Call me strange, but i like the RNG. Means every ship is unique. I do wish getting some materials were simpler, or less random. Its the randomness of material/data collection that annoys me at times. Not the rolls.
Elite: Dangerous and the game within the game (or why 13th Legion are heroes)
- Thread starter MissMeYet
- Start date
Call me strange, but i like the RNG. Means every ship is unique. I do wish getting some materials were simpler, or less random. Its the randomness of material/data collection that annoys me at times. Not the rolls.
Many of us mourn Kornelius. In retrospect I should have followed his lead when the 2.1 bomb dropped - I almost did.
Of course all the famous, widely publicised god rolls were g1 rolls, Martian. Of course they were. From the moment I started to see +42% drives and preposterous shields all coagulating onto the same guys' ships in the same groups, I knew that something was up. I also knew that the (fairly lame) Crack Train was at best only part of the explanation. I just didn't know what exactly was going on and - frankly - was so tired of RNGineering that I didn't make the enquiries that might have alerted me to this months ago.
I believe the PvE guys who have said they got the occasional god roll legit. But we have yet to see one single PvP-er of note saying, "Well, at least I got this one legit", with a screenie. Nor, I predict, will we.
Last edited:
Nah, hardly any knew about it. That's why the lid was kept so tight for so long.
Yeah, there's always the chance that a random PvE guy found the same thing and doubtless he's keeping his mouth shut.
But generally speaking you need an ultra-competitive predatory hive-mind and that means a PvP group.
The most annoying thing about Engineers is getting some of the rarer materials/data.
I'm ok with the randomness of the attributes, but adjustment sliders - like Martian Successor suggests - of 5%? of the results of your randomness would be nice.
As for punishment of exploiters... anything less than removing engineered modules/weapons and a ban from visiting the engineers, is a cop put by FD.
I'm ok with the randomness of the attributes, but adjustment sliders - like Martian Successor suggests - of 5%? of the results of your randomness would be nice.
As for punishment of exploiters... anything less than removing engineered modules/weapons and a ban from visiting the engineers, is a cop put by FD.
This can't be suggested often enough.
Full player control over the distribution of positive and negative parameters and thereby equal opportunities and catering for individual player's flying and combat preferences.
It seems so obvious that i will never understand why it hasn't been done that way in the first place, unless technical/programming issues prohibit it.
Perhaps this can become one of the items they will look at when revisiting core game play.
Last edited:
![[VR] Mad Mike](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/27/27910.jpg?1553527108){kind=avatar}
i may as well wade in with my equally pointless suggestion as FD will do what they do.
imo it should be all about the grades of materials we supply, along with a SMALL amount of rng which is well hidden to do the ENG.
We are not the engineer so it should not be up to us to control the exact details of the build imo, we just ask for what kind of modification we want and we give the bits.
that way, if i have A rated materials i know i will get a "great" roll and add a skill element to getting said mats. (I have lots of ideas of how to add skill to this but prolly not for this thread, but for eg, the mining minigame used in galaxy on fire decided the amount of the stuff you mined)
Last edited:
The rolls kind of make sense to me but if I were to be honest I would have liked a Gran Turismo style tuning shop (sorry, only car racing game I play so can't comment on others) where you set what you want with sliders, and the engineer goes away and makes the change but with a bit of a random element to provide the variance.
I would also have set it so that engineered modules degrade faster due to increased wear and tear, rising to be quite significant on level 5. In the introduction to the Engineers, DBOBE related the story of the flight engineer in the Vietnam war over-tuned chopper engines to give greater lift, but it came at the expense of reduced engine life. Having specifically mentioned that, I am quite surprised the effect was not modelled.
The fact we have randomness on both the material/data collection and the upgrades annoys me the most. I do sincerely hope Frontier rethinks this part most of all. Pick one, but dear god in heaven, not both!
My preference is to remove RNG from upgrades because I want to feel like I am dealing with an actual mechanical engineer rather than a crazy magician with the memory of a goldfish. RNG hasn't made ships unique - in practice it hasn't worked out like the theory. It's merely guaranteeing that some ships will be inferrior to others because of luck with numbers.
It would be much more unique in my opinion if each player could manually tweak their ship's capability. You'd get exactly the same amount of variety and min/maxed copy/paste rolls as we have now to be honest. There just needs to be a rule in the negative v positive counter weight scales whereby the more potent the upgrade is the more power it consumes, more weight, more heat and/or lower health, etc it has respectively to the type of module and upgrade. Put every single module statistic on the slider scale and we get something that is actually quite deep. Leave the option to RNG roll the upgrade for players who just want a quick upgrade or don't want to bother spending hours personalising the upgrade to with an inch of its life. And we get a crafting system that is easy to use but hard to master.
But it is not really uniqueness. All models converge towards the same optima. The distinguishing element is just how far away one is from this optimum.
Just by iterating craft&trash you will reach the optimum with 100% certainty. The speed of this convergence is the only aspect of RNG.
That Agony Aunt sure is strange.
I'd totally wet my pants if we got that.
Yeah, probably the layers of randomness the exacerbate the whole issue. Random x random x random.
On the other hand, no idea why we are even discussing this. We had the same discussions waaaayyy back at the time of 2.1 and after. FD set their stall, and its not likely we will see any fundamental changes to it. More likely tweaks only.
I've been a naive, innocent child
No wonder we suddenly got the appearance of psuedo iWin button builds such as the immortality shield Cutter that could also boost faster than a great rolled FDL. And these are the builds that the PvP community and FD have been trying to balance against in the last two betas! With talk of nerfing the effectiveness of boosters, resistances, upping damage of weapons, yada, yada. I mean stations had to be given Engineered guns to counter healing beams - what are the odds those healies were G1 rolled eh?
All of this effort to balance around cheats! My word, you couldn't make this stuff up. Does FD know they've been trying to balance their game around cheat builds all along?
I've been a naive, innocent child
No wonder we suddenly got the appearance of psuedo iWin button builds such as the immortality shield Cutter that could also boost faster than a great rolled FDL. And these are the builds that the PvP community and FD have been trying to balance against in the last two betas! With talk of nerfing the effectiveness of boosters, resistances, upping damage of weapons, yada, yada. I mean stations had to be given Engineered guns to counter healing beams - what are the odds those healies were G1 rolled eh?
All of this effort to balance around cheats! My word, you couldn't make this stuff up. Does FD know they've been trying to balance their game around cheat builds all along?
This is maybe the biggest problem in all this mess.
Last edited:
I've been a naive, innocent child
No wonder we suddenly got the appearance of psuedo iWin button builds such as the immortality shield Cutter that could also boost faster than a great rolled FDL. And these are the builds that the PvP community and FD have been trying to balance against in the last two betas! With talk of nerfing the effectiveness of boosters, resistances, upping damage of weapons, yada, yada. I mean stations had to be given Engineered guns to counter healing beams - what are the odds those healies were G1 rolled eh?
All of this effort to balance around cheats! My word, you couldn't make this stuff up. Does FD know they've been trying to balance their game around cheat builds all along?
Exactly. They balance the game around statistically typical rolls (i.e. far from optimal) while a huge crowd of organized PvP players just use the exploit to bypass any progression.
Last edited:
![[VR] optimal_909](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/109/109067.jpg?1553781733){kind=avatar}
In Gran Turismo, only at the beginnning you actually selected lesser parts. If you were a bit advanced, you slapped the same top-tier tuning parts on cars and basically all cars with similar layout drove sameish. The current state of outfitting in Elite is a far more satisfying aspect of the game with balancing on heat/consumption/weight - totally absent in GT.
Suspension tuning was/is bugged as hell too with plenty of anomalies/exploits.
I also think RNG is good to provide variety in ships. Sure, some can target the 'optimum' as mentioned earlier, but that is probably the top 5% of the player base that can grind hours daily. I cannot, like most players. I tend to compromise with rolls.
I agree that it could be better with wear&tear and other stuff, but I think this aspect of the game is well fleshed out, there are other parts that need to be addressed sooner I think.
This is a funny thought. Why would they even sink work hours into fixing this if they had known this was cheated stuff?
Actually, yeah, i was thinking more of Need for Speed Underground.
But like i said, i don't mind the random engineers either.
You should care because it's not a PvP mess, it's a game mess. Even Solo players may have lost millions in CG rewards, because sploit builds prevented Open traders from delivering their cargo.