For a while now Engineers have dropped the requirement for commodities. I'm absolute in favour of this. To get to level 5 with each Engineer still takes effort and utilising different aspects of the game- mining, missions etc.
I very much hope the commodities requirement is not bought back. Frankly the whole thing is such a lottery it seems fair to make it easier to spin the wheel.
If commodities were to be bought back my opinion would be two fold - 1) there should be some guarantee of the Engineers doing what is promised. 2) There has to be some sort of store for the commodities while you gather them.
My hope is things are not changed. People seem to be getting it all to work now so leave as is. But I wondered what others now think of it and does anyone know if changes are in the pipeline?
To be honest ~90% of commodities were buyable items at certain markets. There were about 4 that could only be gotten through missions but they as you noted were painful as you were pretty much randomly flying from port to port (or relogging) and hoping to get lucky..
All that is really required is to either
1) Make all commodities purchasable from somewhere even if it's a megaship 300ly away.
or
2) Make certain mission boards (again wherever) have a 50% chance of giving rewards of these items. Like an Engineers board perhaps so that Farseer regularly has missions giving X commodity and Qwent often has Y commodity.
I really don't mind flying a bit to pick items up provided I know there's a location/purpose. I hate flying randomly hoping to roll a 6 and get lucky with what I need, having a known place to get said items or get the missions for said items would do it for me.
The biggest mistake FDev made in my eyes was not to scale the engineer ranking system. It's 3 upgrades of each level and you get to the next one, so in other words if you pre-gather the right materials within 12 modifications you have them maxed at rank 5 and you don't even need to keep the mods just discard them. It's how I got from nothing to all engineers at rank 5 in a 2 week period. Pre-gather and checklist them off one after the other.
In the lore ship mods are exceptionally rare and hard to get. But since this is Elite suddenly every player and their cat has engineer modifications.
I'd have been happy with everyone being able to get level 1-2 mods but make it ridiculously hard to get to level 4 and near impossible for 5. Make it a long long term goal and clearly advertise that it's there to limit the number of mods around, grind at your own peril etc.
I'd be happy just having one or two engineers ranked 5 and the rest smidged between 1 and 3. Maybe allow them all to be independently unlocked instead of a branching tree too if it's made that hard.
That would hopefully also have stopped people doing silly things like grinding out 400 odd of one material to get every ship with dirty drive tuning 5 at the maximum +142% because um... insanity is contagious...
Anyway, my 2c I think it's already broken so may as well make it easy and fun rather than fitting the lore and universe.
