Even with access to the so called "crack train" cracked industrial firmware needs a MASSIVE increase in its droprate and the material/data storage nee

[Protein Carrot]

Even with access to the so called "crack train" cracked industrial firmware needs a MASSIVE increase in its droprate and the material/data storage needs to be at least doubled.

As someone who has done extensive engineering / grinding / ship building and with a lot of experience in the engineers mechanics I can definitely say that cracked industrial firmware is possibly the worst implemented material in the entire game at the moment. The drop rate of crack has been proven both subjectively and objectively to be extremely low regardless of its status as a tier 3 rarity. Using traditional methods of data acquisition (bases as they are non-POI and as such their existence is non-rng) its rarity is anywhere between five to ten times higher than that of tier 5 data like modified embedded firmware.

Even though it is possible to get the occasional streaks of high crack amounts using bases every once in a while in the long run it always comes down to crack being the one and only hindrance to high tier modifications of drives and power distributors and long range weapons. Now this bit is me making assumptions but based off of everything that I have seen the percentage chance of getting crack from satellites and other datapoints such as bases and POI datapoints seems to be more or less the same and using the "crack train" method of grinding we have mostly confirmed that the chance of actually getting crack is soul crushingly low compared to other necessary materials for high level engineering.

As completely anecdotal evidence the last time I went base raiding specifically for crack I got 3 drops of it in 24 bases and in the long run that type of occurrence rate is quite consistent. I have done way more bases than I would like to guess and these types of numbers are also consistent with every possible piece of feedback that I have gotten from anyone else. Actually the only reason the "crack train" even works is because you can spam the data scan infinite times and even using it you can go tens of scans without getting a single one and that's nothing too out of the ordinary.

We already know that the "crack train" does not work in 2.3 so once the patch hits the main client it's back to massive time investment for crack unless if you get very lucky and more often than not it's so rare that effort just simply doesn't correlate with results at all. The reason why this specific material requires such a lengthy post is simply because tier 5 dirty drives and tier 5 charge enhanced power distributors are objectively the modifications (far better than any other drive or PD mods) for any combat ship and absolutely 100% necessary for any minmaxed PvP ship and just as useful for PvE.

And yes for anyone who does a lot of engineering the caps for mats and data are incredibly low considering the amount of different types of mats that exist within the game and even a more casual engineer-ee can fill up his or her storage in a very short period of time. The module storage bit is also way too low but that's another thread for another time.

 

[Elethiomel Zakalwe]

It's supposedly standard grade data, why is the spawn rate so stupidly low?

 

[Stealthie]

Either that or maybe people need to accept that they're not supposed to be able to do this stuff as routinely as they've come to expect?

 

[jasonbarron]

Protein Carrot, I'm pretty sure you just won the "Longest thread title ever!" award

Good post.

 

[CMDR Dreamstate]

I think Data needs to be increased by 100 and materials by 200.

This doesn't detract from the effort and time spent collecting them - it just makes it more of a chore to decide what to dump to make room if you want to try out other builds on other ships.

An increase would be ideal, and it would make me finally happy about the state of the engineers.

 

[Protein Carrot]

Either that or maybe people need to accept that they're not supposed to be able to do this stuff as routinely as they've come to expect?

Due to the inherent RNG with the engineers we need the ability for all mods to spammable because it is far too easy to get nothing good within fifty rolls. Even if you didn't like that argument it makes absolutely no sense from either a lore or a mechanical perspective that a tier 3 rarity material is the second hardest material in the entire game to get (hard as in simply inconsistent as opposed to hard as in there is some sort of mechanical challenge involved).

Why would anyone even be opposed to increasing the percentage chance when not only is it clearly not working as intended but the fix is quite literally changing numbers which takes no dev time?

 

[Lanceor]

In the olden days, if someone wanted something, they worked on it until they earned it.

Nowadays, if someone wants something, they complain until it's given to them.

 

[SeaFireliv]

I got some cracked industrial firmware for a job done today. Was going to sell it, but maybe I shouldn`t...

 

[Ra'Kaan]

@OP

yup.

 

[Protein Carrot]

In the olden days, if someone wanted something, they worked on it until they earned it.

Nowadays, if someone wants something, they complain until it's given to them.

I have done more grinding than probably 99,9% of the entire playerbase of this game. I don't mind something being difficult or time consuming to grind but what I do think is stupid is the extreme inconsistency and very, very, very, very low drop rate of crack while being a tier 3 material.

 

[Stealthie]

Due to the inherent RNG with the engineers we need the ability for all mods to spammable because it is far too easy to get nothing good within fifty rolls. Even if you didn't like that argument it makes absolutely no sense from either a lore or a mechanical perspective that a tier 3 rarity material is the second hardest material in the entire game to get (hard as in simply inconsistent as opposed to hard as in there is some sort of mechanical challenge involved).

Why would anyone even be opposed to increasing the percentage chance when not only is it clearly not working as intended but the fix is quite literally changing numbers which takes no dev time?

You're still looking at it as if it's something you can decide to do and then work on until it's done - and that's making you think it should be possible to do it more quickly.

Perhaps, instead, the idea is that you're supposed to be content with the upgrades that you CAN achieve routinely and just consider the remaining ones as a "lucky find" when they do appear?


If anything, I'd say that a lot of this stuff should be made massively LESS common so that people give up on trying to grind upgrades completely.

 

[jasonbarron]

You're still looking at it as if it's something you can decide to do and then work on until it's done - and that's making you think it should be possible to do it more quickly.

Perhaps, instead, the idea is that you're supposed to be content with the upgrades that you CAN achieve routinely and just consider the remaining ones as a "lucky find" when they do appear?


If anything, I'd say that a lot of this stuff should be made massively LESS common so that people give up on trying to grind upgrades completely.

Wait, are you sticking up for RNG being the determining factor in drop outcomes, as opposed to skill & hard work? That's gotta be a first.

 

[Protein Carrot]

You're still looking at it as if it's something you can decide to do and then work on until it's done - and that's making you think it should be possible to do it more quickly.

Perhaps, instead, the idea is that you're supposed to be content with the upgrades that you CAN achieve routinely and just consider the remaining ones as a "lucky find" when they do appear?


If anything, I'd say that a lot of this stuff should be made massively LESS common so that people give up on trying to grind upgrades completely.

The whole point of engineers is minmaxing your ship squeezing out every last possible edge you can. Besides even if the argument I was making was wrong and we played devils advocate your line of reasoning is directly going against the prime directive of this games design philosophy, "blaze your own trail". You are directly trying to restrict players to activities that are personally approved of by you and this goes against the things that David Braben is trying to achieve.

Honestly I think what you are actually opposed to is the idea of maxing out ships for PvP and you just don't want to say it.

 

[Stealthie]

Wait, are you sticking up for RNG being the determining factor in drop outcomes, as opposed to skill & hard work? That's gotta be a first.

As a rule, I tend to think that game dev's always underestimate people's willingness to do whatever it takes to gain some advantage or achieve some goal.

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think FDev realised just how obsessively people would pursue engineered upgrades.

Course, I guess the problem, now, is that if you make them harder to achieve then you'll just be magnifying the difference between the people who've already got them and those who haven't.

 

[jasonbarron]

As a rule, I tend to think that game dev's always underestimate people's willingness to do whatever it takes to gain some advantage or achieve some goal.

Maybe I'm wrong but I don't think FDev realised just how obsessively people would pursue engineered upgrades.

Course, I guess the problem, now, is that if you make them harder to achieve then you'll just be magnifying the difference between the people who've already got them and those who haven't.

What's so wrong with people "obsessively" pursuing upgrades to enhance their ship capabilities? Personally, I just think that's part of the game. I agree with Protein Carrot; a G3 mat that's considerably more rare than a G5 mat is a problem, and perhaps Fdev needs to address the spawn rate with a minor adjustment.

 

[CMDR Ofan]

What's so wrong with people "obsessively" pursuing upgrades to enhance their ship capabilities? Personally, I just think that's part of the game. I agree with Protein Carrot; a G3 mat that's considerably more rare than a G5 mat is a problem, and perhaps Fdev needs to address the spawn rate with a minor adjustment.

I don't think the implication was anything was wrong with it, but on the balance of things it's reasonable to assume FD wanted top tier mods to be rarer and harder to get and accordingly while it becomes a chore from player perspective to repeatedly hunt down bits and pieces as with each repeat we want faster completion we should remember their design intent; to be the most exclusive and labour intensive mods to get.

Just because we want to do something more often and with increasing efficiency does not mean it should automatically be made more accessible - if they intended everyone to have easy access to the parts to the degree that it was trivial to get top grade rolls they would just have just buffed the vanilla parts across the board instead of giving up kit with rng rolls.

Matt rarity wise perhaps they just mislabeled them? Fd have been known to bodge the labels on the jars before

 

[jamfour]

If anything, I'd say that a lot of this stuff should be made massively LESS common so that people give up on trying to grind upgrades completely.

Why not instead actually reduce the dependence on RNG thus removing the problem altogether? If you only need one roll per module, all of these issues of drop rate and storage start to disappear.

it's reasonable to assume FD wanted top tier mods to be rarer and harder to get

There’s nothing hard about getting any of the materials or data, just time-consuming.

we should remember their design intent

As you said previously, you made an assumption about what their intent was, thus invoking this in support of your argument is bogus.

 

[fantasmic]

Either that or maybe people need to accept that they're not supposed to be able to do this stuff as routinely as they've come to expect?

Perhaps, but in that case I would expect, and accept, that the rest of the material drops need to be brought down massively to be in line with the going rates of crack.

Matt rarity wise perhaps they just mislabeled them? Fd have been known to bodge the labels on the jars before

Also acceptable if unfavorable. I would expect to see such a simple typo corrected immediately. The next beta update should be way more than enough time to resolve such a simple error causing significant frustration in the end-game community that are their most probable buyers of future content.

 

[Morbad]

Abuse of instancing to get multiple data scans is clearly an unintended bug exploit, but I certainly agree that cracked industrial firmware being harder to get than essentially any other engineering component is off.

I racked up a 600k galaxy wide bounty doing a dozen base assaults (a mix of ++ and +++ high and medium security bases) on Friday and walked away with nine cracked industrial firmware and more than fifty modified embedded firmware...the later of which is supposed to be much less common than the former.

 

[h347h]

It wouldn't be so bad if they showed up as mission rewards about the frequency of exquisite focus crystals.

I am currently working on gathering 200 rolls worth of dirty drives. Funny enough I can gather the cadmium and isolators in a day or two. It could take weeks for the CIF by its self.