Engineer weapon crafting needs to be rethought (if what we suspect is true)

[excalibus]

I think absolutely the opposite. If its to easy its just sitting there hitting the reroll button. If its hard enough you might actually have equipment with character.

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The mechanic is not bad the depiction is. Its one thing to know its random based - its another to be visually reminded.

i must confess every time i watched the engineering video, i wanted to buy a vowel at the end...

to add... one thing that is certain however is we will get the 'primary' effect we want on the weapon, it will all, to an extent, be a little bit of variation across multiple modifications of the same weapon types and some will end up with a special effect and some won't, we won't get 'worse' weapons than the standard ones that much is a certainty, or what would be the point of the engineers modifications to begin with, this has been said on the live streams a couple of times now, that overall the modification will end up with more increased stats than the stats that decrease

 

[Blackcompany]

FD really needs to leave out the crafting part. A commander gets contacted by an engineer to meet at his or her base and to bring X materials so the engineer can perform upgrades to modules. Simple. Unless the engineer is TEACHING me how to become an engineer myself, there should be no crafting aspect in ED. This random, unknown, or last minute surprise reward stuff sucks. Didnt FD learn from the Community Goal efforts? Tell us what the reward is so we can get it as it is advertised OR not, if not interested the reward. Again, simple.

Agree completely. The forced use of a frankly nonsensical, shoehorned crafting system is irritating at best. I have yet to see a game made better by crafting, and Elite is not proving an exception.

 

[Han Brannigan]

i must confess every time i watched the engineering video, i wanted to buy a vowel at the end...

I was waiting for a scantily clad woman to pop up and turn my weapons around....

 

[amigacooke]

When it effects PCs and NPCs ships...its the entire game.

Only if you can't envisage taking on the enemy with an inferior ship and achieving victory with superior cunning and/or skill.

 

[NeilF]

Then don't use it.....see, easy fixed.

...ah! And here we are at Powerplay again. A great opportunity to introduce some interest and depth, but basically poorly implemented. Answer... "don't play it"... And just like Powerplay, heaps of effort and valuable developement time which easily could have gone to the other placeholders in the game.

Of course it's too early to declare this about our Wheel Of Fortune Engineers, but it's not entirely looking a mile away from yet another interesting concept, unfortunately buried under piles of inane skilless grind is it.

Going to be an interesting month...

 

[Zeta Legion]

I was waiting for a scantily clad woman to pop up and turn my weapons around....

Yes, this fabulous Force Shell C3 Gimballed Cannon with increased damage and projectile speed COULD BE YOURS!

 

[anikaiful]

I think a second hand market for ships would be a neat addition alongside this. In this scenario the ship will come with the new mods and a fixed name and perhaps skin, which would sell at certain stations. This ship would then go on-sale to the rest of the community. This could also be dealt with by a new class of AI, the second-hand ship sales person.

Yea, well, in theory okay, but thinking that further ... the market would be dominated by those with the most credits... except, of course, if price could not exceed the minimum price of a stock ship...

 

[Han Brannigan]

Yes, this fabulous Force Shell C3 Gimballed Cannon with increased damage and projectile speed COULD BE YOURS!

exactly.

 

[Derath]

Agree completely. The forced use of a frankly nonsensical, shoehorned crafting system is irritating at best. I have yet to see a game made better by crafting, and Elite is not proving an exception.

DAoC was better for crafting, and FF14 has a really fun system that suffers from being usually pointless (awesome system to make worse gear doesn't really work) but I do think its a strange choice here, but it is extremely popular. People love crafting I can totally understand why they are putting it in.

 

[Harmoniser]

Yea, well, in theory okay, but thinking that further ... the market would be dominated by those with the most credits... except, of course, if price could not exceed the minimum price of a stock ship...

true, but game is already dominated by the people with the most credits. Just like real life! I think this might work better if ships degraded over time. I like the idea of flying a beaten up cobra that takes 2 or 3 goes to start.

I think the game needs a super tax! To get us all back down to being peasants again.

 

[Retu81]

Yea, well, in theory okay, but thinking that further ... the market would be dominated by those with the most credits... except, of course, if price could not exceed the minimum price of a stock ship...

You'll lose about 50% of your new ship's value at the moment you fly it out of the dock for the first time.

 

[MyHammer]

Yes, this fabulous Force Shell C3 Gimballed Cannon with increased damage and projectile speed COULD BE YOURS!

not only you will get the gimballed cannon, if you provide additional seven zaffledongs und nine dark matter barnacle crustbreads you will, now listen closly, receive a free cannon tube cleaner, sunglasses with the engraved force shell logo and... the fabulous guide of how to set up your weapon. Only 213 left, get it now!

 

[Trueno33]

t
As per the video stream demo, you have to pick a specific single weapon to upgrade. You better pray to the rng gods to upgrade all 4 to a similar specification!

so the upgrades are for single hardpoints? it makes things more complicated for sure. But it could make sense. I was never too much into crafting in my games

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

I think a second hand market for ships would be a neat addition alongside this. In this scenario the ship will come with the new mods and a fixed name and perhaps skin, which would sell at certain stations. This ship would then go on-sale to the rest of the community. This could also be dealt with by a new class of AI, the second-hand ship sales person.

Until FD add the idea of durability to ships in ED there isn't any real point at the moment.

Ships should 'age' regardless of whether they have been repaired or not. The older the ship the more it might fall apart with modules not working properly. You then take the risk of buying 'a heap of junk'.

Its pretty unrealistic to continuously be able to repair a ship ad infinitum at the moment. However I don;t hold as much faith in FD as I used to when it comes to ED, it seems slowly but surely the problems with this game are just getting worse and worse as time goes on. I doubt we will ever get this sort of functionality in the game at this rate.

 

[Han Brannigan]

zaffledongs

This made me lol.

 

[MyHammer]

This made me lol.

couldn't resist. sorry FD!

 

[Ziljan]

Having four multi-cannons on my FDL each with different stats and personalities makes me want to to name them. Lol.

Not really a bad thing.

 

[Zeta Legion]

Having four multi-cannons on my FDL each with different stats and personalities makes me want to to name them. Lol.

Not really a bad thing.

I'd want to be able to name my ship first. It'd be silly if I could name my PA but not the ship it is attached to

 

[Jack Schitt]

I think a batch option or clone option would make sense....but maybe FD want to avoid that.

The problem with that is that it breaks the new lore and is self-defeating. "These changes have positive and negative consequences, and the Engineers trade is more of a black art than a science, so results can vary with each attempt. Unless you want three of them doing at the same time. Then the first part is still a black art, but the duplication is more of a science."

They're already pushing at the limits of my disbelief suspension with the insurance mechanic which will work exactly like this. Lose a one-of-a-kind, unreproducible "black art" modification. Pay the insurance excess and get an exact copy of that same one-of-a-kind, unreproducible "black art" modification. I'm prepared to let them have this -- just -- because insurance already has a whole bunch of iffyness surrounding it (instant teleport escape pod?) whereby game mechanics have to trump believability. So this one straw isn't going to break the camel's back.

But if you can have a one-of-a-kind weapon made then buy an exact copy, wouldn't that completely negate what the Engineers do? Wouldn't they just perform modifications on everything until they got the best results they'd seen, then clone that result for all their customers? In fact wouldn't all the module manufacturers be doing this in-house for the off-the-shelf stuff, negating the need for Engineers at all?

 

[Derath]

I actually like the idea of seperate weapons have seperate stats, while batches please those who enjoy symmetry I'd much rather have a variety of different boom! Let us name the ships and the weapons.