They made the same problems with Odyssey engineering like with ship engineering. I wouldn't call ship engineering fixed but I suspect they go just the same route and I have a suspicion it's just planned grind for hooking players with addictiion-stimulating game mechanics. The pattern just repeats.TBH - I’m not sure anything is needed on Ship Engineering compared to the total mess that suit/personal-weapon engineering is in with material requirements, methods of acquisition, drop rates and (lack of) trading ability.
Focused Feedback - Balancing Ship Engineering & Material Gathering
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I literally have no idea what you mean. I suspect you don't either.
molgrips understood what I mean so I have a hunch it must be you.
You seem to be equating having an unlock procedure, which means not everything is accessible on day one, with some cruel and unusual punishment, rather than something which is very common in games.
It's doubly funny when you refer to someone's suggestion about engineering costing a fortune as if it was some kind of alternative content gate (the same account I posted my engineering stats from earlier has over 10 billion credits in assets and here's the thing - I haven't been doing anything like credit maxing on it - it's my 'just for fun' alt account.)
I certainly won't be paying Lori Jameson (for example) a visit any time soon on the alt because I hardly do any combat on it but that's fine - I can live without a grade 5 surface scanner for a while. The unlock requirements for most engineers are relatively trivial for people who actually play the game (i.e. not you obviously).
(Edit: For clarity I'm talking about ship engineering here, not suit engineering which I really don't give two farts about.)
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Indeed
I don't think removing unlocks is good. But making engineering materials more acessible is.
There are flaws in the engineering system for sure. But having to unlock most fo them after the initial 4 is actually a well made part of the content.
It gives porpuse for the player, unlockables that they will keep finding new reasons to use through their play time.
Eventually having more reasons to do new things.
I have most engineers unlocked, left the Colonia ones, for a day me and my friends decide to do a long trip. Never needed them, and left them for the future.
So I have a goal there, to come back with some pinned blueprints.
Everyone might feel the problem is a diferent one. But the Original post already Highlighted the main areas of discussion.
Problem is the avaliability / aquisition of the materials. Making the process of upgrading modules, more tedius and repetitive than it should.
-Farm loads of materials
-Spend them with random variations consumption and results.
-Do this again for every module
If you want G5 thrusters or G5 FDS, commun things to want in every ship. It's not an unlock, you will repeat the farm and upgrade process multiple times.
Imagine if you want to test something new, and you don't want to copy from other CMDR's build on youtube...
There are players with way more.
This repetition and the amount of materials needed is less acessible than the engineering unlocks.
Because it's very deviating from what you were doing, and demands dedicated activities, multiple times.
Any player wanting to upgrade a module they already made before, might check and find out they need to spend 1 hour going on an SRV somewhere to find and shoot at crystals or brain trees. For the second time this month. Because after the engineering unlock, the rest is recurrent gameplay.
Recurrence of the same activities in engineering is the real pain.
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Then again many do play for the combat. I dont think the unlock is a punishment, that would more the kind of chasing PoIs and finding nothing of use in them.
The pre-engineered DSS is superior anyways!
It's an interesting one as well in that - unlike the pre-engineered FSDs - it's actually relatively cheap.The pre-engineered DSS is superior anyways!
If you assume that an explorer who is likely to benefit from spending one fewer probe from time to time is doing enough surface driving to have decent raw material reserves and so only needs to go out of their way to collect high-end manufactured and data, then a standard G5 DSS will cost about 10 Proto Radiolic Alloys (some traded down) plus a smaller number of low-mid grade Mechanical, while the pre-engineered one costs 28 Mechanical Components (only 4 G5 if traded down but there's probably easier ways to get them).
Unlocking the engineers still required and very accessible to new players.
If I remember correctly new players get an invite to Felicity Farseer, which immediately introduces them into engineering and gain access to engineering FSD, thrusters, sensors, and a couple others for G1 . This leads to a couple other very easy unlocks for more handy engineering. The first 8-10 engineers pretty easy. The rest have requirements based on normal progression like combat rank.
When they get to Scout rank in exploration, which i think is new ? I think it used to be a distance travelled thing, although fairly minimal, maybe i'm misremembering.
Distance travelled is Elvira Martuuk - enough to need an out-of-bubble trip but not much further. And I think nowadays she tells you where to get the Soontill Relics from, in case you were under the impression that they came from Soontill.
Farseer has always asked for Scout rank but nowadays that's pretty hard to avoid getting long before you might have any interest in engineering. The meta-alloy is bizarrely difficult for an unguided unlock, though - one of only two engineer tasks in the game that might be tricky for a player not relying on 3rd-party guides to figure out [1], and it's also probably the first one they'll come across.
I assume the meta alloy requirement is fully intentional, forcing a player to learn about 3rd party tools. A very early lesson and an important part of playing ED. Probably a confusing lesson for many new players, but natural for experienced WoW players.
Ha, nice theory, but no. Back when the engineers were first introduced, there'd been regular Galnet articles saying "barnacles, Pleiades, meta-alloys" for a few months before and that continued for months after (because, in part, of them being so necessary to clean UA interference from stations). Shortly after 2.1 launched they had a Galnet article which basically said "Go to Darnielle's Progress for all your meta-alloy needs"I assume the meta alloy requirement is fully intentional, forcing a player to learn about 3rd party tools. A very early lesson and an important part of playing ED. Probably a confusing lesson for many new players, but natural for experienced WoW players.
Martuuk's Soontill Relics requirement was the one you needed to look up at the start, and they fixed that to give extra hints fairly quickly.
Farseer's gift is one of the few things in ED which has got noticeably harder to figure out without third-party tools over time ... and now, of course, someone looking at third-party guides for how to get their meta-alloy stands a decent chance of being routed directly through a Maelstrom's hyperdiction zone on either the way there or (more fun) the way back, just to add to the lessons.
It is not accessible at all. I encounter players regularly on discord that are utterly intimidated by everything to do with Engineers and are trying to get into 'endgame' tasks without doing any of it. It is absolutely a massive cliff-sized learning curve hurdle for newer players that constantly requires patient explaining, information, teaching, and wishing of good luck with RNG that everyone has to suffer through.
It is not a good look, to put things mildly.
Back then at the end of 2018 i found the engineering unlocks quite nice because the said unlocks introduced me to all sorts of game mechanics that were not familiar to me.
For example, mining. I really hate it when i had to do it as a unlock, but eventually it grew on me and became a favorite relaxing activity
Just wanted to add that this is a massive disincentive fir returning players also. I have an engineered to the nines combat ship, exploration ship and multi-role. The thought of having to go throught all that mcguffin fetching nonsense AGAIN to get up to snuff... ugh...
A few simple ways to imporve FPS: Add revives to FPS(make medivac missions, etcetera) so dying in FPS is not so big a deal and doesn't always cost you everything(have ship auto depart for orbit if all crew go down in FPS outside).
MASSIVLY reduce the time to kill in FPS... right now it's like a water-pistol fight. Add skill shots(headshots, reduced damage on limbs). Add a prone state. Add breath hold and stamina mechanics.
Making a good entry level FPS should be really simple... i'm gobsmacked at how poor a job was done initially.
Most kills only take 1 shot for me, I don't think it could be reduced much more - Granted, some take 2 shots, so it could be halved for them.
It's not really that I dislike the unlocks per se - it's just that one cant say engineers is accessible for new players when they have a lot of jobs to do even to get to thw point when they can really start wasting their time clicking 100s of times. Provided their bins are full - which likely arent.
I think you are confunsing acessible with easly achieavable / effortless.
I could engineer ships since the Cobra 3, as soon as I bough an ASPX I went and engineered its thursters and FSD to G3, the best I could.
This was weeks before I could even buy an Anaconda. But I was exploring all aspects of the game, doing diferent missions, testing more than just the combat and trading I wanted to do.
An Anaconda is also not acessible, you have to do lots of jobs before the point you can just pick one up and fit as you like.
You can do a single thing since the sidewinder and see how log it takes to achieve that Anaconda.
But most players will ''have a lot of jobs to do even to get to thw point when they can really start wasting their time clicking" to do their space combat or exploration, whatever on that ship.
Many new players will watch a tutorial about doing X Y Z process on how to speed run the whole credits progression of the game as fast as you can.
The goal of the game is to enjoy what you are doing. Some might enjoy a certain activity loop, want to buy the best ship for it, then fine tune that ship.
If all those things were just given, than you would be always on your confort zone, without means to improve.
I think the problems with engineering are clearly pointed out for a long time, on the mainly on the original post. We should focus on those.
Others might be just our own personal view.
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