Thanks mate. I think the 'big deal' is how emotionally attached some of us are to ED. It was a huge part of my youth and it's been the best gaming experience I've ever had for most of it's current iteration. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't want to move on, I just want to play the game I love.
On a personal level, power creep hits every game sooner or later, but this one has been particularly cruel in the way it's inflicted a time intensive game mechanism on established players.
It took me years to reach Elite. I've watched youtubers do it in an afternoon, but that's not the way I wanted to play. I had enormous fun and a great deal of satisfaction doing things my own way, including figuring out a whole bunch of game mechanics on my own. (Yeah, I'm one of those BGS weirdos!
)
There isn't a way around the massive time sink created by engineering- if you want or need engineering, you have to gather materials. If you want to do it efficiently, you have to make use of out of game resources- boards and forums, third party software, ever changing walkthroughs on social media.
It's an enormous undertaking.
What's particularly galling is the way it takes just as long to engineer a small ship as one of the Big Three.
For a new player, working toward an Annaconda or similar, engineering is something that can be done along the way.
For someone with a fleet that took almost four years to assemble, it's not going to be quite that simple.
Knowing that I just don't have the time, even if I had the inclination, is utterly crushing.
Which is probably why so many frustrated players flounce off in a huff!
See above, Max. 'Just playing the game' for three years got me enough materials to part engineer one Python. I have over a dozen ships I want to restore to their previous level of ability. Most were specialists of one shade or another, so the blueprint that works for my Vulture, say, is useless for my Vipers. With the time I have available it would take years to get the fleet back to where it was, relatively speaking, this time last year, even if all I do is grind mats in the most efficient manner I can manage. I'll never gather enough materials to complete the task in the course of normal gameplay.
My issue is that my entire fleet has been made obsolete by power creep introduced to offer engineered ship builds a reasonable level of challenge.
The game very cleverly scales difficulty based on your in game rank and your current ship. I'm Elite and my 'current ship' is obsolete and needs engineering to make it competitive. I face outrageously heavily engineered NPCs as a matter of course- their shields are all but impenetrable, but even if I get through them their hit point pool is immense. I'm taking on axe murderers with a nerf gun!
I'm time constrained, engineering a single ship takes me many weeks. I have a large fleet, I don't have years to throw away bringing them up to a reasonable standard.
And there's a pretty strong possibility that other mechanisms will be introduced into the game which will also take a considerable amount of time to retrofit into my fleet.
So I have an uncomfortable choice to make- grind for an extended period just to make my ships competitive, or abandon the bulk of them, which effectively means throwing away four years of progress.
That's an enormous issue for me, Max.
How long have you played Elite? Care to give up four years progress, or (potentially) spend many months, possibly years, min/maxing a game activity you don't enjoy to regain that progress?
Compared to their performance relative to other ships last year, my fast ships are no longer fast, my fighters and warships are no longer well armed, my traders and miner are no longer well defended, my long range explorer cannot keep up with friend's engineered explorer builds.
I know you may not see this as an important issue, but can you see how it completely changes my game experience? I have to run from every encounter, even against NPCs, or face almost certain destruction, I can't take part in community activities, I can't even keep up with my fellow explorers. It's a game breaking issue for me.
