One more thing to add.
I remember in the beta period, when players were complaining that they would (once the game was final) be spending hours on a mod, but there were times (in testing) that the mod result was actually mostly worse in most ways than the base component they started with. DEV and players went back and forth on this for awhile.
There was a live-stream at some point... i can't recall who the Host/channel is, but he had a game designer on as a guest. When discussing Engineer RNG, the Host looked... pained. The game designer looked... smirky.
That was telling.
(A similar phenomenon happened around 1.2, when the Heat Mechanic was introduced. And it was brutal. Most of the beta players were in complete revolt about it, but Dev's reply was generally "Well, sorry you all don't like this. Nonetheless, we think it's fun." Eventually they shelved the idea for a few months. $10 says someone was forced to remove that new mechanic until a better implementation was conceived.)
Back to 2.1...
Eventually near the end of beta, DEV declared "We have listened! Now it is highly probable that a module will perform better than the stock component in most ways."
Only in a Land of Delusion would a game designer believe that players really want to spend many, many hours doing Engineer tasks that result in an FSD that travels .5 LY over the stock unit. Or a pulse laser that is 3% more damaging... an improvement you would never notice in combat. And of course, the player that does all this and gets their .5 LY improvement - yeah, some of them are going to claim "This is cool!" They have to; otherwise they'd have to admit they just wasted a few days of their life.
So. Yeah. Unless the goal is "make everything take weeks" - there are some problems that need addressing in the design/coding meetings. Making things take days doesn't make them FUN. It simply makes them take a long time.
I remember in the beta period, when players were complaining that they would (once the game was final) be spending hours on a mod, but there were times (in testing) that the mod result was actually mostly worse in most ways than the base component they started with. DEV and players went back and forth on this for awhile.
There was a live-stream at some point... i can't recall who the Host/channel is, but he had a game designer on as a guest. When discussing Engineer RNG, the Host looked... pained. The game designer looked... smirky.
That was telling.
(A similar phenomenon happened around 1.2, when the Heat Mechanic was introduced. And it was brutal. Most of the beta players were in complete revolt about it, but Dev's reply was generally "Well, sorry you all don't like this. Nonetheless, we think it's fun." Eventually they shelved the idea for a few months. $10 says someone was forced to remove that new mechanic until a better implementation was conceived.)
Back to 2.1...
Eventually near the end of beta, DEV declared "We have listened! Now it is highly probable that a module will perform better than the stock component in most ways."
Only in a Land of Delusion would a game designer believe that players really want to spend many, many hours doing Engineer tasks that result in an FSD that travels .5 LY over the stock unit. Or a pulse laser that is 3% more damaging... an improvement you would never notice in combat. And of course, the player that does all this and gets their .5 LY improvement - yeah, some of them are going to claim "This is cool!" They have to; otherwise they'd have to admit they just wasted a few days of their life.
So. Yeah. Unless the goal is "make everything take weeks" - there are some problems that need addressing in the design/coding meetings. Making things take days doesn't make them FUN. It simply makes them take a long time.