates
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Personally I think the rate is ok now, it's just the fact it's Imperial Shielding, followed by .. Imperial Shielding and then ... Imperial Shielding. So I don't bother with HGE any more, much for fun doing some BGS work and 'accidentally' filling up with EFC / BTC (missions should ideally also have more variety, but since it's only a side effect it's not quite as annoying).
 

xondk

X
Aashenfox said:
The materials which have problems are the following...

Military grade alloys (war and civil war)
Military Supercaps (war and civil war)
Improvised components (civil unrest)
Pharmaceutical isolators (outbreak)
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And you are checking situations where it is the system owner that has these states? its been a long time since I've gathered the materials, am out exploring, but even then people complained and at least then people seemed to miss that it needs to be system owner that has that state, and also needs to have right economy last I checked as well?
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
xondk said:
And you are checking situations where it is the system owner that has these states? its been a long time since I've gathered the materials, am out exploring, but even then people complained and at least then people seemed to miss that it needs to be system owner that has that state, and also needs to have right economy last I checked as well?
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I would go and check how it works rather than use historical info - this game changes :) And OP knows what they are talking about.
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
Factabulous said:
Pretty sure fdev are more into the 'play the game and collect stuff you see' method of play than the 'I am staying here until this bin is full' method. But restoring the drop logic would be nice.
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Filling a bin is a distant dream. Right now I'd simply like to be able to collect what I'm looking for in a way that seems reasonable, rather than a load of stuff I don't. I appreciate that there are many ways to play this game, and I know it sounds self serving, but it's true that the players that probe the limits that use literally every tool available, are the ones to cater to, as they proliferate the knowledge and guidance down to those who don't enjoy learning convoluted game mechanisms. I love convoluted game mechanisms, but they need to be logical and predictable (to a reasonable degree). I'm using hte word reasonable a lot because that's really what it comes down to me for me.

The incident that prompted me to amek yet another on-my-knees-begging for a fix thread, was a squad mate, ironically posting up a screenshot of an HGE, in an independent system, and he asked the discord... 'This is an independent system, this is an HGE (incidentally 70kls out, geez FD :rolleyes: ...), in CIVIL WAR state, clearly owned by the INDEPENDENT controlling faction, I'm taking bets on what it will contain!

I felt sure that he would get either MGAs or Mil Supercaps. But no....Core Dynamics Composites. This is a level of broken that shouldn't have made it into live, there's no excuse for that. Sorry to rant again, I'm not ranting at you, you know that, just taking the opportunity to mouth off again. lol :)
 
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MoonRacer

MoonRacer
Sadly this complaint is not the only problem with material distribution.

There are lots of grade 1-3 materials, which I have never seen. I have now 894 data and 5041 raw and manufactured materials. I have a lot of grade 4 and grad 5 materials, but only in a few categories. OPs list has just one material (grade 5), which I have. The rest I have never seen even once.

Data materials (lower grades) were fairly easy to come by by scanning combat/trading ships around busy bases, also by wake scanning. This no longer works (since around 1 month or so). Wake scanning works, but comes up without any data materials, scanning of combat ships outside of RES zones seems no longer to deliver data materials, and inside RES zone the drop is very low.

HGEs always have the same materials (Boom, War), in Federation systems: Core Dynamics Composites and Proto Heat Radiators. Encoded Emissions (state does not matter) only rarely have data materials, but they have better materials that Degraded Emissions. Chemical Storage Units (Very Common) are rare to find, but Chemical Mainpulators (Rare) are often dropped.

If I cannot find Rare or Very Rare materials, I can understand it, I do not fly around in the entire bubble. But Common and Very Common materials should drop nearly everywhere.

HGEs seem to dry up (no concern, I am nearly full on the 4 rare materials they drop), Enconded Emissions deliver data only in rare cases. It seems they are constantly fiddling around with probabilities. But distribution of important things via RNG never works very well.

Fact is, I stopped trying to unlock more engineers, since every time I look what I could engineer with new engineers I am lacking grade 1-3 materials. The only thing that works well are raw materials, but it does take a lot of time and the percentages shown for moons/planets do not really reflect the things you find.

I only casually look into USS. Lately I read here that the 'Convoy Dispersal Pattern (Threat 0)' is for scanning the ships for data materials. Does not work in most cases, there often is just one ship and scanning it does nothing. I avoid this nonsense for now. It was much better when I started to play (February 2019), it is now, from my POV the worst material distribution I saw in this game. Obviously the 'newbie support' at work....
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
xondk said:
And you are checking situations where it is the system owner that has these states? its been a long time since I've gathered the materials, am out exploring, but even then people complained and at least then people seemed to miss that it needs to be system owner that has that state, and also needs to have right economy last I checked as well?
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Yeh I appreciate the effort to check if I'm doing something wrong, I promise I'm not. I could have written the book on materials gathering since it was introduced (no brag, it's just I do a lot of engineering, I have 6 'proper' pvp spec ships and a very analytical mind)
 
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Aashenfox

Aashenfox
Navigare Necesse Est said:
The uncertainness how to procure certain ingredients from the bloated table just compounds the frustration and adds to an experience of overly grindy gameplay. There simply isn't proper feedback if players do stuff right or wrong for their goal at hand and that just leads to unneccesarily wasted time.
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In a nutshell this is exactly it, well said.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
This is one of the two issues I'd really like fdev to come back to us on (the other being the codex dropping discoveries for the last 6 months). In both cases it would be reassuring to know that they actually acknowledge that they are broken. I can understand them being left as neither are game breakers, but they are both areas of the game that affect many, and having them left in the current state despite confirmed and voted issues is a tad disappointing.
 

MoonRacer

MoonRacer
Factabulous said:
This is one of the two issues I'd really like fdev to come back to us on (the other being the codex dropping discoveries for the last 6 months). In both cases it would be reassuring to know that they actually acknowledge that they are broken. I can understand them being left as neither are game breakers, but they are both areas of the game that affect many, and having them left in the current state despite confirmed and voted issues is a tad disappointing.
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Especially when the last April Update was targeted at new players, who now have conflicting and wrong hints where to gather materials, except maybe awful things like Davs Hope, which will only help if you are willing to logon/logoff like an idiot.
Instead of making things clear (not necessarily easier) they fiddle around, and while some of the changes are nice, the introduced bugs and the constant fiddling around is definitely not helpful. There seems to be a great fear that more experienced players could find too many materials. Maybe they also see, that engineering goes a long way to totally unbalance the game...
 

BDelacroix

BDelacroix
What I find funny is I have bucket tons of minerals and I only rarely collect any. This is largely due to trade recipes not really asking for many minerals.
As for the manufactured parts, I do "the grind". I go to some combat area and blow up a bunch of npcs. Use collectors (need a new batch each fight as NPCs are extremely good at shooting limpets) and just gather whatevs. Hopefully a bit of that nets me enough to trade up to whatever g5 stuff I happen to need.
Takes a while and I get bored with it, though.

I do understand the complaint, however. If someone needs old machine parts, one might think to go to an old hulk orbiting a star and just mine some off.
 

Aashenfox

Aashenfox
Yes debris fields immediately following and during wars, would be a very immersive way to collect g5s, like searching a scrapyard for that one left side fuel sender you need. :D
 

Bigmaec

Bigmaec
I'd agree with your OP.

Alas, I do as Facta and fill EFC, BioC and MEF with missions. So I always have a number of g5 mats via Mat trader available. Not really much, but enough to do the occasional ship refit. What I'd love would be a mission reward for raw. You can fill them up at the crystalline shards pretty well, but the nearest to Colonia are 18k LY 😔
 

Stealthie

Stealthie
Factabulous said:
Personally I think the rate is ok now, it's just the fact it's Imperial Shielding, followed by .. Imperial Shielding and then ... Imperial Shielding. So I don't bother with HGE any more, much for fun doing some BGS work and 'accidentally' filling up with EFC / BTC (missions should ideally also have more variety, but since it's only a side effect it's not quite as annoying).
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Well, yeah.

That's what I mean by "doing something with the spawn rates".

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if they decided to reduce the spawn rates a bit, as long as they could find a way to make the full range of G5 mat's more reliably available.

Right now, it seems like they're just giving us the ability to shovel big piles of certain mat's into our inventories (or even huge piles, if you're so-inclined) and then relying on mat' traders to do what game-balance should be doing automatically.

As I said ages ago, if they're intent on going down this road, they might as well simply get rid of individual mat's entirely and, instead, have a single generic "G5 debris" mat' which spawns roughly 5 times less often than it currently does.
 
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