Engineers FD - Quick win for you

[Aewarin Jameson]

Many complaints on the forums about Engineers. A lot of them are just moans for the sake of it but some do have merit.

I am sure you are working hard to come up with a solution - allow me to give you a quick win.

Common complaints:
- Too much RNG
- No storage for commodities / components
- Not enough storage for materials

Quick fix:
- Alter the loot tables for each new activity that reveals a material to be 2 or 3 max (so 70+ total down to ~12)
- Alter the recipes to use these mats and drop the requirement for commodities

Why is that a quick fix ?
- Reduces the number of different materials required for engineers
- This in turn speeds up harvesting
- This in turn allows players to visit the engineers more often and "have a go"
- This reduces the frustration of the RNG output. It's still there, but for each hour spend looking for mats you get more attempts at an engineer.
- Stops NPCs from attacking you for simply having a recipe commodity that you can't store (yet)
- Should be a relatively simple change (loot tables & recipe pointers).
- Missions offering commodities can remain as it doesn't affect anything
- Buys you time to add storage / implement any other changes you might think of

I really want ED to succeed so please read the above in that frame of mind.

 

[tomalus]

The only thing that I expect if they even do that, is increase materal cap to 900, and data to 300. But I doubt even that.

 

[Robbeh]

All this would do is make the process quicker to complete, it doesn't fix any of the broken/bad gameplay mechanics that are involved.

Giving people the shiny to keep them happy rather than creating enjoyable/challenging things to do to earn the shiny is not the way forward in my opinion.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

The only thing that I expect if they even do that, is increase materal cap to 900, and data to 300. But I doubt even that.

I remember Mike saying something like they would increase it to what it is now and that would be about it.

The inference there is either they simply don't want to or can't.

All this would do is make the process quicker to complete, it doesn't fix any of the broken/bad gameplay mechanics that are involved.

Giving people the shiny to keep them happy rather than creating enjoyable/challenging things to do to earn the shiny is not the way forward in my opinion.

It's a quick fix that improves the QoL when playing Engineers until such time FD can implement something better.

• There are 70+ materials to gather. That's an insane amount to keep track of. This would reduce that amount temporarily.
• Second, there are too many layers of RNG - reducing 1 (as a temp fix) by means of less materials to contend with indirectly fixes the 2nd RNG layer (engineers)
• Third by granting quicker access to the engineers to have "more goes" for your time invested it improves the overall experience with engineers.

It's 2 things to change (AFAIK) - loot tables and recipe pointers. That's it.