Engineers Forcing players to kill soft targets or cops for materials

[Devari]

You don't even notice how you contradict yourself from one sentence to the next, do you? How do you suppose Frontier was made "aware of the frustration"? Of course complaining helps! How else would the devs know what players think of new features of this project? How can you tell when it's "enough threads"? How many threads of complaints change a dev teams approach?

We have already gotten FD's attention on this issue, given that we have the recent changes to Galnet postings and a list of several upcoming changes in next month's patch. It's clear at this point that posting more complaints about how much you hate SRV driving or how much you hate the RNG aspects is not going to change anything or get any response from FD. They have told us very clearly that the RNG aspects are here to stay but that they will be making certain adjustments to mat drops and blueprints to make the upgrading process easier. None of your posts, however, are constructive as they are simply uninformed complaints where you clearly don't understand the process of SRV scouting or mat collection to begin with. If you have constructive comments to make about a process you first have to demonstrate that you have put in the minimum effort to understand and become familiar with the process in question, which you clearly have not.

Knowledge and skill are not the same thing.

I never said they were the same. What I said was that although there is a certain element of randomness for what any given rock might drop the SRV driving/mat scouting process overall is far more dependant on both skill and knowledge than you were aware. You claimed that the mat collection process was "random", "luck-based" and had "no skill involved". This characterization is simply not true, for all the reasons I've stated, as both skill and knowledge are major factors.

I think it's great that players who feel so inclined can figure stuff out by themselves - I do so myself; I'm simply not a surface miner for crying out loud - where did i suggest otherwise? But reading up on someone elses findings is not "a skill".

First, driving the SRV is a skill and reading the wave scanner is a skill. These both dramatically affect your ability to collect mats effectively so right away you should have known that SRV mat collection is clearly skill-dependent. Second, knowing what type of planet drops a given material and knowing when you should move to a different part of the planet to improve mat drops are knowledge-based. All of these factors taken together will have a dramatic impact on your success at mat collection. To suggest there is "no skill involved" when both skill and knowledge are major factors affecting your success is simply wrong.

I simply don't think it's a good idea for a multi-role game to force players (and i stick to force) into activities that are not part of their chosen path. That's akin to telling a mage to use a sword and a bow if they want to upgrade their spells. Great idea? I gave the miner example about bulkheads/HRP earlier in this thread. Good idea, badly executed: Fail.

It's supposed to be "blaze your own trail". There was none of that monkey business in Frontier back in 1994 and having it now makes no sense at all, whatsoever, not for a "sim" and not for a space RPG either. It's closer to do-it-all-or-leave-it. For. No. Reason. You like that, apparently, or you are on a crusade to defend a gameplay mechanic that you dislike, which I by now imagine is within your capabilities. I do not like it. Can you accept that?

This is really a completely separate issue, and is one I've been highly critical of in other threads. It's quite separate from the issue of whether you can learn to gather mats efficiently in the SRV however. You can very readily gather enough Yttrium and Polonium to upgrade your FSD, as long as you are willing to using appropriate skill-based and knowledge-based techniques. If the issue is simply that you don't "want" to drive the SRV or think that you shouldn't "need" to do an activity that doesn't suit your playstyle, that's not something FD is going to fix for you. My biggest concern here isn't that we have to drive the SRV, because the SRV is after all an "exploration" activity so at least they're tying an exploration task to the FSD upgrades. My concern is with the other mats where we need to do "illegal" activities to gather certain mats effectively. I've gone into detail about why this is bad game design and how it destroys the immersion that is critical to Elite's success. Unfortunately FD doesn't seem to have any inclination to change this so we've stuck between deciding how "badly" we want/need any given upgrade and if we are willing to jump through the hoops they've put in front of us. In my case I am wiling to jump through most of those hoops, but have drawn the line at mining which is the lowest time/reward ratio in the entire game, and I strongly dislike the "illegal" activities and do the bare minimum of those tasks. At the end of the day you will need to decide for yourself what your threshold is in term of the amount of grind and activities that you are willing to do to upgrade your ship.

 

[psyantologist]

If the issue is simply that you don't "want" to drive the SRV or think that you shouldn't "need" to do an activity that doesn't suit your playstyle, that's not something FD is going to fix for you.

This is exactly why I rant and vent about it. Frontier isn't going to fix it "for me". They will fix it if a significant part of the player base seems to find offence in it, may it be expressed on the forums or through a change of behaviour (statistics changing, including "no longer playing the game/not buying into further seasons")

Yes, reading the wave scanner requires learning how to read the wave scanner. Driving well requires practive, sure. Exploration for exploration equipment is fine too. But darn near every mod requires almost every activity. I don't think that will float that well in the long run. And we're here for the long run, ain't we?

I am glad that we have some decent common ground about the immersion being vital for Elite: Dangerous' survival and this being at risk.

And, yeah, that is exactly why I go ape doo doo about it. Because enough roar will trigger that very inclination you correctly point out as being amiss on FDs part, at the moment. I don't expect them to listen to one player. Yet a forum filled with players has changed their minds in the past and will do so in the future. We'll get module storage. I can't even imagine how many angry whiny complaint threads exist about that. "enough of them" might be the answer. We got bookmarks. We're apparently even getting remote ship-sale so we can get rid of the sidewinders we used as bookmarks before we had bookmarks.

You might notice my OP was mostly about killing haulers/cargo ships and cops - the first because they are no match (even if Wanted and no "illegal kill", per se, i am sympathetic to smugglers and do not enjoy kicking someone who is smaller than me), the latter because i despise it being "an activity" to kill cops or toddlers for spare parts which should float around in every hangar for virtually no cost. Immersion breaking.

I don't even mind that "cop killing" is in the game, though. There used to be missions to frag system authority ships - i did not find offence in them being in the game, because it's a game about space ships (how would it look like with FPS elements? Awful. That's how it'd look like) but even if i don't mind they exist, I wouldn't do these missions.

We got a bit side-tracked on the whole surface prospecting situation - I do not want to see that being taken that away from players who actually enjoy it (I'm perfectly aware that some people love driving simulators - and that's all fine and dandy) yet i consider anything that drives players out of the game over plain needless frustration should not get into the game/stay in the game. It's a process. Little is carved in stone. I want this game to stay alive and flourish. I want to be able to recommend it to my friends again - which I used to do yet currently cannot do anymore as they would get upset with me for it. I'm saddened to write down that realisation; I kept it in the back of my head, but it's true. And it has not always been this way and does not need to stay that way either.

Blowing up a variety of surface loot boxes which look distinctively different on the wave scanner to find that the same old stuff squirts out of them is plain lame. It's a very, very, very strange approach to "surface mining", I'd say.

Give me a Detailed Surface Scanner that actually gives me a detailed scan of the surface, so I'm not flying aimlessly, a slightly more advanced wave scanner which can effectively tell the stuff apart which I found with the DSS - and I imagine I'll be fine with SRV/prospecting with all the other RNG elements it features.

 

[Devari]

This is exactly why I rant and vent about it. Frontier isn't going to fix it "for me". They will fix it if a significant part of the player base seems to find offence in it, may it be expressed on the forums or through a change of behaviour (statistics changing, including "no longer playing the game/not buying into further seasons")

Yes, reading the wave scanner requires learning how to read the wave scanner. Driving well requires practive, sure. Exploration for exploration equipment is fine too. But darn near every mod requires almost every activity. I don't think that will float that well in the long run. And we're here for the long run, ain't we?

I am glad that we have some decent common ground about the immersion being vital for Elite: Dangerous' survival and this being at risk.

And, yeah, that is exactly why I go ape doo doo about it. Because enough roar will trigger that very inclination you correctly point out as being amiss on FDs part, at the moment. I don't expect them to listen to one player. Yet a forum filled with players has changed their minds in the past and will do so in the future. We'll get module storage. I can't even imagine how many angry whiny complaint threads exist about that. "enough of them" might be the answer. We got bookmarks. We're apparently even getting remote ship-sale so we can get rid of the sidewinders we used as bookmarks before we had bookmarks.

You might notice my OP was mostly about killing haulers/cargo ships and cops - the first because they are no match (even if Wanted and no "illegal kill", per se, i am sympathetic to smugglers and do not enjoy kicking someone who is smaller than me), the latter because i despise it being "an activity" to kill cops or toddlers for spare parts which should float around in every hangar for virtually no cost. Immersion breaking.

I don't even mind that "cop killing" is in the game, though. There used to be missions to frag system authority ships - i did not find offence in them being in the game, because it's a game about space ships (how would it look like with FPS elements? Awful. That's how it'd look like) but even if i don't mind they exist, I wouldn't do these missions.

We got a bit side-tracked on the whole surface prospecting situation - I do not want to see that being taken that away from players who actually enjoy it (I'm perfectly aware that some people love driving simulators - and that's all fine and dandy) yet i consider anything that drives players out of the game over plain needless frustration should not get into the game/stay in the game. It's a process. Little is carved in stone. I want this game to stay alive and flourish. I want to be able to recommend it to my friends again - which I used to do yet currently cannot do anymore as they would get upset with me for it. I'm saddened to write down that realisation; I kept it in the back of my head, but it's true. And it has not always been this way and does not need to stay that way either.

Blowing up a variety of surface loot boxes which look distinctively different on the wave scanner to find that the same old stuff squirts out of them is plain lame. It's a very, very, very strange approach to "surface mining", I'd say.

Give me a Detailed Surface Scanner that actually gives me a detailed scan of the surface, so I'm not flying aimlessly, a slightly more advanced wave scanner which can effectively tell the stuff apart which I found with the DSS - and I imagine I'll be fine with SRV/prospecting with all the other RNG elements it features.

I actually agree with the majority of these points. I think part of the issue is that Elite has relied quite heavily on grind from the outset and for some reason the player base "accepted" this without really asking whether it was good for the game. When they rolled out Engineers they went with the "lazy" option of not only grind-gating the mats but also RNG-gating the upgrade process as well and for some players the overt RNG on top of grind was too much. Part of the issue here is that they needed to "balance" the game to somehow include everyone from casual traders to high-end bounty hunters without making it unplayable or trivial for either end of the player spectrum. Even with these issues I was willing to tolerate the Engineers grind and the RNG aspects if the end result was more gameplay options for our ships. I just decided that I would develop strategies to deal with it, but for me the immersion-destroying aspects like having to blow up T9's for chemical manipulators really did take the game down quite a bit in my view. Essentially it made us choose between not going after a certain upgrade or doing activities we would never choose to have our commander do in order to get the mats we need. Forcing players to make this "choice" is the worst game design decision they can make in an open-world game as it means choosing between not playing the game at all or not enjoying the content we have been railroaded into playing. The main problem for FD at this point is that the strong sense of immersion that they carefully crafted during the first year has been eroded quite heavily by all of the Engineers and RNG issues. At this point they're stuck with trying to fix the balance again without actually making any major changes to the Engineers or crafting system. I don't think the level of immersion will really reach the point that it was for me pre-2.1, but the overall game is still engaging enough that I have enough interest to keep playing and hope that FD will learn from this process about what not to do with future expansions (i.e., give players true options/choice instead of limiting or railroading us).

 

[psyantologist]

Yay, common ground! A whole non-atmospheric planetoid of it! That calls for tea! =]

 

[Devari]

Yay, common ground! A whole non-atmospheric planetoid of it! That calls for tea! =]

Or maybe a glass of ... Lavian Brandy?

 

[Zieman]

Yay, common ground! A whole non-atmospheric planetoid of it! That calls for tea! =]

Or maybe a glass of ... Lavian Brandy?

In absence of the latter, I'll have to settle for Jameson Whiskey...

 

[tehface]

Forcing me to destroy authority ships or scoop around in conflict zones is pretty much the biggest horse-doo-doo in Elite history. Forcing me to kill Haulers or Type-Xs to gather Materials is plain shameful. What kind of person comes up with ideas like this? And why? To generate "new gameplay"? This is insane! A certain grade of moral corruption might work for some role-players, but forcing it upon players for the most basic engineer mods stinks. A lot. I loved this game and the direction its going now is ruining it.

feel free to delete the game, many other love the idea.. and embrace it

 

[Sunleader]

Yes, he is, because he claimed the process was "random" and "luck based" with "no skill involved". He clearly had no understanding of all the factors that can be controlled or influenced. His claim is wrong, full stop. He did not say that there are "certain factors" that are random or luck-based, this was how he described the entire process.



No, not really. If you know what you are doing you can consistently get 1-2 Yttrium or Polonium per hour on average from a planet that drops it. Just because there are certain factors that are out of your control does not make the overall process "random" with "no skill involved". You could make the same claim of "randomness" for any skill-based task as there is always some degree of randomness in any activity. Take, for example, firing a rifle. Most people would consider this a VERY skill-based task but there are a large number of "random" factors that remain partially or even completely outside of your control, including:
-Target movement (can be very unpredictable).
-Wind (can be measured but can also change randomly).
-Variations in ammunition (even with match-grade ammo).
-Barrel temperature (varies as rounds are fired through the rifle).
-Optics calibration (never completely perfect even when properly zeroing-in the scope).
-Heart rate/breathing (not completely controllable even with training).

And so on. Yet no one would claim that a marksman's ability to hit his target with a rifle was overall a "random" task just because there are certain factors that aren't completely controllable by the shooter.



That is sort of the entire point here, there are MANY ways to increase your chances of finding any given material. There is still a certain amount of randomness due to the RNG for mat drops but you can still dramatically increase your chances of finding a material by doing all of the things that have been mentioned in this thread. When someone claims it's "random" or "luck based" and doesn't even acknowledge or understand these factors, they are simply wrong. They are not "sort of right", they just have no idea what they're doing. Same as if they tried to claim that firing a rifle at a target was a "random" task because of all the factors I mentioned above. Saying something has "random" elements while being able to identify the various factors that are controllable is a completely different statement than claiming that the overall process is "random". Like I've mentioned in other threads, the amount of hyperbole I've seen in some of these threads is ridiculous. It's as if certain players encounter something they can't control 100% and they suddenly give up completely and start acting as if it's a completely "random" process that they have no control over whatsoever.

1.
Mate Seriously.
If your Answering ONE Statement.
Please Answer this One Statement. And dont Answer it in 3 Different Sections Independently from each other.
It makes no Sense and Distorts the meaning of what your Counterpart Said.

2.
The Problem is the Luck Part remains the Bigger Issue.
See Mate. I am a Miner/Explorer. As such Surface Mining happens to be something I do now and then.
But there is several Problems with this.

A.
There is no actual Indicator as to which Material you find on which Planet. While each Planet gets an certain Set of Materials and Apparently certain Planet Types Exclude certain Materials.
An Certain Planet Type does never Guarantee to have an Certain Material.
So even if you Find out which Planets do not have a Certain Material. There is no Way to Find out wether or not an Planet has the Material your looking for. Except Landing and Searching it for at least 1-2 Hours.
Thanks to that the only Reliable Method to Search for an Certain Material in an Relatively Short Time is to use Lists from Other Players. Which however means that you cannot do it unless your actually Finding these Lists in the Forum or other Places.

B.
Even if you Found a Planet which has the Material your looking for.
And even if you know the Scanner Sounds and Graphics and thus can Explicitly Search for the Encounter which has a Chance to Drop this Ressource. (By the way this is not teached in the Game either and most people wont know unless reading about it in the Forums) You sometimes have to Search for 1-2 Hours before you actually get the Material you want to have Dropped because you might end up getting other Materials from that Encounter.


So in the End. It Remains a Random thing.
Its not that you cannot Control it to 100%
But that you Cannot even Control it to 50%
You can Increase your Chance from roughly 3-5% to 15-20% Which is an Very Big Skill Based Increase.
But it also means that 80% is still dependent on Mighty RNG Sama.



And pls also note.
Here we Talk only about The Materials which you can Gather from Mining and Surface Mining which is among the Easiest (albeit most Time Consuming) Materials to Farm for.

The Easiest and Fastest given you have no Qualms Killing Authority and Traders. Is the Manufactured Ship Parts you get from Killing Certain Ship Types. Which is just as Random with the Drops. But Drops a Ton of Materials at once thus having an Far Higher Chance to give you the wanted Material. And because Ships are easier and faster to Find and have an Clear Indication towards their Type.

But the Hardest is the Materials you can only get from Missions and Criminal Actions.
Because the Missions Require you to Search for an System in a Certain State, With an Faction in a Certain State, Which an Certain Government Form and then on top you need to be Lucky to actually get an Mission from them which gives you the Material you want. Which even if you did everything in your Skills. Is Still Incredible Random.

The Worst however is the Base Raiding. Because here not only is the Result Fairly Random. Meaning you often do this 1 Hour Action for Nothing.
But its also very Risky and something very disliked by People who dont want to Perform such Actions.
And the only way here to icnrease your chances is too choose an higher Difficulty Target.




And then there is the Final Thing.
The Direct Effects of the Upgrade are Random to an Certain Degree.
And the Special Effects which especially for Weapons are the thing People actually want. Are 100% Random with no way to Influence them at all.



Ultimately Sorry.
But this is still Random for most Part
You can Tweak your Chances a bit.
But nowhere close to where you would get what you want more often than not. Meaning its stiill for most Part Random.

 

[Devari]

1.
Mate Seriously.
If your Answering ONE Statement.
Please Answer this One Statement. And dont Answer it in 3 Different Sections Independently from each other.
It makes no Sense and Distorts the meaning of what your Counterpart Said.

You expressed various different ideas in your reply so I addressed them individually. Most people actually prefer this instead of a large wall of text, particularly given that basic formatting on these forums (i.e., spaces between paragraphs) doesn't show up properly on IE/Edge for some reason, which is the browser I'm currently using.

2.
The Problem is the Luck Part remains the Bigger Issue.
See Mate. I am a Miner/Explorer. As such Surface Mining happens to be something I do now and then.
But there is several Problems with this.

Again, yes and no. There is always a certain element of randomness with the mat drops, but it is not as random as you think because there are various techniques or strategies to address this. For example, if you just randomly travel from planet to planet, hoping to find one that drops a given material, then yes you're relying on "luck" because you aren't doing anything to improve your chances of finding a given mateiral. On the other hand, if you use the skill/knowledge-based approaches that many people have posted in this thread you can replace "luck" with "knowledge" and will find the process much less frustrating.

A.
There is no actual Indicator as to which Material you find on which Planet. While each Planet gets an certain Set of Materials and Apparently certain Planet Types Exclude certain Materials.
An Certain Planet Type does never Guarantee to have an Certain Material.
So even if you Find out which Planets do not have a Certain Material. There is no Way to Find out wether or not an Planet has the Material your looking for. Except Landing and Searching it for at least 1-2 Hours.
Thanks to that the only Reliable Method to Search for an Certain Material in an Relatively Short Time is to use Lists from Other Players. Which however means that you cannot do it unless your actually Finding these Lists in the Forum or other Places.

This type of statement makes me think you haven't been reading anyone's responses in this thread. This SPECIFIC issue has been addressed by FD in the patch in early-mid June (i.e., over 6 weeks ago) by having Galnet notifications posted at the Engineering bases telling you what planets will drop any given material. It's not very well marked but if you search the right-hand news feed on the main screen you will find a "Hearld" entry that tells you which planet to search for any given material. If you do this you are 100% guaranteed that the planet in question will have that material.

B.
Even if you Found a Planet which has the Material your looking for.
And even if you know the Scanner Sounds and Graphics and thus can Explicitly Search for the Encounter which has a Chance to Drop this Ressource. (By the way this is not teached in the Game either and most people wont know unless reading about it in the Forums) You sometimes have to Search for 1-2 Hours before you actually get the Material you want to have Dropped because you might end up getting other Materials from that Encounter.

Yes, this is a steep learning curve. If you keep at it however (and by this I mean at least 6 hours of active searching on various planets to learn the basic skills) you will get better at it. I have done about 40 hours of SRV driving at this point (around 3000 km distance) with about half of this time being SRV mat scouting and the other half being data point runs at settlements, and now I can recognize the SRV wave scanner tracings by sight alone. Now I just turn the sound off (as I find this much more relaxing) and just read the wave scanner visually. When you get started however you will really need to rely on a combination of reading the wave tracings and listening to the sounds until you know what you're doing. At this point I can get an average of around 1 Polonium or Yttrium per hour consistently, but it doesn't necessarily drop at regular intervals. It might be 2-3 in one hour and 0-1 in the second hour, etc., but over a 4-6 hour stretch it averages out very consistently.

So in the End. It Remains a Random thing.
Its not that you cannot Control it to 100%
But that you Cannot even Control it to 50%
You can Increase your Chance from roughly 3-5% to 15-20% Which is an Very Big Skill Based Increase.
But it also means that 80% is still dependent on Mighty RNG Sama.

It is much more controllable than you think. First, however, you need to know what you're doing and optimize all of the controllable factors. This is very much like the example I provided with firing a rifle, there are many factors to consider that will affect your success that are "random" to some extent but can still be optimized. These include:
-SRV Driving (need to know how to drive properly at high speeds to minimize travel time between rocks and minimize SRV damage)
-Wave Scanner Reading (can do this by sight, sounds or a combination of both but you need to learn this)
-Planetary Terrain (choosing the right terrain, i.e, mountains or rough terrain, not just craters or planes)
-Using Galnet Postings (if you don't use an in-game resource then you really do deserve to spend hours with no results)
If you don't do these things, and claim that you can't find mats, then that's just an issue of not knowing what you're doing or not putting the necessary effort/time into it. This process will also get much better with the 2.1.05 patch when you can use the Detailed Surface Scanner to make the process even easier.

The Worst however is the Base Raiding. Because here not only is the Result Fairly Random. Meaning you often do this 1 Hour Action for Nothing.
But its also very Risky and something very disliked by People who dont want to Perform such Actions.
And the only way here to icnrease your chances is too choose an higher Difficulty Target.

This is actually very easy to do now if you know what you're doing. I've addressed this issue myself by compiling a guide/list of how to scan medium settlement bases for firmware drops. You can find the guide here: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...List-and-Guide-for-Modified-Embedded-Firmware No shooting, no bounties, no need for an orbital strike to obliterate everything in the base. It takes maybe 20-30 minutes to scan the data points on a given base and I have gotten an average of around 2 Modified Embedded Firmware per hour plus large amounts of other high-grade firmware data drops.

And then there is the Final Thing.
The Direct Effects of the Upgrade are Random to an Certain Degree.
And the Special Effects which especially for Weapons are the thing People actually want. Are 100% Random with no way to Influence them at all.

Again, do you actually read the forums or patch notes at all? This SPECIFIC issue has been fixed by FD by adding Favors for the experimental weapon effects. This happened with the 2.1.03 patch from mid-late June that was applied over 4 weeks ago. You can simply choose the experimental effect you want by using the Favors, it's much easier than relying on random results and is now 100% controllable with the only "cost" being the need to regrind the rep levels after you use the favor. I'm sorry, but if you aren't even aware of the changes that FD has already made (Favors, Galnet postings, etc.) and don't even read the responses in this thread then how do you expect anyone to take your posts seriously? You are complaining about issues that you either haven't taken the time to understand properly (such as SRV mat scouting) or in some cases have even ALREADY BEEN FIXED by FD in previous patches and are now 100% controllable (such as Favors or Galnet postings).

 

[Devari]

feel free to delete the game, many other love the idea.. and embrace it

The issue here is that you are being expected to do "illegal" things to progress in the game, even if you're commander is supposed to be a "law abiding" pilot. Like I had said in a prior post, Elite relies very heavily on creating an "immersive" atmosphere where you feel like you're in a believable and consistent universe. If we start doing activities that run "counter" to how we view this universe then we aren't really invested in the game in a meaningful way other than "progressing" or "leveling up" our ship. That might work for a typical MMO where there very little immersion or engagement with the "universe" but if FD doesn't reverse this course it will become a huge problem with Elite. Let's face it, Elite isn't "groundbreaking" in terms of graphics, gameplay or setting. Any of those issues individually are rather "unremarkable". It's the entire "immersive" universe that they've created that makes the game so enjoyable, and if they lose this aspect players will quickly leave for other games that offer a better experience. At this point Elite has had no serious competition and fills a very large niche, but this is changing with No Man's Sky releasing in August so Elite can't afford to alienate players who have invested hundreds of hours into the game.

 

[Privata]

The issue here is that you are being expected to do "illegal" things to progress in the game, even if you're commander is supposed to be a "law abiding" pilot. Like I had said in a prior post, Elite relies very heavily on creating an "immersive" atmosphere where you feel like you're in a believable and consistent universe. If we start doing activities that run "counter" to how we view this universe then we aren't really invested in the game in a meaningful way other than "progressing" or "leveling up" our ship. That might work for a typical MMO where there very little immersion or engagement with the "universe" but if FD doesn't reverse this course it will become a huge problem with Elite. Let's face it, Elite isn't "groundbreaking" in terms of graphics, gameplay or setting. Any of those issues individually are rather "unremarkable". It's the entire "immersive" universe that they've created that makes the game so enjoyable, and if they lose this aspect players will quickly leave for other games that offer a better experience. At this point Elite has had no serious competition and fills a very large niche, but this is changing with No Man's Sky releasing in August so Elite can't afford to alienate players who have invested hundreds of hours into the game.

Why would a law abiding pilot get upgrades from dodgy engineers who are borderline ilegal?

 

[Devari]

Why would a law abiding pilot get upgrades from dodgy engineers who are borderline ilegal?

Who says the Engineers are "dodgy" or "illegal"? They're secretive and very selective about who they interact with but there is nothing "illegal" about the vast majority of the Engineers we interact with. Felicity is a well-known explorer who doesn't do anything illegal at all, Todd is a well-known pilot and bounty hunter who is very respectable with his combat activities, etc. Sure, the Dweller is borderline illegal but you need to be willing to connect with the underground/black market to even meet him so that at least is consistent. The rest of the Engineers are very much "high society" that need the right connections or introductions, but they are hardly "illegal". In fact many of them are very well connected with powerful governments or corporations (Federation/Imperial/Sirius/etc.) and are probably seen as more "respectable" or "legitimate" than most player characters who in many cases wouldn't really have anyone of consequence to vouch for them. Most of the Engineers would be closer to Lando (i.e., runs Cloud City with a lot of official influence/connections) while most player characters would be more like Han Solo (independent smuggler/trader with few powerful connections or affiliations other than his relationship with the Rebel Alliance).

 

[Privata]

Who says the Engineers are "dodgy" or "illegal"? They're secretive and very selective about who they interact with but there is nothing "illegal" about the vast majority of the Engineers we interact with. Felicity is a well-known explorer who doesn't do anything illegal at all, Todd is a well-known pilot and bounty hunter who is very respectable with his combat activities, etc. Sure, the Dweller is borderline illegal but you need to be willing to connect with the underground/black market to even meet him so that at least is consistent. The rest of the Engineers are very much "high society" that need the right connections or introductions, but they are hardly "illegal". In fact many of them are very well connected with powerful governments or corporations (Federation/Imperial/Sirius/etc.) and are probably seen as more "respectable" or "legitimate" than most player characters who in many cases wouldn't really have anyone of consequence to vouch for them. Most of the Engineers would be closer to Lando (i.e., runs Cloud City with a lot of official influence/connections) while most player characters would be more like Han Solo (independent smuggler/trader with few powerful connections or affiliations other than his relationship with the Rebel Alliance).

Lando is an outlaw. he has done tones of crimes against the empire even before he joins the rebel alliance.
And thats both in the EU and canon

 

[Devari]

Lando is an outlaw. he has done tones of crimes against the empire even before he joins the rebel alliance.
And thats both in the EU and canon

He may have had a "shady" past but as of Episode V he was the official administrator of Cloud City and had a lot more "respectability" than Han Solo, to the point that Vader approached him with a "deal" to at least maintain the "illusion" of respectability/credibility. Solo, on the other hand, was "smuggler scum" and was hunted down by everyone from the Hutt Cartel to random low-level bounty hunters like Greedo. I mean if you really want to sidetrack the discussion onto Star Wars I don't mind, but the point here is that Engineers like Felicity and Todd are hardly "shady" or "illegal" characters and they actually have have quite a bit of respect from the Elite galaxy in general.

 

[Bemoteajh]

so i have to wait for a month potentially for the right      to pop up? yeah no im good...