Engineers Feature Request: tip-offs tied to pinned BP

CmdrKull

C
I posted this idea in a very clever DD thread about Black Market engineer goods mission, but thought I'd repost it here in the hopes that FD sees it and considers it.

I propose that once we Pin a blueprint, we start getting tip-offs that would lead to the materials and commodities needed for that blueprint. "Hey I heard you were looking for Arsenic. B1 had a formation rich with the stuff. Here's the coords." And you find a poi with a cluster of rocks and get 9-12 units of arsenic. "Hershel was trying to upgrade his FSD but the idiot picked a fight with a bounty hunter. Maybe the wreck hasn't been picked clean yet". Find the USS and you get a couple of everything needed.

It's a great way to use top-offs, give people an almost garunteed good experience with them so they pay more attention in the future, and cut out a whole bunch of the random searching that can be, honestly guys, VERY frustrating.
 

Mephane

Mephane
No.

* You can only pin 1 blueprint. If multiple blueprints you need are clustered on 1 engineer, you are at a disadvantage to someone who needs blueprints that happen to be spread out. (Could be solved by allowing to pin multiple per engineer.)
* You may want to pin a specific blueprint, but only one of the materials is the actual bottleneck, and you have the rest in abundance. Now you are getting a lot of more surplus on those materials that you already have to throw away from time to time.
* Generally why would the universe react to a UI choice in the engineers screen? Why should things spawn in the world because you have pinned a blueprint? It makes no sense.

I do agree with the wish to influence what you get, and I wish the materials had each more deterministic (and varied) ways of acquisition, but coupling that with pinned blueprints is a rather problematic idea.
 

Karl Agathon

K
The "pin a blueprint" idea/implementation is, in this day and age, an entirely assbackwards concept. Let's not encourage FD to keep it the way it is. We should be able to view ALL blueprints once an engineer is visited, regardless of where we are. Hire proper UX/UI engineers, FD!

Mephane said:
No.

* You can only pin 1 blueprint. If multiple blueprints you need are clustered on 1 engineer, you are at a disadvantage to someone who needs blueprints that happen to be spread out. (Could be solved by allowing to pin multiple per engineer.)
* You may want to pin a specific blueprint, but only one of the materials is the actual bottleneck, and you have the rest in abundance. Now you are getting a lot of more surplus on those materials that you already have to throw away from time to time.
* Generally why would the universe react to a UI choice in the engineers screen? Why should things spawn in the world because you have pinned a blueprint? It makes no sense.

I do agree with the wish to influence what you get, and I wish the materials had each more deterministic (and varied) ways of acquisition, but coupling that with pinned blueprints is a rather problematic idea.
Click to expand...

All great points.
 

CmdrKull

C
Thanks for the feedback. The idea is to supplement engineers without asking for a top-to- bottom redesign which would be a nice thing to get but doesn't feel too likely to happen soon.

If the tip-offs were specific enough you could avoid collecting more "worthless" or over abundant items. One of the examples I have called out arsenic specifically because I spent a weekend looking for 1 unit of it a while back. Tip-offs tend to come in while you're doing other stuff, and I found for my sanity that I had to ignore engineers until I only needed a little more of this or that to be ready.
I see the point about people with multiple pinned blueprints being more efficient, but I don't think it's something FD needs to balance as we can all unlock engineers and pin multiple blueprints. Less restrictions on pinning blueprints is good. I don't bother pinning blueprints now because checking on Inara is easier to me. Giving the pin a BP mechanism a specific use seems better than leaving it as-is.
Pinned. Blueprints getting universal attention seems reasonable, at least as reasonable as taking a mission and then pirates popping up to say "The rumors were true". In elite, people talk apparently. Word gets around. Let it be to our advantage for once.

I'm interested in ideas that we can put forth that don't require large overhauls because there is the hope that smaller changes could make it in sooner. Engineer commodity storage is the type of fairly small change with a big impact that FD said they would consider. I hope a way of targeting materials would be another such reasonable change. I like the posted Black Market idea more than mine, but I think mine requires quite a bit less code and testing because big parts of it are established in the game already.
 
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