Anyone else trying to G5 everything before the change?
- Thread starter Viking84
- Start date
I hope they compensate this stupid 1-5G technique with very easy material data collecting.
to be honest, I think it's a good idea but I'm too lazy. Most of the stuff I wanted g5 was g5 already. If I get to the point where I really want to pimp out a new ship (chieftain 
, I actually like engineering, including mat gathering, call me crazy but it's not a big deal.
I don't min/max my rolls but getting through ranks 1-5 each time wasn't bad.
, I actually like engineering, including mat gathering, call me crazy but it's not a big deal.I don't min/max my rolls but getting through ranks 1-5 each time wasn't bad.
For the benefit of others who may not already know this from their own experience, I will tell you anyway.
Wipe any MEH upgrade and start from scratch every time. (Using Outfitting) No idea why this helps, but it does. I also never go to Farseer with less than at least (3) A rated FSDs shipped in of whatever class I am working on at the time. I worked with (6) per to get my 6A and 7A upgrades up into the 56%+ range, and of course a TON of mats.
I keep the best roll (s), wipe the rest and keep going. More often than not, the +56% comes with the first roll of a fresh/wiped module.
Again...No idea why this makes a difference, but it does.
P.S. When I was upgrading my Orca, I rolled a +58% OM on my first roll! I quit right there, banked that 5A and called it a day for that session. (Sometimes you get lucky like that. And you also need to know when to call it done!)
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/end thread. Problem solved, nothing more to talk about folks. GG EZ.
Yep.
I'm sure that'll create no issues with anything such as PvP, trading, running missions, exploration, CGs or BGS related stuff.
People using new mod's will be able to content themselves with the warm, fuzzy, feeling that comes with being an "early adopter" rather than actually, y'know, coming out ahead.
Because the customer is always faulty.
Yeah, I've never seen something like that. Best I've been able to see at all is 57% OP which are incredibly rare to get.
That's the core thing here though - there are time sinks and there are grinds. In Elite, doing anything other than just flying around enjoying the scenery or doing a quick bit of combat feels like a second job; most of the advancement in the game is gated behind tasks that are extremely repetitive and get old fast. That "getting old fast" part is where you leave compelling gameplay behind and get with the grindin'. The whole thing really boils down to the original problem of ED being a mile wide and an inch deep - if to get a Corvette you had to go through a 50 hour fully voiced questline at the end of which Hudson shakes you hand and gives you the keys to the ship, no-one would be complaining about the Fed ship grind. The problem is that all that is available to progress are "kill x ships of faction y", "take object x to location y" (where x can be data, people or commodities) and "point device at inanimate object until timer runs down or object transforms into resources". FDev need to figure out how to make the core mechanics of the game less repetitive and more fun. There's a reason why I still load up Skyrim, go into the same holes in the ground and beat up the same bandits, and it never feels like a second job (even though Skyrim also has progression and crafting).
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Yeah but excessively repetitive time sinks can and will stop working, besides, new features will keep interested the croud.
No, the game is what keeps people playing, NOT engineering and certainly not throwaway time sinks. Gathering the mats to do the mods you want is the only time sink necessary. It's how engineering works now, it's how it has worked for the past year and a half. The engineering feature has never needed a grade grind in it, and I truly believe it doesn't need a grade grind added to it IN ADDITION TO the already existing material hunting time sink.
Nobody wants instant grade 5 mods, but we don't want it made more time consuming than it ever has been either. That seriously feels like the wrong direction for the game to move towards: increasing grind walls.
The positive sides are that storage will be increased, you can store at least 100 items of every engineer material, plus if you don't want to look/grind for them yourself you can obtain/exchange for an materials trader, so obtaining engineering materials will be less labour intensive. As it stands, three rolls will give you one engineer grade increase, so I don't think it is going to be any more grinding, plus you can engineer a selected blueprint at many more locations than the engineers base, as it is at present. For every negative there are more positives, the way I am looking at it. We won't know for certain until it is introduced. We all maybe pleasantly surprised.
That's not a "positive side of the new system".
It's just rationalising something that's fundamentally bonkers.
It's like inventing shoes and then, somehow, forcing everybody to take the laces out of their shoes every time they take them off, purely to make putting shoes back on again more time consuming.
And then inventing a machine that automatically laces shoes so that people won't be quite so inconvenienced while doing something that they needn't actually be doing at all.
If they want engineering to be simpler and more straightforward, just leave mat' collection as it is and implement the other proposed changes.
If they want engineering to be harder, just make the bloody mats more challenging to collect and forget about this contrived grind.
And, to be clear, when I say "make mat' collection more challenging", that DOES NOT mean just dialing-up the bloody rotten RNG a few notches.
What it means is sitting down and thinking up some gameplay mechanics which actually make mat' collection engaging as well as being difficult.
Ideally, mat's should be easy to locate but difficult to collect.
Well, I’m covering myself and G5’ing copy modules for all my ships, then storing them for later
The plan then is when the new system begins I will be able to start re-rolling these modules from G4 and see if indeed better results will follow compared to my what will be my grandfathered casino rolls.
In addition, I will add a few more ships with modules I think may fit into future ships like the cheifton etc.
.....While emergency G5’ing I had a nice result on the 5A FSD with a 54% optimised mass. It will now jump just over 50 light years while fully loaded.....nice
Flimley
The plan then is when the new system begins I will be able to start re-rolling these modules from G4 and see if indeed better results will follow compared to my what will be my grandfathered casino rolls.
In addition, I will add a few more ships with modules I think may fit into future ships like the cheifton etc.
.....While emergency G5’ing I had a nice result on the 5A FSD with a 54% optimised mass. It will now jump just over 50 light years while fully loaded.....nice
Flimley
As it stands three rolls of the preceding grade on any single mod at an engineer gives you that grade for every mod the engineer offers. A one-shot thing. Unless you're using favours for special effects on weapons, you literally only need to go through grades one to four on one occasion and you've unlocked those grades forever, for everything the engineer makes.
Under the new system you will need to go through grades one to four every single time you upgrade a module.
I find it difficult to believe that material brokers will offset the enormous increase in material quantities and variety that will be needed.
I also find it difficult to believe that FD would increase materials storage to 100 units of each material if the planned Engineering changes didn't massively increase the grind. They have resisted requests to increase the mat limit for quite some time (despite adding new mats with 2.4) and they are now planning on allowing players to carry several thousand units of materials when we are currently limited to 1000 total mats of all types combined. That alone should tell us the new Engineers grind will be terrible.
The problem here is that enough people were vocal about RNG that they failed to realize that RNG and grind are effectively interchangeable. The current level of grind is quite reasonable given all the changes they've made to Engineers since 2.1 launched and the only downside to what we have now is that it comes with a certain amount of RNG which can be dealt with in various ways. The new grind will just be straight-up grind. There will be no way to circumvent it or to just accept the RNG we currently have. The other issue many players fail to realize is that RNG is as likely to work in your favor as it is to work against you. It isn't necessarily a negative aspect of the current system, just one that adds a certain amount of unpredictability to the results. I have had many grade 5 rolls generated which were good rolls on the first attempt and this is dramatically less work than what we are going to have when Engineers is reworked. We will then need to grind a new module through a dozen individual rolls of grind for essentially the same output that we can now generate with a single roll.
The new system will have less RNG but far more grind and the trade off will absolutely not be worth it. That's why I didn't mind the RNG aspect of Engineers, I found ways around it by strategically deciding which modules to upgrade or even used it to my advantage with secondary effects. The RNG we have hasn't stopped me from finding a way to get the system to do more or less what I wanted. The new Engineering system will have very little user input or strategies involved. It will be an issue of needing to accept a massive amount of grind in exchange for a more narrowly-defined RNG output and fewer Engineering options. If FD thinks this somehow "improves" the game then I expect that much of what we will see with Beyond will be more of a step backwards in terms of gameplay rather than an actual improvement. In a sense I suppose this shouldn't surprise me, it's not like they're adding any real "content" with Beyond so their only real option is to dramatically increase the grind for what we already have in the game.
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