I love the one guy who said he doesn't grind, he just loads his ship full of gold and sits at a beacon so he can repetitively farm NPC pirates for Engineering mats.
Because that's totally NOT grinding/farming guys....
It's not my cup of tea, but it does sound like he has fun doing it.
If you enjoy it, it's not grinding. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it. Optional leisure activity game is optional.
I love the one guy who said he doesn't grind, he just loads his ship full of gold and sits at a beacon so he can repetitively farm NPC pirates for Engineering mats.
Because that's totally NOT grinding/farming guys....
I can see what you're getting at, especially as I often disregard opportunities myself simply because it's not really convenient at the time. But overall, I think it mainly goes to mindset.
To me, Elite feels like a quasi-frontier situation. Civilization is relatively close at hand, but you can quickly find yourself off in remote areas with little prospect of coming across anyone else, maybe for months.* In that context it makes sense to gather as you find things, because resources can be scarce, and you may not know when you'll come across them again.
If I'm out in deep space exploring and I come across a signal source, I'm probably going to check it out anyway because it's unusual or unexpected. If it turns out there are materials to be gathered there, I might as well take a moment to see if there's anything worth picking up while I'm there.
If I'm making one of my rare forays into RES/CZ combat, no, I'm not going to stop mid-fight to gather, but once I've dealt with the ships in my immediate area, I'll probably zip over to the largest or most valuable collection of debris and pop out a limpet or two while I'm reloading/repairing/letting my shields top off a bit before looking for my next series of targets.
Mining? Not even a question. The limpets will take care of anything that turns up automatically. Completely free bonus, IMO.
So while I'd agree, it can break the flow of the game, it only does so if you let it. Even if you only pick up 10% of what you come across because that's all that conveniently fits into a gap in your current flow - it's 10% more than you'd have if you just ignored it all on principle.
Distant Worlds 2 unexpectedly did wonders for my material supplies. I had almost 6 months of being out in the black just incidentally collecting stuff with no real opportunities to use any of it. To the point it was over a year later before I started finding myself running low on certain things again. And I never, ever, at any point during the expedition set aside time to go farm materials. Everything I gathered was stuff I picked up in the normal flow of what I was doing at the time.
I agree with some parts of your post but this part -
If I'm making one of my rare forays into RES/CZ combat, no, I'm not going to stop mid-fight to gather, but once I've dealt with the ships in my immediate area, I'll probably zip over to the largest or most valuable collection of debris and pop out a limpet or two while I'm reloading/repairing/letting my shields top off a bit before looking for my next series of targets.
I made a point on this earlier about farming any half decent materials after a few kills.
I check my contact panel as I go and if an Elite sidewinder or whatever ship drops a class 3,4 or 5 material after I've blatted him, then I'll stop to pick it up.
"Hmm, what's he dropped" Fear of missing out lol.
Remember they self destruct after a time so "make hay" or you'll be left with 15 grade 1 cabbages as a material reward
Now! You might like cabbages........
Pug
I love the one guy who said he doesn't grind, he just loads his ship full of gold and sits at a beacon so he can repetitively farm NPC pirates for Engineering mats.
Because that's totally NOT grinding/farming guys....
Is playing a game of football in FIFA grinding? Or driving around a circuit in Forza? Those games are build around that core activity, just like ED is a game build around flying a ship and shooting stuff.
If playing the core game activity is grinding to you, and you claim you don't like grinding, isnt the solution obvious? Or are you over at the FIFA forums as well complaining you have to 'grind matches' to be able to buy the best players?
I don't really mind spreadsheets. It's constantly tabbing out to my browser for information on a website that bothers me. Half my time playing Elite is not even IN-GAME activities.
It's not my cup of tea, but it does sound like he has fun doing it.
If you enjoy it, it's not grinding. If you don't enjoy it, don't do it. Optional leisure activity game is optional.
You're purposefully obfuscating this. Fun has nothing to do with whether or not something is a grind. State of mind doesn't make repetitive tasks not in-fact repetitive.
Bypassing the fact that the only way to DO that tactic all that effectively, is to already have an Engineered ship.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I'm not trying to come off rude, I actually love that this thread spawned such a lenghy debate of different points of view. But I've had quite of enough of those telling me how I SHOULD be feeling or experiencing the Engineering system or the game in general. Especially when they don't actually know a thing about how I play it at all.
If you want high grade raw materials in any reasonable quantity you're going to spend a lot of time driving around on barren planets shooting rocks. You'll ignore most of the rocks, because they're full of crap stuff you don't want - the odd one will have what you're looking for and then you begin again
Yeah you can get them from material traders, but as you know they trade down - not up (another grind). It's amazing that you can't see that FD saw that people were making money easily so they introduced another currency and called it 'materials'
I guarantee Oddysey will introduce another currency for weapons that we will have to grind for - it's not gameplay it's just padding
Aaaaaand that's exactly when this game went from fun and exciting to something I can barely justify logging in for. The grind is horrible. The complete lack of any in-game direction for this Engineering stuff is unbelievable. I'm juggling 10 different third-party tools and YouTube videos just to get by, and I still don't fully understand the process.
If there's one thing I learned from playing Eve Online it's this: Spreadsheets for a video game is NOT fun and should never be required. Yet here I am again, looking at people's spreadsheets for this soul-sucking endeavor.
This isn't fun. I'm no longer having fun. And I would love to just ignore engineering and merrily go about my business but the upgrades are so game-breaking that they are pretty much required to do anything efficiently so that's not a real option.
This is all to get Felicity Farseer to level 5. To say nothing of all the other Engineers I'm expected to do space chores for to unlock their goodies. The vague and nebulous materials grind is the real problem. I would much rather these Engineers just hand out quests - err "missions" - like every other game on Earth. But nope, instead I'm logging in and out of the game repeatedly to farm the same High Grade Emissions source. Because that's just super fun stuff!
Who thought this was a good idea? Should I just abandon this fools gold and have fun again?
Soooo.... My only question is, why exaggerate how many third party tools you're using? I mean, don't get me wrong, if you really are using 10 "tools" as well as youtube and a couple of browser pages, then I apologise and my question then changes to "Dear god why?", because you can literally get everything you need to know about engineering, and where to source the materials, from two websites. I have two tools, one of which is the market connector and doesn't actually do anything itself other than log station data to give to EDDB, and the other, I even keep forgetting to turn on as it's use is limited, and three websites (one for making the actual ship builds and the other two for finding everything I need), plus EDDB when I go trading and EDSM for when I need to find a particular faction.
Worst case scenario is you will need 5 websites, and 1 tool and that gets you any information you need. And considering most of those websites will only be used occasionally anyway, I really don't understand the fuss.
I mean, compare this to any other MMO. Without fail there is always a grind some where, for some thing. That's part of how MMO games work, it's how they keep you playing beyond "Oh hey, I've completed the story, bye" And as this is an open world sandbox "make your own story" type of game, all I can say really is either, if you don't like grind, don't play an MMO; Or do what you can without grinding, but don't complain if someone who has done the grind is doing better than you are.
But, back to topic, for the most part you really don't need stage 5 to beat the PVE, so unless you're planning to go toe-to-toe with other people in combat, the far easier level 3 is all you really need, and even then, if you select your missions wisely you won't even need that. And if you are plannign to go PVP combat, then you can't really complain if osmeone who has put in the effort beats you.
Sorry, no such thing, I'm afraid, but to each their own. And on the other hand, the meta is the game to some people.
But either way, I don't think anyone could feasibly get any Engineering done "organically," as it's very much contrived and arbitrary busy work. At least that's very much the case for me. It's standard MMO time sink stuff, and that's fine to an extent, but it's a whole lot of nothing I would care to reasonably do in the game if it weren't for the carrot at the end of the stick.
Well, i happen to disagree. For a start, i had (unknowingly) unlocked a number of engineers before engineers even was a thing. I was doing those things because i enjoyed them, not because of engineers.
I'd already mined 500t of rock. I'd already travelled 5000 LY. And things like getting friendly with a certain faction or earning so many bonds/bounties for a faction were just part of my regular play.
You're purposefully obfuscating this. Fun has nothing to do with whether or not something is a grind. State of mind doesn't make repetitive tasks not in-fact repetitive.
Bypassing the fact that the only way to DO that tactic all that effectively, is to already have an Engineered ship.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I'm not trying to come off rude, I actually love that this thread spawned such a lenghy debate of different points of view. But I've had quite of enough of those telling me how I SHOULD be feeling or experiencing the Engineering system or the game in general. Especially when they don't actually know a thing about how I play it at all.
You are entitled to your feelings. You are entitled to your opinion.
The fact that my opinion differs from yours doesn't though mean I don't care or I'm being dishonest.
It simply means that we have different gaming perspectives.
Considering you have been very careful to specifically not talk about what/how you ED game, combined with the fact that you seem to believe engineering is a must, leads me to believe you are a PvP player and you want to be 'competitive'.
It's the only activity where engineering is a 'must' in ED, past a certain level.
If you want high grade raw materials in any reasonable quantity you're going to spend a lot of time driving around on barren planets shooting rocks. You'll ignore most of the rocks, because they're full of crap stuff you don't want - the odd one will have what you're looking for and then you begin again
Yeah you can get them from material traders, but as you know they trade down - not up (another grind). It's amazing that you can't see that FD saw that people were making money easily so they introduced another currency and called it 'materials'
I guarantee Oddysey will introduce another currency for weapons that we will have to grind for - it's not gameplay it's just padding
Considering you have been very careful to specifically not talk about what/how you ED game, combined with the fact that you seem to believe engineering is a must, leads me to believe you are a PvP player and you want to be 'competitive'.
This is exactly what I'm talking about right here. Just...wow.
I play in solo for now to avoid gankers who frequent systems Engineers are in, I have ZERO interest in PVP to be honest. I can already tell this is one of those games where I would have to put in way more effort than I'm willing to invest to be all that good in PVP anyway.
And you act like I'm being evasive when I don't recall anyone directly asking me what I do in the game, granted I haven't kept up with every single post. Also, what bearing does that even have? Things like massive improvements in jump distance and better power distributors etc etc benefit every single aspect of ED. Are you saying there's some activity I should be doing that doesn't benefit from Engineering? Just...confused about this narrative you have going on about me, a stranger you make assumptions about.
Which is why despite how you couch it, most all gamers are going to consider Engineering a must-do. So far the entire game is experiencing space IN SHIPS, so the idea that we can be expected to ignore huge SHIP upgrades is just....see what you're doing? This is exactly what I'm talking about.
You get I would perfectly happy with ED if Engineering simply didn't exist at all, right? This isn't about me being 'competitive', you either just aren't hearing me out or - more commonly - just want to demonize strangers you don't agree with.
And if your answer to my dilemma, like others, is to simply ignore the mechanic altogether - that's a daming indictment on how the system is currently implemented. Why would anyone put something in a game that's best left ignored?
You're purposefully obfuscating this. Fun has nothing to do with whether or not something is a grind. State of mind doesn't make repetitive tasks not in-fact repetitive.
Bypassing the fact that the only way to DO that tactic all that effectively, is to already have an Engineered ship.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I'm not trying to come off rude, I actually love that this thread spawned such a lenghy debate of different points of view. But I've had quite of enough of those telling me how I SHOULD be feeling or experiencing the Engineering system or the game in general. Especially when they don't actually know a thing about how I play it at all.
OK, I'll be honest as you ask. I like the variety of activities needed to unlock engineers, I like the options they give me to tinker with interesting ship builds and I don't have any problem collecting materials. (It's well over a year since I took off thinking "I want to find material X for engineering upgrade Y"). So the current system is definitely to my liking. I'll stop short of saying it's "fine" seeing that you don't like it. Personal preferences are at work; that's all.
I don't want to tell you how to play the game or what your experience of engineers should be, except to say what I always say about any game: if you're not enjoying it, don't play it! Unless you have vastly more leisure time than me, that time is far too precious to spend on something you don't like. This criterion covers both my choice of game and what I choose to do in it. Never grind; it ruins the experience in any game.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I actually preferred it when I started a few years ago, before you had a safe zone for beginners, before the mining and the get rich quick tricks, when by the time you had accumulated enough credits to be able to afford one of the better ships you had actually learnt how to survive within the game and to play within the limits of what you have earnt rather than expecting everything given to you on a plate.
You're purposefully obfuscating this. Fun has nothing to do with whether or not something is a grind. State of mind doesn't make repetitive tasks not in-fact repetitive.
Bypassing the fact that the only way to DO that tactic all that effectively, is to already have an Engineered ship.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I'm not trying to come off rude, I actually love that this thread spawned such a lenghy debate of different points of view. But I've had quite of enough of those telling me how I SHOULD be feeling or experiencing the Engineering system or the game in general. Especially when they don't actually know a thing about how I play it at all.
This is a completely wrong and an erroneous statement of the information at hand.
I believe that some people in their view are saying you Do not need to grind, you can go about your normal business and collect things.
Your making an assumption about state of mind - Who's state of mind?
Yours, mine, Santa's, Trumps, Kim Jong-un's who's? this is the royal 'We' again.
People were trying to help and you are going out of your way to be dopey and argumentative.
Take the advice or Don't (that will of course involve your State of Mind) happy grinding.
Pug
I love the one guy who said he doesn't grind, he just loads his ship full of gold and sits at a beacon so he can repetitively farm NPC pirates for Engineering mats.
Because that's totally NOT grinding/farming guys....
And this is the problem with the internet. Anything but mindless gushing praise or hatred of something automatically makes you some kind of extremist on the other side of the issue.
I've never said I think the current system is "fine", or "to my liking", or that I "could care less what newer players think", and I take exception to the suggestion I've been "dishonest" in my responses.
Rather than thinking everything is 'just fine', I simply don't think the problem is nearly as bad as you're making it out to be. And this is the truly critical part - Those positions are not the same thing.
I think there's plenty of room for improvement across the board in how Engineering is handled, but as things stand, it appears that's unlikely to be coming. So I, and many others, have offered advice and perspectives in good faith to help you come to terms with the state of the game as it is, and effectively reduce the "grind" associated with material gathering.
So you can continue to rail about this self imposed misery, and label all who offer help in dealing with it as liars and apologists, or you can accept the situation for what it is and either continue to make it as unpleasant for yourself as possible, or you can maybe try not treating it as something to be "won" in an afternoon. Or you can opt out by skipping engineering entirely.
Regardless, after 10 pages you've been substantially presented with all of the answers you're likely to get, and there's little to be gained by shooting the messengers because you don't like the answers.
You're purposefully obfuscating this. Fun has nothing to do with whether or not something is a grind. State of mind doesn't make repetitive tasks not in-fact repetitive.
Bypassing the fact that the only way to DO that tactic all that effectively, is to already have an Engineered ship.
I think a lot of you would be better off just being honest and stating that you feel the current system is fine or to your liking - or you already got through it all and could care less what newer players think - rather than coming up with dishonest and pseudo-philosophical angles to convince those who disagree that the blue sky isn't actually blue.
I'm not trying to come off rude, I actually love that this thread spawned such a lenghy debate of different points of view. But I've had quite of enough of those telling me how I SHOULD be feeling or experiencing the Engineering system or the game in general. Especially when they don't actually know a thing about how I play it at all.
You are the one doing the obfuscating, mixing words and meanings. Doing stuff repetitively is not the same as grinding. 'Repetitive tasks' are the only thing that is done in the game of Tetris.. yet it is the most successful game of all time.
I am very new to the game, got it for free on Epic last month... and you don't see me complaining. I love the game because it is a continuation of Elite 1,2,3 which I played a lot in the past. If anything.. the game is too easy and too forgiving.
You say you have had enough of people telling you how you should be feeling about the game.. fair enough.. well guess what, I for one have had enough about hearing how you feel about the game. You were presented with solutions, you don't want those. You don't like the game? Ok .. stop complaining, stop playing.. case closed.
