RNG is an plague on this game. It has been since the beginning, but apparently, Fdev can't resist putting it in the game anyway.
I mean, can you just write it on a big whiteboard in everyone's office, which says "REMOVE ALL RNG!!"?
RNG is frustrating, it is nonsensical, especially if you are doing everything in your power to get what you want.
No, instead, RNG goes "screw you silly player", and you are just wasting your time.
Want to know what caught my irk?
I'll tell you: Imagine, you're a miner. Right? You scan a ring, you know, has cool graphics. And it creates these fun little highlighed spots. Has a name like "Alexandrite Hotspot".
So, you drop into those spots, and there's obviously hundreds of asteroids in your direct vicinity. You scan them with your fancy new Pulse Wave Analyzer, which, again, looks cool. And then a couple of asteroids light up. These asteroids are interesting, and they have subsurface deposits, fractures, etc.
Now guess 3 times what each of those asteroids have.
If you guessed "Alexandrite", you guessed wrong.
Hell, in my case, I scanned exactly 46 asteroids (started moving toward the planet, so they're definitely all different, and started counting them for the sake of this post). Guess how many of those asteroids had Alexandrite?
Zero. Nada. Nothing. There was only 1 asteroid that had fissures, and which revealed... Serendibite. Which is cool, but not what I was looking for now was I?
After those 46 I just gave up, sold the Serendipite, and logged off.
Now you can say "man you just got unlucky". And that's the problem. I was not unlucky. I did everything I could have done, to have a reasonable suspicion I would find what I was looking for. That's not "unlucky", that is just the game giving false information.
Why? Why do you do this? How do you not realize how this is insanely frustrating to play with? In what game design world do you live, that you go make a game feature that says "alexandrite hotspot" and then someone can't find any of that in 46 asteroids? It should be *literally* impossible to happen.
This same problem I still have with finding materials. I do NOT want to drive around on a planet for 2 straight hours, just to find 1 unit of the material I am looking for and which I NEED for the thing that I want, and find a crapload of junk for everything else. The junk is not even useful for material traders because you don't even find enough of that for converting it into the thing you want.
It is utterly ridiculous that you leave players up to RNG to progress in terms of engineered modules or some such. The time investment for the reward is too much, and everyone knows it, and is extremely unfun and frustrating to play with. It has been said before, and you "hotfixed" it with the materials trader. But all that does is... nothing. There is no targetted gameplay. You just land, kind of muck around and hope you find something.
RNG is not "realistic" either. Realistic people in a realistic world would not bother with luck. They would go and make 100% sure they knew where something was before committing. It's why we don't see random oil rigs all over the place. It's because people actually went and probed and made sure that where they were gonna put an oil rig, there is actual oil. In Elite, we all kind of put oil rigs all over the place and hope we get lucky. It's nonsense.
It is nothing more than wasting time for the sake of wasting time. Try and farm all the things even if you knew 100% where everything was, and you would STILL spend literal days of gameplay on that crap. It's stupid, it's unfun, it's unneccesary for the sake of this game.
So please, I beg you, get rid of any and all RNG elements in this game.
I want to land on a planet, find a POI (using the new probes) where I can get my materials, and get the hell out again. This alone will take me short enough to keep me engaged, but is usually long enough to be balanced in terms of material gain. But I DO NOT want to go "uhh... where do I land? okay here *pick random spot*. Nope, just drove over an hour to 14 different highlighted spots on my wavescanner and I STILL didn't find what I needed."
And for the asteroids... ring hotspots are the right idea, but still terrible in practice. They need to SIGNIFICANTLY increase the spawn rate of what that hotspot is supposed to be. And with significant, I mean in the rates of finding at least 1 every 3-5 asteroids has the stuff you want and for which you **probably** dropped into that hotspot in the first place. I DO NOT want to drop into a hotspot, scan several dozen asteroids, and still not get what I wanted to find.
I mean, can you just write it on a big whiteboard in everyone's office, which says "REMOVE ALL RNG!!"?
RNG is frustrating, it is nonsensical, especially if you are doing everything in your power to get what you want.
No, instead, RNG goes "screw you silly player", and you are just wasting your time.
Want to know what caught my irk?
I'll tell you: Imagine, you're a miner. Right? You scan a ring, you know, has cool graphics. And it creates these fun little highlighed spots. Has a name like "Alexandrite Hotspot".
So, you drop into those spots, and there's obviously hundreds of asteroids in your direct vicinity. You scan them with your fancy new Pulse Wave Analyzer, which, again, looks cool. And then a couple of asteroids light up. These asteroids are interesting, and they have subsurface deposits, fractures, etc.
Now guess 3 times what each of those asteroids have.
If you guessed "Alexandrite", you guessed wrong.
Hell, in my case, I scanned exactly 46 asteroids (started moving toward the planet, so they're definitely all different, and started counting them for the sake of this post). Guess how many of those asteroids had Alexandrite?
Zero. Nada. Nothing. There was only 1 asteroid that had fissures, and which revealed... Serendibite. Which is cool, but not what I was looking for now was I?
After those 46 I just gave up, sold the Serendipite, and logged off.
Now you can say "man you just got unlucky". And that's the problem. I was not unlucky. I did everything I could have done, to have a reasonable suspicion I would find what I was looking for. That's not "unlucky", that is just the game giving false information.
Why? Why do you do this? How do you not realize how this is insanely frustrating to play with? In what game design world do you live, that you go make a game feature that says "alexandrite hotspot" and then someone can't find any of that in 46 asteroids? It should be *literally* impossible to happen.
This same problem I still have with finding materials. I do NOT want to drive around on a planet for 2 straight hours, just to find 1 unit of the material I am looking for and which I NEED for the thing that I want, and find a crapload of junk for everything else. The junk is not even useful for material traders because you don't even find enough of that for converting it into the thing you want.
It is utterly ridiculous that you leave players up to RNG to progress in terms of engineered modules or some such. The time investment for the reward is too much, and everyone knows it, and is extremely unfun and frustrating to play with. It has been said before, and you "hotfixed" it with the materials trader. But all that does is... nothing. There is no targetted gameplay. You just land, kind of muck around and hope you find something.
RNG is not "realistic" either. Realistic people in a realistic world would not bother with luck. They would go and make 100% sure they knew where something was before committing. It's why we don't see random oil rigs all over the place. It's because people actually went and probed and made sure that where they were gonna put an oil rig, there is actual oil. In Elite, we all kind of put oil rigs all over the place and hope we get lucky. It's nonsense.
It is nothing more than wasting time for the sake of wasting time. Try and farm all the things even if you knew 100% where everything was, and you would STILL spend literal days of gameplay on that crap. It's stupid, it's unfun, it's unneccesary for the sake of this game.
So please, I beg you, get rid of any and all RNG elements in this game.
I want to land on a planet, find a POI (using the new probes) where I can get my materials, and get the hell out again. This alone will take me short enough to keep me engaged, but is usually long enough to be balanced in terms of material gain. But I DO NOT want to go "uhh... where do I land? okay here *pick random spot*. Nope, just drove over an hour to 14 different highlighted spots on my wavescanner and I STILL didn't find what I needed."
And for the asteroids... ring hotspots are the right idea, but still terrible in practice. They need to SIGNIFICANTLY increase the spawn rate of what that hotspot is supposed to be. And with significant, I mean in the rates of finding at least 1 every 3-5 asteroids has the stuff you want and for which you **probably** dropped into that hotspot in the first place. I DO NOT want to drop into a hotspot, scan several dozen asteroids, and still not get what I wanted to find.
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