Engineers David, David, oh dear.

[rrobes]

Then you're doing something wrong. I could easily roll 4 or 5 Grade5 FSDs in 20 hours. Hell Grade 3 is arguably harder since it requires modular terminals instead of Magnetic Emitter Coils. Polonium is probably the hardest but 8 polonium can be found quickly if you can read the wave scanner and don't do what most people do which is drive around randomly (on the right planet) hoping to get lucky. Chemical manipulators for 4 upgrades is trivial in an anarchy system hunting cargo ships. And strange wake solutions just pile up if you scan wakes regularly when leaving port.

If I decided to I'm fairly certain I could do 4 in 10 hours or less.

The metal rich worlds I've been to searching for Polonium and Yttrium have yielded literally hundreds of metallic meteorites, chondrites and outcroppings, the yields have been 1 or 2 out of a hundred for Polonium and Yttrium. That has been my direct experience. I have also found crash sites, canister caches, crashed satellites with data points, drilling sites. So I think I've gotten a bit of a hang of readings the chirps, the clicking of the counter and the bands across the scanner. I have also read that others have experienced similar drop rates. I am very happy that you can do such wonderful things, maybe you have been luckier than most.

The one thought that is forming in my mind is that certain events will not happen until you reach a trigger point in the game. Until a couple of days ago, I had never come across ancient relics, rebel transmissions, technical, data canisters. All of a sudden all this is coming on, and today, I started to get interdicted while quietly sitting at a USS scanning for those elusive polymer caps and military supercaps, never happened before in 1k+ hours of play.

Point is, you may be searching for stuff you may not be able to obtain at the point of the game you are in. BTW, any number of mats I couldn't find before are a dime a dozen in missions. This just adds to the futile nature of grinding, grind is bad, useless grind is just silly.

"Beam me up, Scotty!"

 

[Dbrn47]

The sky is most assuredly falling and I've not a single helmet to spare.

 

[Shanaeri]

Only frontier can tell how well the engineers update has been doing, as only they will have the concurrent player metrics.

I believe the engineers crafting mechanic is flawed in multiple ways which I'm not going to go into here but what I do know is most people won't write about their experiences on a forum, they'll either just carry on and shrug or quietly just stop playing.

I do hope (and I expect they are) Frontier are reading the posts here, and on Reddit. Looking at the videos from serious to the silly before going back into a room and taking a long hard look at all their customers feedback.

 

[halcyon]

Can we start filtering all these RNG moans into one thread please?

It's always the same faces.

Can we start filtering the fanboyz constant moaning about people criticising the game into one thread please?

It's always the same faces.

 

[CMDR Jake Rake]

RNG isn't in itself a bad thing.

An RNG poorly implemented is a bad thing.

Take borderlands or diablo. The RNG is at the "other end" the weapon values are calculated to drop when you find the weapon. It's a one-layer RNG system which feels satisfying when you find something good, and neutral when you find something that isn't helpful. If you can't find anything, you can always just bide your time, save up, and buy it from the market.

Elite is the opposite. The RNG is AFTER you've done all the work. Furthermore, the RNG is layered in each instance, making the probabilities of finding the stuff you need much lower. Flipping a coin and getting heads is 50-50 and fair, but as soon as you have to get heads multiple times in a row, the chances diminish drastically.

You need 3 materials and a good crafting roll in elite to be satisfied with the module you made. This is four "heads" results.
1 head in a row: 50%
2 heads in a row: 25%
3 heads in a row: 12.5%
4 heads in a row: 6.25%

But with elite, it's not just one coin. There's a chance you'll get a different material entirely. Instead, the "coin" has a heads, tails, security firmware, arsenic, nickel, yittrium, and on and on. . . so from the start the chances of getting a single material per encounter is under 50/50 for most materials. So instead it looks (hypothetically) like:

Yittrium: 5%
Security firmware: 50%
Atypical Scan: 35%
Satisfying crafting roll: 40%

Multiply those together, and you have a 3% percent chance of getting what you need on the first pass. Now, in a game like diablo or borderlands where loot drops happen more often, this would be less of an issue, as you could make more attempts at finding the things you need in a shorter amount of time. But in elite, finding each of these materials takes a much longer time. I do not want to spend six hours for a 3% chance to get something worthwhile.

Ways to fix:

Make the lower-teir upgrades more with the time investment (higher tiers may be fine, they get pretty powerful)
Increase drop rates and amount of lower-level materials. Not a big fix, but may alleviate some frustration.
Always offer a surefire way to get a material on your current active blueprint. It may technically be less-efficient or difficult to do a mission, but it'll alleviate frustration knowing that there is a sure way to get a material that's needed.
Give hints that show where materials can be found. We need more of these. Maybe an informat NPC can say, "I hear they are offering magnetic coil wires if over in Eravate if you can do them a few favors."​

It's not the RNG that's the entire problem. It's the way it's implemented. It's implemented to be frustrating, with little recourse for players to feel a sense of agency and a large time commitment with a comparatively little reward.

There is the constructive critisism you are looking for. I read the whole thread and found that there are many people in here just to fight. In my opinion criticising the RNG element or what ever is valid. For me it's not a huge deal because i see it as an "endgame mechanic". For the people that are fine with the RNG and don't like the "whining threads" you're not alone in this forum and it doesn't belong solely to you. If it's within the rules of this forum and no moderator steps in people can and should post there opinions about a matter. Ofc that includes the people complaining about no constructive critisism and the people who write it down. Complaining about people not being constructive in their criticism and just calling them cry babies makes you look like less of what you're trying to complain about. - funny that no one replied to the construcive criticism - that is btw the same in every forum -

 

[Deareim]

From the past, we know that FD do not change/fix broken update. Just small changes.
PP, wings are good examples...

They will never change the way Rngineers is working. Just live with that.

 

[relayer]

I feel ED has more than it's share of bitter negative people who like nothing more than to complain and moan.

I can't help wondering if it's due to the older demographic

Ah, actually, it seems like the younger demographic who feels entitled, has burned out on min/maxing, goes through games like tissue paper and are used to being The Hero Of The Story and some kind of progression cannot really grasp what the Elite series is - a huge, uncaring universe, and you a speck in it.

Kinda like life in that way

 

[JohnCarter]

Ah, actually, it seems like the younger demographic who feels entitled, has burned out on min/maxing, goes through games like tissue paper and are used to being The Hero Of The Story and some kind of progression cannot really grasp what the Elite series is - a huge, uncaring universe, and you a speck in it.

Kinda like life in that way

Oh you went there!!!!!!...............

 

[Wicz]

Ah, actually, it seems like the younger demographic who feels entitled, has burned out on min/maxing, goes through games like tissue paper and are used to being The Hero Of The Story and some kind of progression cannot really grasp what the Elite series is - a huge, uncaring universe, and you a speck in it.

Kinda like life in that way

So any problems with the game are caused by young/old players, who are either playing the game incorrectly/too fast or just unhappy in general!

The issues couldn't possibly have anything to do with a string of bad design decisions and poor implementations?

Problem solved /facepalm