Focused Feedback - Balancing Ship Engineering & Material Gathering

[Ozric]

I've been trying to think how best to sum up my thoughts on this for a while now. I think that there are far too many issues to be solved with a balance pass on how easy it is to get materials. But let's start there.

Give raw materials as mission rewards
Offer more g5 materials as rewards
Reduce the amount needed for cross group trading at material traders.

To obtain them as fast as possible, materials within Grades 1 to 3 are typically traded down from Grade 4 and 5s. To make them worthwhile to gather by themselves, should their availability and the rate at which they are obtained be increased?

Listening to people who go and farm g4 and g5 materials until they are full and trade down is a ridiculous way of looking at the issues with the situation. The only reason why most people do it is because youtubers tell them it's the easiest way to do it. They don't actually bother to stop and think if there's a different way. But herein lies the problem. No matter what changes you make, if it doesn't make it quicker and easier than the current way of farming high grade mats and trading them down, it won't make a difference to the perception of how "hard the grind is". Plenty of MMOs make you do the same content repeatedly to get the "end game" armour or weapons, I had to run a dungeon in ESO 33 times before I got all of the set I was after, because they drop with true RNG. (though it is worth mentioning they have changed the way it works so bosses will drop a piece of the set you haven't already got yet until you have them all. Also once you have a piece of the set you can reconstruct it at any time for a cost, so you don't have to farm for it again).

Let us know which materials ought to be made more readily discoverable.

Arsenic.

Other Feedback and Suggestions​

The biggest issue is Engineering itself. When ships are designed for the game they are designed in a way that balances them against themselves and other ships. Engineering throws all of that balance out of the window. With engineering you can use any ship for almost every possible situation, so it makes using ships for their intended purpose irrelevant.

When the engineering system was overhauled it removed the RNG element of it, but if you read a lot of the comments here people still complain about RNG. The new system made it far easier to reach G5 rolls on your modules, and in almost all cases it also made them better than the previous iterations of it. Then you have the issue of experimental effects, most of which are so overpowered it's beyond ridiculous. Take Shield Generators as an example, the G5 for Reinforced shields is:

DISTRIBUTOR DRAW +12%
BROKEN SHIELD REGEN RATE -10%
OPTIMAL STRENGTH +38%
ALL RESISTANCES +17%

Obviously the main drawback there is that your shields recharge 10% slower when they go offline. It's not much of a drawback anyway, but if you apply the Fast Charge experimental effect then you get:

SHIELD REGEN RATE +15%
BROKEN SHIELD REGEN RATE +15%
KINETIC RESISTANCE -1%
THERMAL RESISTANCE -1%
EXPLOSIVE RESISTANCE -1%

So actually you end up with:

DISTRIBUTOR DRAW +12%
BROKEN SHIELD REGEN RATE +5%
SHIELD REGEN RATE +15%
OPTIMAL STRENGTH +38%
ALL RESISTANCES +16%

The only downside is a 12% increase to the Distributor draw, which is nothing at all! With most experimental effects you can almost entirely negate the negative effects from the engineering process. There are two issues with this.
1) It goes entirely against the principle of engineering when it was introduced
2) It makes ships practically indestructible

Weapons become so overpowered that the only way to protect yourself is to have fully engineered shields/armour, which then means it's very hard to actually kill you. You can't stop people from escaping easily as they can just charge the FSD while being shot at and then jump away. (You could add a module/effect that disables the FSD within a certain range (easily), and this could be countered by a module that negates that effect).
Engineering is already now a requirement for doing combat in anything above small ships, which means if you're making it a requirement then you have to lower the entry bar to it. Or.

Get rid of experimental effects, increase negative effects and actually make people have to make a choice if they want to use engineering.

You should not be able to have your cake and eat it, as it destroys the balance of the whole game.

If you want to talk seriously about balancing ship engineering then you are going to have to nerf lots of the various engineered blueprints and effects, there's no way around that. If you plan on just making things better and easier, then you might as well remove all entry requirements because you will be making it more of a necessity than it already is.
You are also going to need to do more than one initial balance pass. You are going to need to monitor the situation and then make follow up changes over the following months.

 

[C'tri]

Material Gathering

Availability and Time Required​

Alternate Gathering Methods

Rolling for Engineering Improvements​

Other Feedback and Suggestions​

First of all context that colours my suggestions:
I am a LTE holder who stopped playing when it was announced that VR support would not be coming to Odyssey.
I have not played since and don't have hopes that Odyssey's content changes will entice me back, though on-foot spaces in carriers and megaships is a good start.

To each of the points above.

Availability and Time Required​

As observed, the current meta is to grind out G4/5s and trade down. One of the improvements Odyssey introduced was the Bartender's more granular trading values.
I would recommend reworking the ship based material traders to use a similar approach, increasing the "value" of G1/2/3s.
The categories of the existing material traders create additional barriers between ease of gathering the materials desired.

Consider changing it in the following way:

• Material Traders offer either Raw/ Manufactured/ Data materials as they currently do
• Material Traders accept any Raw/ Manufactured/ Data materials in barter
• Materials gain a numerical value like Odyssey materials, instead of having fixed consistent values based on categories
• Consider dropping materials from ships in clusters to make incidental collection less time consuming (maybe 1 cluster and a few individual pieces - for limpet users)

Alternate Gathering Methods
1. Being able to specify a desired material / commoditiy reward, and being offered a "take it or leave it" mission from an on-foot mission giver.
2. Direct Acquisition of upgraded modules from outfitting
3. Direct Acquisition of upgraded modules / ships from Fleet Carriers (Players being able to sell upgraded ships/ modules)
4. A new mission reward category that is a Core/Shield/Weapon module that your ship can equip (Currency, Reputation, Influence, Material, Cargo, Module)
5. Engineer missions - Pick an upgrade (experimental or graded upgrade) and have the engineer generate missions that reward some or all of the materials required.
6. Better bartering (see above)
7. On foot activity - Why can't players on foot pick up ship-born materials? Have them treated as a "good" for the purpose of inventory management, and added to the ship inventory when dropped off. Rather than dilluting the pool of on-foot materials and in-space materials with cross contamination, the component list for on-foot and in-space engineering blueprints should be simplified and the number of options condensed.
8. Bartering with other earnables (deep core mining, explo data, vouchers, hearts) - excellent idea. Throw Guardian data/ manufactured into the mix too.

More overlap = more incidental acquisition = less dedicated grinding

Rolling for Engineering Improvements​

The odyssey approach of having a single upgrade path for each module and it being "one and done" rather than multiple rolls should be considered.
Keep the current costs for a single "roll", multiply them by between 3 and 5, and make that a flat purchase for a maxed upgrade. This makes the time involved predictable.

Other Feedback and Suggestions​

Consider making experimental upgrades removable and storable.
Most modules only have one (sometimes two) engineering paths.
A big observation is the scale of difference between an Engineered Combat PvE, Engineered Combat PvP, Exploration, and heavy Cargo ships.

Consider a future update that shifts much of this customisability away from Engineering and into the modules themselves.
The Standard/ Prismatic/ Bi-Weave shield is an excellent example of this.
Likewise the enhanced thrusters/ normal thrusters.
Engineering should be simplified down and module options broadened instead.

Make engineering G1-5 blueprints available anywhere there's outfitting, ditch unlock requirements.
Visiting engineers for experimentals and missions etc is still a motivator to do that.

Odyssey suffers terribly from silo'd game design. removing the lines between on-foot and in-space rewards, acqusition, and spending mechanics is a good way forward to correct some of this.




My thanks to the Buur Pit for drawing my attention to this request for feedback.

 

[STARFIRE REVMEUP]

My take...

I am one of those people that can spend hours collecting materials, especially rocks and data and its relaxing to me.
Many of my banks are completely full, nearly all mineral banks are totally full.

Make all material storage UNLIMITED, (or at least on carriers). Its nearly heartbreaking to leave high end material laying on the ground, huge wealth that could have been TRADED for other desirables. And frankly I would personally collect for longer if there was no limit. but thats me.

Maybe allow cross trading for data, rocks, tech ect

Maybe allow player TRADE of materials on carriers, ie a living market. There are people like myself, that would collect just to provide a service to others. In other games, i loved to find niche markets and provide for them.

 

[Fus_Roh_Potato]

I agree. The game was mostly sandboxy with only a few minor imbalances to start with. As soon as engineering came out, there were massive vertical divergences everywhere that ruined natural and organic PvP, then served to transform the game's progression type into one that only made the game easier with time invested. Many have claimed they had so much fun by simply resetting their accounts. That design is very backwards.

This whole time, it was always a possible option to tailor the stats of engineered mods such that they are not more powerful on their own, but slightly more powerful when in proper combination with other mods and when building for a specific play style. There was an entire game of theory crafting and experimentation possible that was never tapped into, all because each mod was not a mod, but an upgrade (and a very strong one).

 

[VR Lucian Arkright]

Firmly in the "BUY OUTRIGHT" camp on this and always have been. We have billionaires mugging ships for parts, that should be READILY AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE. Be done with the whole "gather" game around them entirely and just let people buy the parts they need. Could you imagine the chaos if every time someone wanted to mod their car they had to Road Warrior 15 Kia Optimas hoping for one of them to have a new spark plug?

EDIT: Expanding on this a bit. Let's work in a reason to have some of these permits maybe? Need a new Flux Capacitor? Well it looks like you can only buy those in the Noroads System. Which you need a Permit for. See where I'm going here? Have the materials hunt occasionally take you into places you need a permit for, leading to other things. We have lots of Permits for systems that are in no way special currently. Make them special.

Boosting the signal on this idea - I really like the idea of providing a purpose for Permits.

 

[CzłowiekImadło]

Greetings Commanders

Now that Update 8 for Odyssey is live, we'd like to reignite the series of balancing changes that started before Odyssey's release. Now, it's time to turn our attention to ship Engineering. We recognise there has been significant feedback for on-foot Engineering too, but we'd like to approach these one at a time due to the number of aspects involved. Specifically, we'd like to look at the balancing of the Engineering grind, which largely relates to...

This proposal is late by a couple of years, but still a welcome one nonetheless.

Material Gathering

Availability and Time Required​

To obtain them as fast as possible, materials within Grades 1 to 3 are typically traded down from Grade 4 and 5s. To make them worthwhile to gather by themselves, should their availability and the rate at which they are obtained be increased?

Low-level materials could "accumulate on their own" as we play - maybe have small amounts them as basic rewards for (almost?) every activity and every reward option for missions. This would make low-level engineering readily available to everyone, while high-level ones would still need a bit of work to be put in. The basic idea would be to have them trickle in all the time instead of going for them when absolutely needed and getting a huge lump (though it could still be an option). We already have a reliable source for getting large amounts, that you identified: trading. Do we really need another source of large amounts? (not denying that we do not, genuine question)

Similarly, Grade 5 materials can be traded down into 3 Grade 4 materials within the same category. However, Grade 4 and Grade 5 materials take similar amounts of time to gather. Should the number of materials picked up per instance be increased to account for this?

This seems like a straightforward YES.

We're also aware that some materials are much harder to find than others as they are tied to rarer BGS states. Let us know which materials ought to be made more readily discoverable.

Any estimates regarding how long it took to earn a given Engineered module by gathering materials will also be helpful in addressing this aspect of balancing.

Making rarer materials more available and balancing the effort needed to get engineered modules is a commendable idea. I would only wish you guys made use of the analytics data about the galaxy, that you undoubtedly gather, and did the work yourself, instead of delegating to the playerbase

On the other hand, maybe playerbase doing it is not a bad idea

Alternate Gathering Methods​

We appreciate that the repetitive nature of material gathering may not be for everyone. Some have called for ways to earn materials while engaging in the specific types of content they already enjoy.

Maybe instead of inventing new ways of getting resources, we should look at why the current ones suck and fix them first? And then add some new ones
It would be nice to be able to set some kind of scanner to the specific manufactured material I need, and then, when targeting Signal Sources it would give me some % chance of getting that material from that source, so that people do not waste time sniffing the useless ones.
Similarly, Surface Scanner could indicate high concentrations of selected raw material, and have them actually be plentiful in these areas instead of driving multiple kilometers in SRV between two lonely rocks.
I do not have currently any ideas for Data materials, maybe because gathering them is so painful and so bad right now, that I just can't see how it could be improved

We'd like to hear your feedback on the idea of unique missions offered by Engineers themselves. These could be repeatable and offer materials specific to the upgrades offered by the Engineer who issues them. Let us know what you think of this idea and how many materials this might offer relative to gathering the materials manually.

Seems like a great idea to me. As to the amount, I think it should give at least enough of that particular material for a single roll, so I do a single mission for each material for a particular mod, and then I am guaranteed to be able to do at least one roll. It still sounds like a lot of missions to do a single module fully engineered, so maybe multiple types of materials per mission?

Another idea is to allow materials to be "bought" with items that are not obtainable at Commodities Markets. This could include things such as Exploration Data, Bounty Vouchers, Void Opals and Thargoid Hearts and would allow players to earn materials while playing within their chosen disciplines.

I'm not sure if I would personally use this method, but more options is always good.

Rolling for Engineering Improvements​

Some time ago, Engineering was changed so that some improvement was guaranteed with each roll. However, the amount by which your progress towards the next module grade is still random. This means sometimes the same number of materials will produce a minimal increase. Should this be changed so that the same number of materials are always required to reach the next tier? This would allow Commanders to know exactly how many materials are needed.

Having it fixed and predictable is probably the best approach, as there is nothing more frustrating, than gathering a bunch of materials and getting 5 rolls that improve by fractions of a %.
Alternative, that would not require a big overhaul of the roll system is to add a minimum roll values. Right now, the possible rolls on lower grades do scale with reputation, so initially we need like 2-3 rolls for G1 mod, but later it is almost guaranteed to go with 1 roll - and this is good! But it does not carry over to high-rolls: first G5 roll can give even 50% (if you're lucky), but finishing rolls can give you 0.0001%. Making it so that rolls would always be guaranteed to give at least 10%, maybe 15% would make the system work in a similar way it does now, but greatly reduce the frustration. Player would know, that they are guaranteed a perfect module in, say, 7 rolls, but they will get it in 4-5 on average, and in 3 (maybe even 2?) if they are very lucky. This is probably worse than fully fixed system, but maybe will require less work to implement?

Other Feedback and Suggestions​

Feel free to respond with other ship Engineering balancing feedback and suggestions that go beyond the ideas mentioned above. To keep the conversation on-topic and help us collect the feedback, this thread will be closely moderated. Please only reply with responses to the topics mentioned and keep feedback constructive. Unrelated or unhelpful posts may be removed during clean-up. If you find this has happened to your post, consider raising your points in another thread within the Dangerous Discussion section.

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

O7

Overall I'm very happy to see this proposal! It looks like a step in a good direction. Recent and upcoming updates are actually starting to look very promising - did the person in charge of game design change? Because it feels like the Odyssey mess forced some positive changes in this department I haven't followed E news much recently, so I might have missed it!

 

[HNGamingUK]

Credits, Credits, Credits - Considering in the current year (2021) I don't have to manually gather parts to get a car engineer to complete his job it shouldn't be the case in Elite.

I should be able to go to an engineer pay them x amount and they do the work. Even if the cost of completing the work is 5x of the current cost.

 

[Brrokk]

I'm in sympathy with many of these suggestions. Making materials available from multiple methods; maybe making them available for (a lot of) credits; better exchange rates at traders. I'd like fewer materials in total too.

However, please don't lose sight of the fact that ED is a space piloting game - there's no need to remove requirement for space flight. I thought it was a mistake to allow remote engineering. Please don't allow more recipes to be pinned, or remote special effects, or combined material traders. Keep crystal shards distant. Let's fly around doing stuff.

 

[Oisin]

Feel free to respond with other ship Engineering balancing feedback and suggestions

Hello there, I logged in to this forum for the first time since 2014 (I think) to respond to this post.

Engineering is what ultimately put me off this game as someone with no time or desire to grind past Anaconda back in the day, it's the reason I never purchased Odyssey and I'm sure I'm not alone there.
If this element was made more interesting (missions I guess), or that barrier somehow removed I would be picking up Odyssey in a heartbeat.

 

[JackalHeadGod]

Personally I feel the entire focus of the engineering system is off. I understand that on the simulation/arcade spectrum Elite swings heavily to the simulation side, but I feel it's gone way too far (to be honest I feel that about most of the game) and "realism" has simply become grind.

Up front I'll admit I don't play the game much anymore (though game design issues such as those around engineering or one of the main reasons for that) and that I'm more on the casual occasional evening in elite end of things compared to the hardcore players (but then so are likely most of the player base).

Materials​

It makes no in game sense why we can't just buy and sell materials for in game currency (I can buy an entire ship, but I can't buy a tonne of carbon or some Zinc? I could do that right now, I can buy Zinc on Amazon, okay that's not exactly a tonne, but my point stands).

The only thing the current material system does is force time gating on to players: "You must play this game 20h" to afford this upgrade, and then if you decide you put the wrong experimental effect on the ship then you must play another 20h to put on something different.

This enforced resource scarcity is actively penalising experimentation and locking what has become a critical part of the game for any form of PvP or high end PvE away from newer players. By locking things behind such slow content gates you make it more likely people will use the same builds that others do (by taking them from forums) rather than try out things they they might find fun but might not work out (Lots of MMOs have learned to allow fluidity in builds for this very reason).

I seem to remember at some point reading the idea was you'd earn materials playing the game and have them when you needed them, but nothing could be further from the truth. You can really see this based on how many posts there are about how to optimise material gathering. When people are discussing the only viable ways to gather materials in terms that involve re-logging the game to trick the system in to respawning then your basic gathering loop is broken.

Engineers​

I find the entire model of the engineers goes against maintaining a sense of fun and progression. I've no problem with having to unlock engineers (though some of the unlock conditions seem a bit arbitrary). My problem is with everything after that, so many decisions have been made that add time sinks to the game that don't make logical sense, and seem to be there only to force players to spend more time grinding.

Firstly I don't see any lore justification for how few people can perform these engineering activities. Are we really meant to believe there are only a couple of people in a society of hundreds of billions spread over so many worlds that can put a drag drives upgrade together? I can almost understand it for some of the xeno stuff, but even then once one engineer worked it out, someone would reverse engineer it, put it up a tutorial on HoloTube and everyone would be making them.

The scarcity of access seems designed purely to require the player to travel to multiple engineers to fully upgrade a new ship, an activity that might take many gameplay sessions before the ship is in a state the player wants it to be. That's a lot of travel time where your not actively engaging in any of the core game mechanics and frankly I find it hugely off putting.

Summary​

The core of my complaints with the current approach to engineering all resolve around one thing: The system appears designed from the ground up as a time sink. Almost every step of engineering is designed to take significant time from the player doing repetitive un-fun activities. I'm not a fan of deliberate time sink activities to extend a games lifespan but at least in other games those activities can be fun, I see little fun in the current implementation of engineering.

From my perspective the entire thing needs torn out and reworked (just the process of acquiring upgrades, I quite like a lot of the upgrades themselves)

What would I like to see​

I'd prefer to switch to an globally accessible unlock system. The future is likely an information economy, double down on that rather than the current approach.

1. Firstly remove all but level 4 and 5 (and alien) materials.
   1. Everything else is too common to realistically be a "rare" resource that would be traded or moved in such small quantities within economies on this scale.
   2. If you want to keep all the gathering options for low level materials them then just convert them to regular tradable cargo items, at appropriate price points for the effort required to gather them, rather than materials.
2. Replace "remote workshops" with "workshops" on all relevant stations, these do two things:
   1. Sell blueprints for upgrades (the current basic upgrades) for cash based on station level and your association with the current ruling faction
   2. Apply any blueprint you've unlocked (by any means at any location) for cash (not materials)
3. Engineers should now sell blueprints for only experimental effects.
   1. They should keep their current unlock requirements
   2. Experimental effect blueprints should be purchased using cash and a number of level 4 and 5 materials (this represents you finding rare materials for the engineers to help them experiment and find new upgrades/effects in trade for the results of previous research they've done, not you paying to actually install the upgrade)
   3. I'd probably add a loyalty system that requires you to upgrade the loyalty of the engineer to get better blueprints (perhaps like repeating the unlock requirements or just based on how many blueprints you've bought from them so far, or perhaps tie each engineer to a faction and require missions to be done for that faction)

The core idea here is that you're acquiring information on how to upgrade your ships as you move around the game using a combination of faction influence, straight cash for the basic upgrades and materials for the experimental effects. Once you have that blueprint you can easily apply it to a ship in a way that encourages you to experiment with the options you unlock. The primary time cost is focused on permanent account unlocks not throw away upgrades; working towards a new blueprint becomes a permanent payoff rather than something you might discard completely if you applied the wrong experimental effect or just want to try something different. As you play the variety of options available to you increases along with, hopefully, your skill to make use of those options.

This approach also opens up some interesting new game play mechanics

1. Missions can reward blueprints (or ask you to steal them from settlements)
2. Community Goals can reward blueprints
3. You could get high level weapon experimental effect blueprints (or maybe new tiers of basic upgrades) from military levels or powerplay.
4. Crashed/abandoned ships could have blueprints

Basically you have more freedom to award blueprints from any game mechanic you want as your not tied to having to add them to a limited pool of engineers. You could also expand the blueprint concept to "Experimental Modules" (weapons, scanners etc.) that could be custom built at workshops based on acquired blueprints granting even more things people could earn through gameplay.

To me this would be a far better game mechanic. It encourages you to experiment with builds through ease of access, it give collectors a goal as they can work towards 100% of the blueprints. It cuts the material grind down as you no longer need an infinite supply (and it would give you an opportunity to re-balance the earn rate vs the spend rate). It allows much earlier access to the basic upgrades while still gating experimental effects for more experienced users. And it seems like it should be more enjoyable than the current system, while I'd argue actually making more sense lore wise.

The only thing it isn't is an infinite time sink, but then you can't have everything

 

[Sethiest]

So much said. Don't want to repeat others. So I'll say what may not have been said yet, (at least I didn't see it).

Increase material storage cap.

Introduce data trading with the bar staff for odyssey ground materials like cat media etc.

 

[CMDR imonfire666]

One thing you could do... is to make sure the materiels are at the Known Sourses.. that would help allot

AND FIX THAT GAWWDAMM DASHBOARD GLOBE. ​

 

[Damgalnuna]

Three thumbs up. Let us list and purchase from an in-game market. Set your in-game price for your goody - too high and no one buys. Make each entry part of the BGS so it's available equally to all.

Could add materials to fleet carrier marketplaces, either for sale or for trade where you pick specific items you would trade and numbers etc.

 

[Semantik]

I think people have already posted some great details here but I'll add that I wholeheartedly support reducing the engineering grinds in this game.

With 400 B star systems there's such a huge canvas that can be used to add some cool things to see, puzzles and mysteries to solve. Give people something to do that isn't just grinding this or that material.

Tangentially related to grinding materials, one of the blockers for me is also the general PITA it is to reconfigure my ships to do something different... while not hugely time consuming it does take time to remember what components I want to put and do a bunch of extra clicking. Adding a way to save and swap loadouts would be a huge QoL improvement to the game. I think what most people do is to have one ship configured to be a mining ship then another for combat and another for exploration... etc. which explodes the need for grinding since now you don't need 1 Anaconda with an engineered FSD, you need 4 of them. :/

 

[CMDR Ralduk]

Hi, here are my suggestions. I think progression should not be super quick. I think progression should be fun with a decent amount of variety.

Engineering Rolls:

• Remove everything random.
• Split every Grade to quarters to keep some partial progression.
• Every quarter has the same requirements
• If you upgrade two quarters or four (whole grade) at once, you have a discount.

Availability:

• Grade 5 materials should have slightly higher spawn rate.
• Materials should be obtainable from more sources/activities, so every commander can get these the way they play the game.
• Make multiplayer is more rewarding. One commander picks up a material, everyone in the team gets it as well.

Alternative Sources:

• Engineers should offer repeatable missions, which might be hard to do, but commanders will get Grade 5 type rewards. (At least slightly curated missions revealing a little about their life would be amazing)
• Rarely, a Mission Giver could offer rare materials for some difficult or chained missions.
• Exploration should have loops where rare materials can be found: Stranded NPCs, Crash sites, Abandoned settlements,..
• VIP passengers could offer rare materials for difficult requests.
• Miners could find wrecked ships in asteroid fields with rare materials in them.

Whatever you do, make it more fun please.
o7

 

[Purrfect]

As a late game engineering triple Elite with 5k+ hours, I've given up engineering ships outside of minor tweaks. As a game, the fact that I don't want to participate in doing a major game play loop any more says that the engineering grind is broken. The time invested is NOT worth the resulting upgrade.

I welcome the human tech broker system to provide pre-engineered modules, but we need to do similarly to the Odyssey suit situation - you should be able to find pre-engineered ships and modules to buy. I have money. Lots of money. If I happen to find a shipyard with a ship that I don't yet have, I'd like to have a RNG chance of finding something interesting that I can do something with. Like a Type 9 partially ready to go as a trader, or a Dolphin as a VIP ship with the doubly engineered FSD already fitted.

I've said this a couple of times before, HGE farming is not organic gameplay. Scanning Jameson's crash site for four-six hours and trading down, rinse and repeat is not organic game play. I do it because it's the only way to really grind out a fully engineered ship in a reasonable time. Needle farming is not organic, but I do it because there is no alternative that isn't more boring. I hate non-organic gameplay with a passion, and so when I was still upgrading ships, I'd organize a weekend to grind grind grind, and then I wouldn't do it again for months. Until Odyssey engineer and suit grind came along, I thought that Horizon ship and module engineering grind was the most appalling abuse of player's time ever devised in any game ever made, but I was wrong. I hope you repeat this exercise with Odyssey shortly.

This means I only own half the ships in the game, despite wanting them all, and to leave fully engineered ships in place around Colonia, bubble, Witchead nebula, and the Pleiades, as well as my carrier. My core fleet is just four ships: Cobra Mk 3, Chieftain, Cutter, and Corvette. I have around another 13 ships that I don't really use that often because I can't be stuffed engineering them properly. It's just not worth it.

There needs to be a way to get the necessary "unlocks" to get something, including just paying or trading for it, or as a mission reward, that lets us get on to playing the game, and not grinding. I'd love to see mission rewards like in Odyssey, where you can get ship grinding materials and negotiate with them whilst doing something actually enjoyable. I'd like for a recycling center to exist like interstellar factors that you could go to, and you could browse a RNG generated stock of mostly or fully engineered modules and ships. I'd like to trade with other players materials, modules, and ships. I don't like my FDL. It's mostly engineered. I'm sure there's someone who would like to buy it and make it into their own.

I'm sure there are players who love engineering and don't mind doing the grind. This could create player-led and organic gameplay opportunities. Extending it to powerplay, so that a pirate PowerPlay might favor piracy favored pre-engineered modules and smuggling ships, or similar (and not just LYR) opens up new organic gameplay and a real reason to get into powerplay, which is just so underwhelming as a game feature that in 5000+ hours, I've not done even one hour of it. I do not like mining, but I've done a lot of it, because it was necessary. PowerPlay as it stands is unnecessary and you don't have any reason to go do any of it. Use re-imagining engineering as a trade based, Power Play integrated, player driven economy, and I think it will go a long way to fixing it.

If this is too hard. Create a dump crater. Dump random materials into it. Let Cmdrs drive their SRVs through it in a CQC mode and fill up their bins in < 10 minutes, but they need to fight other Cmdrs to get the stuff.

Lastly, access to engineers. If you're exploring, as one my alts is at the moment, I have zero access to engineering, but I do have access to carriers within 10 kly. Please make any shipyard (at all ports or FCs with one) capable of upgrading any form of engineering (grade or experimental). Please make any outfitter capable of upgrading any grade or experimental. Making me fly 50 kly to just fix one small engineering problem is making exploration a third class citizen of this game. Please fix this.

 

[dm06]

As they said above:

• missions providing N amount of M grade T materials from C category, where N and M are fixed for the mission and C with T are player's choice. For example, for the mission with reward of 3 grade 5 materials, I can choose either 3 antimony or 3 selenium or 3 proto heat radiators or 3 datamined wake exceptions as a reward.
• guardian and thargoid material traders

Update roll system for the cases:
- maximize the module to grade N, that is, upgrade the module to the grade N, waste all required materials but do it with one roll. The goal of it is to minimize time and clicks on button "upgrade". With the change upgrade of some module to grade 5 can save up to 25 button clicks. Imagine amount of click required to upgrade Cutter full with lasers at Muang to grade 5.

 

[Apophes]

I like these suggestions and I hope they will be introduced. I also want to offer additional ideas.
1. I think that it is worth giving the opportunity to buy materials at a price according to their grade (1g - 100k, 5g - 10 mill or at your discretion), and you can buy them from the same traders, you just have the opportunity to both exchange and buy the right materials. It's the right thing, and the elite need more ways to spend their credits.
2. The ability to transfer them from hand to hand (exchange between players) everything is obvious here, I'm even surprised that nothing can be transferred in the elite (except for throwing them out of the ship to another player), I think we should add such an opportunity and exchange credits

 

[Semantik]

I find the entire model of the engineers goes against maintaining a sense of fun and progression. I've no problem with having to unlock engineers (though some of the unlock conditions seem a bit arbitrary). My problem is with everything after that, so many decisions have been made that add time sinks to the game that don't make logical sense, and seem to be there only to force players to spend more time grinding.

this.

And it makes no sense to me why they feel the need to add this time sink... I can see why subscription games have time-sinks... they want to slow down progression so that people pay money longer...

Frontier don't allow you to buy materials or advance engineering via a cash shop -- and thank God they don't... and I hope they never do -- but often games that do have those kinds of cash shops use the extreme grinds to push people over to paying to skip the grind. But Elite doesn't really do either of these so I don't really see why they feel the need to have grinds within grinds.

There are 400 billion systems on their canvas and most of the galaxy is just empty. They could pepper the galaxy with a lot more interesting things to see or mysteries to solve... other long gone ancient civilizations in ruins, etc. I think they've mostly just relied on the grinds as a crutch... it feels lazy.

I think the current interest by FDev to improve things is a really good sign though... I like seeing the updates coming at a regular cadence and am hopeful they will continue to invest in their game.

 

[CMDR Shreaded]

there is already a synthesis system in game, why not make it where to get a g1 mat itll take 50 g5 to make a g4 100 to make a g3.... the values are yours to set but it work well in a few different games i play i dont se why a system like this wouldnt work well in elite