My end goal was to participate in challenging PvP and PvE combat and continue to engage with my favourite aspect of the game, which is the FA-off flight model. I have achieved this by engaging with Frontier's progression mechanics since pre-2.1, as I stated in a previous post. I have the luxury of a lot of free time and ample support from an experienced player group. To be absolutely clear - I am not the OP and I am not looking for help to play the game, believe me, I know how to play the game.
So what are the problems?
Many people, myself included, don't think it's desirable that Elite's progression mechanics don't involve any risk:reward ratio, and that engineering specifically gates combat-centric modules and upgrades behind hundreds of hours of non-combat, low-input, risk-free activities. Again, I perfectly understand that some people in Elite want to just float around in space and salvage things from USS - that's fine and dandy, it's an atmospheric game and there's room for low-key activities. I begrudge no-one their space sandbox. Why these activities are required to further a career in combat, however, is another story.
That's issue one. The disconnect between chosen career and necessary activity for advancement. (Edit: The precedent for this particular complaint was set pre-2.1, and with the 'blaze your own...' tagline. Pre 2.1 Elite certainly had its issues, but it was possible for players to gravitate to a specific career and to a large extent remain there. 2.1 was a rude awakening for many players due to its prescriptive nature.)
Issue two is Frontier's constant choice to encourage repetitious, skill-less play, by how they stack the numbers on top of their barebones mechanics. You can choose not to do it, or choose to not do it in a single sitting (which you have to for sanity's sake), but let's take for example the guardian sites. How many times an individual player can rehash the guardian blueprint 'mini-game' before it gets boring is up for debate, but the fact is Frontier has made mindless, riskless repetition obligatory in order to get even a single module... and that's to say nothing of their proposed synthesis-based guns.
Back to engineering, if I want to G5 a module I need 10 rolls of the final grade to safely reach the maximum, which means what, 200 - 300 Grade 5 rolls per ship? Not including grades 1 thru 4. Again, you don't have to max the ship out, but what player profile is going to enjoy collecting that many things from a static, risk-less HGE in parallel to their usual game activities? I'm sure there are people who do enjoy it, but the numbers involved, purely from a design perspective, smell strongly of gating achieved by artificial prolongation of non-mechanics. This isn't content in any meaningful sense of the word.
Edit: it shouldn't even be surprising to anyone, as Frontier themselves have reined in the numberwang as a result of widespread player discontentment. Do you remember how many blueprints were needed when guardian sites initially dropped? Do you remember when engineering materials dropped 1 unit only and there were no traders? Do you remember when HGEs weren't scannable with the FSS and you literally had to sit and stare at nothing and wait? I 'member.
If you can defend these mechanics and say there's zero responsibility for the mass discontentment on Fdev's side... or that subsequent reworks were unnecessary tweaking in what is and was a perfect game, I will happily listen to your arguments. If I'm told again that "hey mang, it's just cuz, like, you ain't playin' it like me, lol, just go play Mario Kart" I might pop a blood vessel though, so please be careful if you start typing that...
Last edited:
