General Easy fix to the engineering material grind

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42
Aleks Zuno said:
Regarding Encoded materials, something to keep in mind as a possible alternative is that an avid bounty-hunter will amass a huge amount of it in the same way that an avid laser-miner will gain Raw materials. It comes from all of those standard identification scans, possible also around a starport, but which a bounty-hunter must perform to be fully sure the target is Wanted!
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For the last year or two when in human space I shifted from lots of trade (scanning ships with wake scanner) to bounty and assassination. And I bought & engineered ships and re-engineered others. For a while I went nuts blowing up NPCs. Encoded mats I never had to pay attn to. I always had lots.
 
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Darth Ender

D
the point of engineers and materials has nothing to do with making the game more fun or having an in lore purpose. it's to make players play longer and more using the existing games mechanics. that's it. any suggestion that conflicts with that is not going to happen.

you would have to prove your change would result in players doing the activities more than currently for such a change to be viable. Which seems to be the opposite of the OP's idea.
 

ethelred

ethelred
Helmut Grokenberger said:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFDcoX7s6rE
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Both of these comments misrepresent, to a ludicrous degree, the desire to add gameplay to a feature that could do with an overhaul.

The "engineering quick" guides already bypass what gameplay there is by using (IMHO) exploits and logging - people who "want it all" are already doing this to get full bins of engineering materials.

Don't you think there is a better way?
 

Helmut Grokenberger

Helmut Grokenberger
I think Hellrider will agree that those comments were directed towards those who don't want to overhaul but skip engineering. Because they want it all, and they want it now. I stand by that comment.
 

Greasetrap42

Greasetrap42

Easy fix to the [ship] engineering material grind​

(My Version, Without Reinventing Engineering. Probably filled with problems)

1) Dav's Hope and Jameson Crash Sites
  • End the relogging for re-spawn. Farming season is over.
  • Remove the idea of intentional relog farming. The idea of it is terrible.

2) HGE Sites
  • Place random 1-3 elite Anacondas or Corvettes at each site
  • Combat, speed, or stealth required.
  • If you destroy the enemy ships... yippee even more mats. Who can argue with that! Ha!

3) Crystal Shard Sites
  • Ideally get rid of them... but how? I'm stuck on this. This was just a bad idea that's hard to back out of.
  • Somehow bring them to an end. I got no good solution to explain their disappearance.
  • hmmm... anybody else got a good idea?

4) Planetary Raw Mats
  • Make them more rewarding. What happened to the higher grade mats?
  • Have an improved method for finding them. Less random.
  • Have the meteorites show up on ship scanner. So when searching for bios we also find happy surprises.
  • A better SRV scanner for finding mineral clusters and meteorites. Make it better.
  • This will encourage planetary exploration. Goes well with exobiology.

5) Recycle Engineered Items
  • Allow Players to Break Down Engineered Modules.
  • The base module is permanently destroyed and cmdr recovers 75% of the mats, as long as their bins aren't full.

6) Mission Rewards
  • More Types of Mats Available As Mission Rewards
  • More mats available per mission. The really big missions should offer more. Sure, less credits, that's fine.

7) No More Zero Skill Methods For Collecting G4 or G5 mats.
  • Yes, coordinated friends can help noobs. Maybe that encourages cooperative gameplay.
  • At least make a game attempt at making sense,

Overall this might make the game seem harder. But that can be balanced with the RNG of finding stuff.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
Greasetrap42 said:
  • Make them more rewarding. What happened to the higher grade mats?
  • Have an improved method for finding them. Less random.
  • Have the meteorites show up on ship scanner. So when searching for bios we also find happy surprises.
  • A better SRV scanner for finding mineral clusters and meteorites. Make it better.
  • This will encourage planetary exploration. Goes well with exobiology.
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There's already a solution of sorts to this in the Cargo Racks found at various surface POIs, some of which drop raw materials and in Odyssey can be cut open with the Maverick suit (in one of the ultra-rare "Odyssey tools actually useful for non-Odyssey gameplay" moments) to drop six extra materials.
[It'd be nice if you could then pick up those materials with your suit, or at least if getting in the SRV didn't end up pushing half of them through the floor, of course, but you can't have everything]

Adding more of those to the POIs generated by various surface missions, and letting them have a fuller range of raw materials (the set for the planet they're on would make sense, I guess) would make them a natural missions byproduct in the same way that the "Industrial Firmware" data line is. And the mission itself can have enemies - skimmers, scavengers, maybe worse - to make getting at the cargo rack a little trickier (while the cargo rack presence discourages just skipping the encounter with a hail of dumbfires in a more natural way)
 

Jack Winter

Jack Winter
Dan Sher said:
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?
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IMO, it's not the best way, just the most boring way.. It might be more efficient, but it's more fun to acquire mats in other ways.
 

nemolomen

nemolomen
You know, I've been playing this game for 3 years and over 4600 hours and I've only just recently seen, and experienced, my first HGE a couple of weeks ago...

I tried to relog grind a couple of times, once at Dav's about 7 or 8 times and once at a guardian ruin for a about a half hour.

I didn't like it either time so I just play the game and collect mats at a pace that is more realistic...and more fun...in the long run...
 

varonica

varonica
Greasetrap42 said:
3) Crystal Shard Sites
  • Ideally get rid of them... but how? I'm stuck on this. This was just a bad idea that's hard to back out of.
  • Somehow bring them to an end. I got no good solution to explain their disappearance.
  • hmmm... anybody else got a good idea?

4) Planetary Raw Mats
  • Make them more rewarding. What happened to the higher grade mats?
  • Have an improved method for finding them. Less random.
  • Have the meteorites show up on ship scanner. So when searching for bios we also find happy surprises.
  • A better SRV scanner for finding mineral clusters and meteorites. Make it better.
  • This will encourage planetary exploration. Goes well with exobiology.
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You see my thinking is that 3 and 4 are part of the same issue, in the old days, yes a while ago, when testing the availability of mats when compared to percentages in the planetary list it's clear that high grade mats appeared at a factor of 10x the planetary percentage in volcanic POI sites, so if a planet had 1% Polonium the mat drop in the volcanic site would be 10% Polonium, I can recall getting 70 Polonium from one volcanic site. This all changed of course when volcanic POI's changed to the new system, you never had these concentrated sites for high grade mats so the crystal shard sites are actually what I consider the replacement for the volcanic sites.

Oh yes, meteorites do actually show up on ship scanners, as do minerals on vents etc, you just have to be VERY close to see them and you have to hang around because of course they spawn to your instance unlike the mats on bio and geo, so if you are traveling across the surface you simply won't see them from the ship, in fact I have shot meteorites with ship guns in the past.

They don't need to get rid of crystal shard site, they just need to retune them so they drop multiple types of mats rather than the highest level every time, that way they would be the same as brain tree sites, but that would need to go hand in hand with changing the way mats are found on the planetary surface of course, I would suggest a mining SRV of some sort that can mine percentage of materials from the surface according to the percentage in the planetary description, of course there would be some variance according to some sort of algorithm and you could exhaust the minerals in your area after a while, but we could have filters that show us where minerals of certain types can be found. But whatever happens it can't be just the removal of the crystal shard sites with no replacement mechanics.
 
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yianniv

yianniv
Helmut Grokenberger said:
"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?
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Yes, you use similar arguments to ridicule other players' complaints about the game.
 

tolm

tolm
I think “ship” engineering is fine with the already present changes that were made some time ago. Maybe the mat trader ratios could be a little less harsh but I don’t think it’s desperate.

However, the “on foot” engineering is - IMO - a total mess. I gave up trying to engineer even one single suit / weapon because I simply couldn’t get certain materials to drop - and I needed ten of them! So I just bought G3 pre-engineered stuff, got bored and went back to ship-based gameplay. Introduce an “on foot” mat trader and I might be tempted to come back - especially if more viable alternatives to murdering entire settlements were introduced for gathering materials.
 

Brrokk

Brrokk
Jack Winter said:
IMO, it's not the best way, just the most boring way.. It might be more efficient, but it's more fun to acquire mats in other ways.
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We're seeing a common misuse of the word "efficient". Efficiency is always a ratio of output to input. In this context, where the purpose of playing a game is to have fun, the natural definition of efficiency is "amount of fun divided by time spent"; it's not "number of materials divided by time spent". Some just need to git gud at defining efficiency. :)
 
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