From A Legacy Player: Please Give Rid of Engineer Material Grind

As someone who has fully maxed out mods for all the ship components the old way doing pvp (back when there was severe negative effect dice rolls), I think it's time FDEV that you please just take this gameplay mechanic to the backyard and tell it to look at the flowers.

Suggestions:
Option 1. Let us drop material for other commanders. Letting us sell materials at our fleet carrier for credits while offline would be extra cool for those playing solo. We do have material traders now (Praise Braben), but everyone needs to grind the rare ones to trade for other needed ones still. Just because I had to spend several hours grinding Proto Heat Radiators to max out an efficient mod, doesn't mean I wish others be required to do the same. I got extra time that they may not have do to different real world obligations. I rather help them so we can participate in the same activity rather than wait for them to slowly get the same material a month later when I was able to do it in a week.

Option 2: Remove the Rolls when visiting the actual Engineers and just give the best Grade Mod for the material required. This would actually make visiting engineers more valuable, than just going to them for the blueprint and experimental effect. At any other stations, you still have to do rolls since you don't have years of R&D dedicated to the ship modifications like they do (a newbie will waste more material and time compared to an expert).

Edit: Yes the thread title is supposed to be 'get' instead of give. I changed the thread title from the original message.
 
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Would love to see the end of the mats grind. For on foot and in ship. But they don't have another way to distribute the mats.
Looting mats are the same in ship....same dozen or so types.
On foot you can loot almost anything from a given base now. They've lessened how difficult it is to find em.
The material vendors allow you to swap mats.
Indeed you can swap on foot mats AFAIK with a player. Not done it but it's possible.
But the grind to collect mats won't be going anywhere soon. Unfortunately.

o7
 
Would love to see the end of the mats grind. For on foot and in ship. But they don't have another way to distribute the mats.
Looting mats are the same in ship....same dozen or so types.
On foot you can loot almost anything from a given base now. They've lessened how difficult it is to find em.
The material vendors allow you to swap mats.
Indeed you can swap on foot mats AFAIK with a player. Not done it but it's possible.
But the grind to collect mats won't be going anywhere soon. Unfortunately.

o7
Wait so you can jettison ship material now?
 
Sandbox solution to grind in my view: "a gun is a gun is a gun is a gun, you can loot guns, and guns have different advantages, sometimes different attachment points, and maybe.. maybe... you can alter some of the characteristics, but it's ultimately still... just a gun.. it might use a certain kind of ammo that you might have a hard time finding in some parts of the galaxy, but it's just a gun."..

more types of guns, more variety of guns, now that's something, the kinds of weapons you find, the availability of certain.. antiques, or reproductions of antiques, that's more interesting, they could be total crap, or mediocre, but look cool, whatever.

I'm screaming in the wind with how much I think Fdev overthinks and over systematizes everything into a grind ladder, it seems extremely boring..

give me more flavor by having antique weapons that aren't and I must emphasize ARE NOT, "upgrades", or "Better than", other weapons in game... lever actions, bolt actions, guns from forgotten worlds that lost contact for centuries and became mad-max-esque wastelands.. cool guns that are cool because they're mechanically and visually interesting, not because they're any more novel in terms of "they shoot bullets/lasers/plasma/whatever".

If you say "but this is an mmo" I'm just going to point you to planetside 2 which intended for weapons to serve more or less as sidegrades,
 
The mats grind would be okay if they let military suercapacitors and pharmaceutical isolators drop with a greater frequency than proto radiolic alloys in their relevant systems. What does radiolic even mean? No offence to any recovering radiolics out there.
 
Sandbox solution to grind in my view: "a gun is a gun is a gun is a gun, you can loot guns, and guns have different advantages, sometimes different attachment points, and maybe.. maybe... you can alter some of the characteristics, but it's ultimately still... just a gun.. it might use a certain kind of ammo that you might have a hard time finding in some parts of the galaxy, but it's just a gun."..

more types of guns, more variety of guns, now that's something, the kinds of weapons you find, the availability of certain.. antiques, or reproductions of antiques, that's more interesting, they could be total crap, or mediocre, but look cool, whatever.

I'm screaming in the wind with how much I think Fdev overthinks and over systematizes everything into a grind ladder, it seems extremely boring..

give me more flavor by having antique weapons that aren't and I must emphasize ARE NOT, "upgrades", or "Better than", other weapons in game... lever actions, bolt actions, guns from forgotten worlds that lost contact for centuries and became mad-max-esque wastelands.. cool guns that are cool because they're mechanically and visually interesting, not because they're any more novel in terms of "they shoot bullets/lasers/plasma/whatever".

If you say "but this is an mmo" I'm just going to point you to planetside 2 which intended for weapons to serve more or less as sidegrades,
I am in favour of more side grades, as that most likely will give us more options to get more viable builds, compared today, where upgrades in some categories often usually have one upgrade that makes sense... as it is so much better than the alternatives, and then we have some narrow cases, where some of the other upgrades makes sense.
But a change to this not do anything in regard the process of gather material, instead it will most likely increase the demand to gather more, as we now have more builds to explore and test.


But if we get into the guns, guns, guns thing. lets look at games that give us that. like Destiny 2, Borderlands series. etc. Here you are often showered in guns, all randomized, so we are now looking for the "best" variant... and depending on how unlucky you are, you can spend quite alot of time farming for the best variant of that gun.

So trying to replace engineering upgrades with finding more variants of weapons, modules etc. is most likely not going to change anything, as these will most likely be dropped from the same activities we get the current materials for engineering from.. so either we drop plenty of these, with randomized stats, and thus we have to deal with LOTS of junk drops, or they drop rarely, so we need to get luycky to get it to drop, all of this in the name to keep players "engaged"... just like all the other games do...
 
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