Engineers FDev - have you actually played your own game?

[lemny]

Ok, i am not telling you or anyone how to play your game, you play it your way, but why do you want IT NOW? Just play the game, and you will come across what you need.
I can't understand the rush to get EVERYTHING the engineers have NOW!

I agree and would do so if there were a proper storage with 100 per or so mat and not 600 at all. Now i have to discard mats all the time and that's annoying.
And when i didn't have to carry commodities around until the point i have all the mats for an upgrade.

While carrying commodities for a planned upgrade many activities like RES are not possible anymore because you cannot pick your fights. Naah... that's all not funny...

 

[Cmdr Eran Mintor]

This is why we don't do a beta test for half a month when the devs have 0 (zero) QA department.

 

[Muetdhiver]

I think QA checks that the code runs properly and such.

It does not mean that what the code does makes sense. It seems that a good part of the problem
is that the beta was a test of the game mechanics but not of the final (live) gameplay. (inventory limits,
engineers access fetch "quests", spawn rate of things like firmware and so on...)

For the moment I feel we are playing (and really hope that it's the case) the 2.1 "gameplay beta",
due for "soon" patching (it better be, and fast, because FD is losing players/goodwill here).

TBH, engineers feels like a great idea and a poor execution, like powerplay. However, unlike powerplay,
the amount of tweaking to make it good is small.

 

[2plex]

Just waiting for the next fanboi to post, that it's all the fault of the beta testers.
If they had done it properly instead of treating beta like an early access, the game would be fine.
Yeah, right! f u

 

[Derath]

Yeah it hasn't been that buggy, i've never seen a game QA department check gameplay content they pretty exclusively test for stability as its the most important thing they can test (best game in the world sucks if it crashes all the time!)

 

[Erimus Kamzel]

I'm sort of fine with the RNG for upgrade rolls, but it really needs to be taken out of the actual material gathering process. Some materials and components aren't too difficult to find, but I really feel that all of the special commodities need to be available in regional markets.

Pretty much my sentiments too. I actually don't mind the random effect of the engineer dice rolls, as the outcome allows for unique ships in a way - instead of everyone flying an exact copy of everyone else. But the player should be rewarded for the ungodly amount of hours it takes to gather the stuff needed, and that reward should come in the form of making actual headway that reflects the hours put in, or fun engaging gameplay while he's doing it (ideally both!).

Spending 6 hours and finding 2 Polonium, then logging in the next day, at the exact same place, and finding 5 in 15 minutes is not fun gameplay. No skill, no challenge, no reward for the time put in.

Also seeing 3 days gametime go down the pan because of a bad dice roll is ill-conceived gameplay. How it got beyond the design discussion table is beyond me.

If the materials were actually fun to locate, and not a repetitive grind, if the rarest stuff was found in challenging terrain like mountain ranges or deep ravines - places that challenged the player but also positively rewarded them with the actual item they're looking for (not a piece of worthless iron or nickle), then it wouldn't be so bad. If I get a SRV radar blip in a mountain range, or challenging bit of terrain, I should be rewarded with one of the rarest elements if I manage to retrieve it.

All these worlds and all these varied landscapes with all the various challenges each can throw at us, and all we have to do it drive back and forth endlessly across the blandest planets, the blandest terrains, and have the .rng mechanic on our side?... and THAT masquerades as gameplay? Come off it FD! What a wasted opportunity to showcase what Horizons was all about.

Layers of randomness on top of layers of randomness does not challenge the player, and it is not fun gameplay. Its the lowest common-denominator gameplay there is. There's no wonder why ED is accused of lacking depth.

Maybe have a few old time gamers at the design committee discussions meeting next time, and a few less programmers.

 

[BaldEagle]

Pretty much my sentiments too. .....
, and a few less programmers.

Complete agreement to this
+1

 

[FutronBob]

Agree 100% with the OP. I love how so many people brush off all the complaints about it and say "just go on your merry way, do what you normally did before 2.1, and you'll eventually get all the mats you need."

Which would be good advice, if it wasn't an outright lie.

To all those who hold this opinion, please tell me something: did your daily Elite: Dangerous activities before 2.1 consist of:
-Scanning hundreds of high wakes
-Driving for dozens of hours in search of a single material
-Dropping into hundreds of Signal Sources
-Spending hours searching/mode switch refreshing bulletin boards to get a single, specific, mission-only commodity
-Killing dozens and dozens of innocent trade ships in anarchy space

Nearly every single blueprint requires at least one or more materials that are only obtainable by spending countless hours doing the tasks above, all of which involve almost no player skill and are simply reliant on the RNG alone.

Come on guys, be honest here. We all know none of you did this stuff before 2.1.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Ok, i am not telling you or anyone how to play your game, you play it your way, but why do you want IT NOW?

<snip>

I can't understand the rush to get EVERYTHING the engineers have NOW!

Could it be something to do with the fact that:

(a) Patch is called "2.1 ENGINEERS"
(b) All we have heard over the last 6 months is "engineers this" and "engineers that"
(c) Newsletters and live streams pumping up the hype train for Engineers
(d) It's new content .. something else for players to try out

It's kind of expected that a lot of players are going to want to test it out ... not suggesting they want the best mods all at once but to at least test the water out.

FD can't have expected people to "take their time" over engineer modifications as otherwise they would have included storage from the outset. They didn't, which tells me they expect you to start a mod off and see it to completion, or they made a huge mistake by only QA testing with fish.

 

[ndrwc]

Sandro practically that the devs don't play during the livestream when he said they didn't know how long it would take to actually unlock all the engineer upgrades. In part because they chose to shortcut Beta (all upgrades already available, from 5 identical engineers with no unlock requirements, and no crafting materials required after the first few days), but I suspect there was no internal test pre-beta apart from "does the game not crash".

I'd like to put a simple poll to the devs: what are your gameplay stats without cheating? How many hours, what are your combat ranks, what is your asset pool? Do you really play this game outside your dev server?

Could it be something to do with the fact that:

(a) Patch is called "2.1 ENGINEERS"
(b) All we have heard over the last 6 months is "engineers this" and "engineers that"
(c) Newsletters and live streams pumping up the hype train for Engineers
(d) It's new content .. something else for players to try out

It's kind of expected that a lot of players are going to want to test it out ... not suggesting they want the best mods all at once but to at least test the water out.

FD can't have expected people to "take their time" over engineer modifications as otherwise they would have included storage from the outset. They didn't, which tells me they expect you to start a mod off and see it to completion, or they made a huge mistake by only QA testing with fish.

Absolutely this. The entire mechanics (initial unlock, RNG loot, unlocking of tiers, RNG rolls) were not tested. We got Tier 5 with cheap rerolls (no re-grind for the right mats) in Beta, and when 2.1 when live we were left with... something which was vastly different to what had been demonstrated. And we're understandably annoyed.

 

[cmdr sandman]

Loads of good points made here. I really want the game to get better, and I still enjoy it for the most part, but I've a few concerns.

I think FD were too ambitious overall with the Engineers mechanic. I think that the possible mods should (a) have been predictable after you'd put the grind in and (b) have been relatively small improvements. As it is, the people with the most time to play will become overpowered and complain that PvE is too easy. The people with less time to play will find the grind to search for components, coupled with the random results, too much of a time suck and so the gap between the folk with lots of time to play and those with limited time is going to grow wider.

Overall I'd say there's a very worrying trend to the 'big' releases with ED - PowerPlay, CQC and now Engineers haven't enhanced the core game at all and could all be argued to have been poorly thought out and implemented, yet presumably took up huge internal resources. The positives coming out of the 2.1 patch were fixes that should have been implemented months ago.

 

[Viking84]

Overall I'd say there's a very worrying trend to the 'big' releases with ED - PowerPlay, CQC and now Engineers haven't enhanced the core game at all and could all be argued to have been poorly thought out and implemented, yet presumably took up huge internal resources. The positives coming out of the 2.1 patch were fixes that should have been implemented months ago.

This is another very worrying aspect of it all. It seems that FDev are content with how the core mechanics (trading, combat, exploration) work, and are instead spending enormous resources adding separate content on top of this that doesn't integrate well with the core game, and in most cases ends up being ignored by a large portion of the community.

 

[lemny]

... or they made a huge mistake by only QA testing with fish.

They did... all these bugs/bad design were slipped through
- missing storage for commodities required for crafting
- bad collector limpet design (slow, weak and need storage (should be Ammo or nothing at all... they should be like SRVs) and should come back to my ship and not flying around, collecting all illegal stuff in RES... *sigh*
- surface scanner should show mats in % (it should be merged to one module with adv. discovery scanner and scanners like wake/cargo/warrant should be one module or be an upgrade for the ship scanners itself)
- mats/data in the magical storage should have a limit per type and not at all (i have to throw away stuff i don't know if i ever need it or not)
- and last but not least: if there were the grind in the beta, the need of RNG to be tweaked to avoid the komplete useless rolls would be more obvious.

 

[CMDR RubberStig]

I do not like to have to search for individual rocks.
I would like it if FD added ore rich pockets to planets.
We should be able to search for those pockets in our ships and when we find them we can then land and collect the ore with our SRV.
There don't need to be hundreds of rocks in such a pocket just 10 or so would be fine.
I think this would alleviate the grind a bit and it also feels more natural.

If I can scan a planet from space and find pockets, great. If I can to the same to and asteroid field or planet ring and scan that to find them too, great, and if I can store all this crap in a largely unlimited library (Like the crafting mats storage in Guild Wars 2 for example), great. If recent finds of said pockets were to be announced on GalNet, that too would be helpful. As it stands though .. oh dear, what a mess. What if I don't have cargo space in my ship for the mission reward? How do I know what stuff I can afford to ditch from my 600 slots (which I filled with crap after 2-4 hours of mining) when I've only unlocked .. well none but the 2 standard engineers?

It seems likely to me that the programmers @ FD are very good at what they do - the graphics are astonishing, and the flight model is the best in a space game I've ever seen, and the new Outfitting and Mission interfaces are really good. So the mess that is Engineers seems to me to be an issue of design failure, with multiple levels of RNG combining for a very low likelihood of getting what you want in a timely and affordable fashion. To my way of thinking, the player should be able to manipulate each factor like a slider where, a positive effect is always counter balanced by the same negative effect. This removes randomness completely, but also makes the player have to balance what they want with what they don't want. I wouldn't mind being able to gamble on just the special effect in maybe a similar way to the way Diablo 3's enchantments work, where you are always guaranteed a special effect, but you may have to roll many time to get the specific one, WITHOUT effecting the mod you have already created.

 

[Tommy Alpha]

The more I play, the more I wonder if the devs have actually played their own game. Not with a dev account, not with freebies, but actually working their way up the ranks like the rest of us.

Now I'm not just whining here, and I know the title is intentionally a bit rude, but this is an honest question that came about after spending the last 30 hours since 2.1 launched searching for materials and gaining favour with Engineers. These are the mechanics I engaged in during this search:

1. SRV Rock Hunting
2. Mining
3. Wake Scanning
4. Ship Scanning
5. Hunting Transport Ships
6. Refreshing the mission board hoping someone would offer me a useful material

For all of these activities you are at the mercy of a lucky RNG roll to actually get what you are looking for. All of the activities are among the least engaging and rewarding things to do in Elite, and are prime candidates for a proper RPG style grind.

I can almost hear the discussion that went on before this was implemented:

- Guys, we need some materials for crafting. I reckon these should drop from pretty much every activity you can do.
- Good idea Bob! That way all players get rewards regardless of what they are doing.
- Of course they do. And every material from every activity will be unique!
- But Bob, that means everyone HAS to do everything?
- Yes Pete, finally we can force our players to take part in everything our game has to offer!
- Oh well, I'm sure they will survive that with a clear goal in mind...
- Pete, Pete, Pete, that would be too easy! We must ensure each activity can drop at least 10 different materials, so the player has to keep at it for ages to get what he wants.

As you can see, Bob is the problem here, and evidently has a different goal for us all than making the game fun to play. Hence my question to Bob - have you ever sat down and tried to play this game with a clear goal in your mind? It is the most frustrating experience of my gaming career to date, and a huge waste of time as you are FORCED to spend hours doing stuff you don't enjoy doing - the very definition of a grind!

So, FDev, I beg of you, get rid of the randomness in the material gathering process. Make it predictable and skill based. Give us scanners to find surface materials, allow us to choose what rewards we get from missions from materials of the same rarity, allow us to trade low level materials for high level ones... anything to give us more control of how we gather these things!

If you do this the engineering gamble might be more fun - at the moment it feels like going to vegas with your last 10 pound note with the goal of feeding your kids for the next month. Gambling is only fun if you have money to burn, same thing goes for materials!

I never participate in the forums, and I have nothing of value to add to this discussion that hasn't already been said. I literally logged in just to say +1, I agreed the hell out of this post.

 

[Thebadmf]

If I can scan a planet from space and find pockets, great. If I can to the same to and asteroid field or planet ring and scan that to find them too, great, and if I can store all this crap in a largely unlimited library (Like the crafting mats storage in Guild Wars 2 for example), great. If recent finds of said pockets were to be announced on GalNet, that too would be helpful. As it stands though .. oh dear, what a mess. What if I don't have cargo space in my ship for the mission reward? How do I know what stuff I can afford to ditch from my 600 slots (which I filled with crap after 2-4 hours of mining) when I've only unlocked .. well none but the 2 standard engineers?

It seems likely to me that the programmers @ FD are very good at what they do - the graphics are astonishing, and the flight model is the best in a space game I've ever seen, and the new Outfitting and Mission interfaces are really good. So the mess that is Engineers seems to me to be an issue of design failure, with multiple levels of RNG combining for a very low likelihood of getting what you want in a timely and affordable fashion. To my way of thinking, the player should be able to manipulate each factor like a slider where, a positive effect is always counter balanced by the same negative effect. This removes randomness completely, but also makes the player have to balance what they want with what they don't want. I wouldn't mind being able to gamble on just the special effect in maybe a similar way to the way Diablo 3's enchantments work, where you are always guaranteed a special effect, but you may have to roll many time to get the specific one, WITHOUT effecting the mod you have already created.

Here, here!

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

IMHO better gameplay would have been smaller predetermined incremental improvements with each mod, but for that to work they wuld have to be stackable. ie you could add shielded FSD on top of Long Range FSD + Long Range FSD so you'd end up with:

jump_range = (FSD/hull_mass) - (Shielded FSD penalty) + (Long Range FSD Improvement) + (Long Range FSD Improvement)

Such a structure would reward those content to grind for perfection, and prevent those who just want a fettle getting frustrated.

If we put a limit on total the number of upgrades per module, that would prevent too much overpowering. If we keep the multiple levels of each upgrade based on reputation with the engineer and materials available, and assign the level upgrade a points value, you could set this limit to a total number of upgrade_points making the number of permutations totally staggering. Stacking upgrades would multiply the number of permutations exponentially.

I don't want it to be all milk and honey, I want some reasonable down sides... I want the negative side effects to stack as well as the positive side effects. So lets say overcharged weapon L3 is stacked 3 times on a multi cannon...
(+29% DPS +29% Damage +25 Fate Of Fire +25% distributor draw)
(+29% DPS +29% Damage +25 Fate Of Fire +25% distributor draw)
(+29% DPS +29% Damage +25 Fate Of Fire +25% distributor draw)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
(+87% DPS +87% Damage +75 Fate Of Fire +75% distributor draw)

A pretty awesome weapon - if you can power it up as it now uses 75% more power... Lets say you are trying to put that on a vulture, a ship notoriously starved for power - that extra 75% of power could be a deal breaker as you now need to find an additional (0.97MW base weapon * 75%) 0.7275MW

looking at this sample build:
https://coriolis.io/outfit/vulture/2patfFalddksif37l7l04---4a02--2h.Iw19kA==.Aw19kA==

The new upgraded multi cannon simply cannot be used - not without engineer upgrading the power plant as well,which will require more scouring of the galaxy for more materials.

 

[Coyote]

and the flight model is the best in a space game I've ever seen

I'd trade it in for Frontier's flight model without any hesitation. Totally unrealistic. A maximum speed in space? FSD/FTL travel? Come on.

There are good points about the game, but I'm afraid this is rather a low point than a benefit. A necessary one, though - the Frontier flight model isn't multi-player compatible.

 

[Enderby]

The galaxy, the space, that they have created is amazing. The 'game' that they have then tried to tack on to it is not.

 

[Colonel Kenney]

The forums are being ignored... the past couple weeks. They are waiting for the heat to die down before they stick their heads back out. Problem is I don't think when it dies down there will be many left. Better get some news and or letters from the president to address all these concerns soon.