General Easy fix to the engineering material grind

[Helmut Grokenberger]

That's why they should take it out. (And agreed, 1-2-3-4-5 would be fine for a costs basis too)

Maybe figuring this out is the touring test of the game . In all honesty, this is pretty obvious - makes me wonder if all those who complain about the grind of G5 engineering ever look at the numbers.

There is one case where it matters - when you first unlock an engineer, it'll take 3-4 G1 rolls just to do that grade, because the rolls are more effective at higher rep.
But engineer rep is itself a holdover from the pre-3.0 model as well (where you could spend it for experimentals, and where you could roll G5 without first rolling G1-4) and again the Odyssey engineers don't have or need it.

This was all before my time, so I cannot comment on it. But yes, unlocking the engineer is more expensive. But that can be seen as a one time expense. I'm honestly not too worried about this. Also, It should be more known that some engineer unlock grind can be skipped by selling them exploration data. I don't really remember which ones though, off the top of my head I only know Felicity is one of them.

(I haven't engineered new modules for a while but even despite having near-full material reserves I tend to stop at G4 on new ships because the chances of me using the ship enough that I'll notice the G5 boost is minimal for most modules. Hmm. Maybe that's why I have near-full material reserves...)

I recently had a passionate discussion on the forums about shield engineering, if you remember . During that I did some engineering maths and found (again) how far G3 actually gets you - engineering really is the embodiment of diminishing returns.

 

[Ski'Thor]

The grind in this game is pretty high, but there are a lot of guides how to do it right and than it's pretty easy. Sure, it takes (a lot of) time, but it's not very hard to do.
And you are not really forced to do engineering. If you have the time, all right, if not, well, deal with it.

 

[Hellrider]

Then introduce a G6 blueprint (offered by anyone who does G5) which costs 100x raw, 100x manufactured and 100x data (all at G5 rarity), and gives a 0.1% improvement over G5, so that people who insist on having the absolute best still have some grind to complain about.

I love this idea

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Then introduce a G6 blueprint (offered by anyone who does G5) which costs 100x raw, 100x manufactured and 100x data (all at G5 rarity), and gives a 0.1% improvement over G5, so that people who insist on having the absolute best still have some grind to complain about.

"Why is G6 so expensive? Why does it only give so little improvement? This is such a bad design, the devs are so incompetent!!!! Here's an easy fix for the game to make it successful: Make G6 much cheaper and more efffective!"

Sounds familiar?

 

[Ian Doncaster]

Making stuff readily available from missions only is a bad idea, there should be alternatives for any level of player.

It doesn't take that difficult a mission to get G5 material rewards available as an option. The basic "scan this surface data point" ones can do it, as can hauling missions completable in a single run by a Krait/T-7 type medium ship, or two runs in a T-6. And there aren't many key non-combat blueprints which use manufactured as their G5 component as it is.

But I don't think they need G5 material acquisition to be easy, either - in fact, it'd be more "conventional" game design if it wasn't! - after all, you can get a fully-G4 engineered ship (by definition) without picking up a single G5 material, and that then gives you the capabilities to take on pretty much any challenge in the game anyway for picking up the G5s. Encouraging breadth-first rather than depth-first engineering is (see below conversation with Helmut) one of the things that the current design doesn't help with, I think [1].

[1] It's probably too late to change, but what I think they should do is redo it so that "common knowledge" engineers have all the G1-2 blueprints, the next tier up have all the G3-4 blueprints, and the finale engineers like Sarge and Jameson and Palin (and the Colonia ones) have all the G5 blueprints. That'd encourage people to start with the easy high-impact blueprints and stop the weirdness where Jameson has some of the toughest unlock requirements in the game ... for some marginal improvements to niche modules.

Maybe figuring this out is the touring test of the game . In all honesty, this is pretty obvious - makes me wonder if all those who complain about the grind of G5 engineering ever look at the numbers.

Exponential costs for at-best linear performance improvement is the game style even before engineers (look at those A-rated fuel scoop prices, even with today's inflated credit earning rates you'd rarely actually make back the money spent on an A-rated scoop in time saved later, unless you're going on a very long honk-scoop-jump journey)

I recently had a passionate discussion on the forums about shield engineering, if you remember . During that I did some engineering maths and found (again) how far G3 actually gets you - engineering really is the embodiment of diminishing returns.

Shortly after the engineers were added to Colonia, I did an experiment of building a ship purely with what you could get locally - so B/C-rated components engineered up to mostly G3 max. The difference in performance in PvE [1] between that Krait and its A-rated G5 equivalent was measurable on paper and almost entirely irrelevant in actual flight.

[1] Though I successfully ran away from a couple of PvP attacks in it too.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Another suggestion is to make every engineering grade only require a single roll to 100%, just like experimental effects already are, making engineering use a lot less materials and be predictable

Hot take: The randomness is an illusion . This randomness is only an issue for G5 anyway; it does not really matter if G3 completes in two or three rolls. The usual I get for G1 to G4 is like 1-2-2-3 and 1-2-2-4, the worst I get it 1-2-3-4, and that's kind of rare. Not so much randomness in there.

Even if it costs the same I'd like a single roll option so I don't have to click literally hundreds of times to engineer a ship to full G5 when I have all the mats. After the engineering overhaul the outcome of the rolls themselves became meaningless beyond how many times you need to spam click the button.

it's so bad that if you engineer a ship with hull reinforcements and weapons from scratch in one go while having all the blueprints pinned you get rate limited by the server and the rolls get a delay so it takes even longer.

Increase the drop rate of materials and the activities they drop from, you get no materials from asteroid core mining or planet scanning for example and that is a huge missed opportunity

I could reiterate all the methods one could employ to gather engineering materials while simply playing the game, but the instant gratification crowd usually ignores those methods because "Queen" (I want it all, and I want it now). While I agree that building a base stock is a challenge for a new player (but not impossible), once you've reached a certain routine in the game, acquiring engineering materials is only a problem if you want to engineer a ship (or worse, multiple) from zero to hero in one go. Or if you're fixated on one activity, preferably one that requires all things G5 (PvP), an refuse to do anything else.

Gathering materials isn't fun, increasing the drop rate only makes you spend less time on doing the not fun stuff.

It's not fun because there's too many materials and it's too random. This means to get all the materials you need you need to do multiple activities in different systems which means you will spend most of your time traveling and/or relogging. Even HGE farming suffers from this.

Because travel will take up the bulk of the time you can't just get what you need quickly and move on. It's also much more effective to fill up your bins when you're already at the spot which tempts you into grinding it out every time you take the trip. On foot engineering puts up a roadblock to this by limiting your materials to the point that you can barely store the materials it would take to engineer a full loadout to G5 with 3 guns and mods for everything but that ends up being even worse.

Just increasing the drop rate doesn't actually fix the compounding issues with travel times and too many materials that much. A partial fix would be making engineering more flexible so you can substitute materials if you don't have the exact right thing (or at least having material traders/bartenders at every engineering base, ideally for all categories). This could be somewhat hard to do in a way that doesn't appear more complex at first glance.

The easy fix of making everything cheaper doesn't actually fix the underlying problem here.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

The grind in this game is pretty high, but there are a lot of guides how to do it right and than it's pretty easy. Sure, it takes (a lot of) time, but it's not very hard to do.
And you are not really forced to do engineering. If you have the time, all right, if not, well, deal with it.

When the NPC's bloated HP and DR hits you - you better have those upgrades lest your combat experience doesn't take a total dive. It's not enough that it's "technically" not needed. It shouldn't be a prerequisite to enjoy parts of the game like you could before.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

You gotta realise that this game is not created for fun. It is designed to maximise player hours so Frontier can present good news to the stock market. You could make it fun to capture players, but "fun" is a fleeting thing, but busywork and roadblocks, gameloops that appeal to addictive player behaviour - those are more persistent.

 

[aRJay]

It doesn't take that difficult a mission to get G5 material rewards available as an option. The basic "scan this surface data point" ones can do it, as can hauling missions completable in a single run by a Krait/T-7 type medium ship, or two runs in a T-6. And there aren't many key non-combat blueprints which use manufactured as their G5 component as it is.

But I don't think they need G5 material acquisition to be easy, either - in fact, it'd be more "conventional" game design if it wasn't! - after all, you can get a fully-G4 engineered ship (by definition) without picking up a single G5 material, and that then gives you the capabilities to take on pretty much any challenge in the game anyway for picking up the G5s. Encouraging breadth-first rather than depth-first engineering is (see below conversation with Helmut) one of the things that the current design doesn't help with, I think [1].

[1] It's probably too late to change, but what I think they should do is redo it so that "common knowledge" engineers have all the G1-2 blueprints, the next tier up have all the G3-4 blueprints, and the finale engineers like Sarge and Jameson and Palin (and the Colonia ones) have all the G5 blueprints. That'd encourage people to start with the easy high-impact blueprints and stop the weirdness where Jameson has some of the toughest unlock requirements in the game ... for some marginal improvements to niche modules.

...

My objection is not so much about the difficulty but about having to do missions to get things other than ranks or unlocks.

I know I am probably in even more of a minority than power players.

 

[aRJay]

You gotta realise that this game is not created for fun. It is designed to maximise player hours so Frontier can present good news to the stock market. You could make it fun to capture players, but "fun" is a fleeting thing, but busywork and roadblocks, gameloops that appeal to addictive player behaviour - those are more persistent.

That would be a much more convincing argument if this was a subscription game.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

That would be a much more convincing argument if this was a subscription game.

It's a plausible one. Back then I jokingly said they took a monetisation model with engineers, ripped out the monetisation and released that into public. But why?

So they had something to show for release? - Maybe. Plausible, too. But do they just keep repeating to no meet their targets? They had to show something for Odyssey to and that's why there is another grind loop just for foot? I don't believe it, but it's possible. It's why Mass Effect Andromeda was basically Dragon Age Inquisition in space. The original idea didn't work (was something very alike to Starfield) then some veteran swoops in and does what's tried in tested in record time to save the project. Mac Walters got a lot of hate - I think he was just a very reliable crisis manager.

They have no clue. - It is a bit hard to believe they just don't understand how to create appealing and fun gameloops but a good flight sim and proc gen. And very nifty network solution concept and quite impressive BGS. It's easy to say they have no clue - who in their right mind would throw PvE and PvP into the same bucket? Nah, it's a businees decision. Market to both groups

Dumbness - pretty much the easy response. The passepartout answer when you have no other answer. There is simply too much people involved to all suffer from the same insufficiency. And design hat changed the owner a couple times. Nah, there is another reason, a business reason.

They have no concept of fun. - Dismissable pretty quickly. The German involved is me - not Frontier.

So why would someone create these loot gameloops that take such a backbreaking amount of busywork to do? Is it because Braben thinks it's good to have players shoot X enemies before they can call themselves Elite? Well, since he stepped down from operative position and they still do it - I believe it's just padding the player numbers to make a show for the share- and stakeholders.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Well, since he stepped down from operative position and they still do it - I believe it's just padding the player numbers to make a show for the share- and stakeholders.

This isn't something they're actively doing, all of the changes that affect engineering since launch have reduced the grind. Then player numbers are going down and their response hasn't been to add a new endless grind (the caustic sinks/titan stuff is trivial compared to fully engineering a ship).

It's most likely indeed dumbness, playing it safe and design by committee.

 

[Mrc_NorthEast]

At least for the ship mats I would like the material traders cross trading costs to be cut by half or so. I believe there was a cg that did that a couple of years ago, it was popular.
I have ody but have not started the engineer unlocks and collecting on foot mats, so no comment there, except that the bartender cross trading does not seem to generate too many negative comments.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

This isn't something they're actively doing, all of the changes that affect engineering since launch have reduced the grind. Then player numbers are going down and their response hasn't been to add a new endless grind (the caustic sinks/titan stuff is trivial compared to fully engineering a ship).

It's most likely indeed dumbness, playing it safe and design by committee.

Yes, it is always the same routine isn't it? The level is always dialled down from 11. Despite having had extensive experience how to scale such things. Why is the amount of busywork repeatedly misjudged? Is it actually misjudged? Is that dialling down maybe deliberate design?
I'm not saying I hold the truth in hands.

I don't know what you need for the Thargoid stuff. People say there is no prereqs, but we know we have very ardent defenders here who are blind on one eye and deaf on the other. I don't really care, at best it's some petty grind like Powerplay gear and the stuff from the Guardian or whatever that is. I shouldn't call stuff you have to wait 4 weeks for "petty" - it's petty compared to the ridiculous amounts to grind in initial releases of engineers (foot and ship).
The current thing is them trying to narrate a live story. The problem is that the audience is "not in the house". If you have your shows timed you can't have all the audience. That's why the story pace is slow. Still doesn't capture all the audience. "If" I played next year, I would never experience that story.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

At least for the ship mats I would like the material traders cross trading costs to be cut by half or so. I believe there was a cg that did that a couple of years ago, it was popular.
I have ody but have not started the engineer unlocks and collecting on foot mats, so no comment there, except that the bartender cross trading does not seem to generate too many negative comments.

Do you notice that players are always the beggars when it comes to stuff like this? You paid money for the game, you are entitled to the content. The only way you can affect this is to stop playing and taking your money elsewhere. Otherwise there is a next release there and there will be something to beg for again.
Of course the mat trading quotas should be diefferent. It is obvious. Frontier know. The design is deliberate.

 

[Hellrider]

Issue with odyengineering is fact, that bartender trade of 1 whole category literally NOT EXIST. You can just sell data, no exchange one for another.
But it can be much easier, if you cooperate with other players, since IIRC in ody you can share any mission+you can trade them for credits on carriers (or if you have trustworthy people exchange some data for another with them).

 

[Darrack]

Engineering adds nothing to the game except player hours to Frontier's balance sheet

Sorry more drivel, engineering adds a lot to the game, without it i wouldn't have been able to explore some of the distant places ive been to.
Just because folks cant be arsed to do it doesn't make it irrelevant.
What those that cant be bothered see as a time sink, i see as gameplay that improves my ships/gear, don't blame Fdev for introducing content.
I get exhausted saying this but this stuff is optional.

O7

 

[Helmut Grokenberger]

Sorry more drivel, engineering adds a lot to the game, without it i wouldn't have been able to explore some of the distant places ive been to.
Just because folks cant be arsed to do it doesn't make it irrelevant.
What those that cant be bothered see as a time sink, i see as gameplay that improves my ships/gear, don't blame Fdev for introducing content.
I get exhausted saying this but this stuff is optional.

O7

Be advised that you're arguing with someone who hasn't, by their own admission, played the game for seven years. It's futile.

 

[Greasetrap42]

I like how you, or the two people before you, didn't even respond to the best method to get manufactured materials being restarting the game at HGEs or relogging at crashed cobra for encoded mats, what's your solution to those questionable game design choices?

:
:

I just deleted my reply. These same people have answered these questions dozens of times.

I think @varonica had some standard cut-and-paste responses for a while.

There is so much discussion on these forums and elsewhere on this topic... if you are truly interested in how to do stuff in the game better and more fun you can find it easily yourself. If you want to relog and zip your SRV around in circles... go ahead. Or learn better methods. Whatever. You can post suggestions or complaints on the forums as many others have. There is endless players that vehemently believe that collecting eng mats is a huuuuuge struggle requiring constant relogging and mindless circles... while there are other players with large engineered fleets that don't do that stuff.

 

[Greasetrap42]

I like how you, or the two people before you, didn't even respond to the best method to get manufactured materials being restarting the game at HGEs or relogging at crashed cobra for encoded mats, what's your solution to those questionable game design choices?

If this is you then ...< a bunch of advice deleted >... Think of engineering mats as currency. A currency that is more valuable than credits.