Engineers How long do you think the upgrade paths for the engineers should take?

[frostypaw]

So I hear someone's unlocked Grade 5 with all the Engineers - which seems pretty quick to me.

How long do you think the upgrade path - for you personally - should take? Do you want this now, or do you prefer it as a journey of months - are you not aiming to reach top ranks at all?

Please to avoid too much agonising over how the process is done now, we've lots of threads for that, it'd be interesting to know just how quickly people think this content should be consumed, and why so really.
For me it's a long term thing, but I'm more into survival than the heat of battle

 

[Lheim]

The problem with a long unlock time/upgrade path is that there's not just one engineer and there's never just one ship or one module to upgrade.

If folks want each engineer to be a miles-long slog, that's unacceptable to me. That effectively means that with my limited playtime, I'm only going to unlock a few upgrade paths ever, total.

Frontier dug this ditch by making there be 30 odd engineers, and making the mods so desirable as to be un-ignorable. They therefore have to make them vaguely accessible.

 

[Frenotx]

I would like the time to create a given set of upgrades to very short, but the time to settle on which loadout / upgrade setup you like best to be quite long (due to a large number of compelling options, possibilities, and combinations). I want the time to mod a given upgrade to be fairly short do that I can try a wide variety of options. If it takes too long to mod a ship one way, then creativity and trying new bold approaches / ideas is disincentivized.

 

[Lemonhoko]

Even with fish, it would take weeks if not months to play around with all the different mix of builds...
At this rate, to have a dedicated dps build and another healing modified ship would take me a year or more due to the roulette wheel.

 

[Crimson Kaim]

If you are already in the endgame, you should be able to do it within a week or so. If you started from 0 again it should take around 3-6 months.

 

[Kyokushin]

6 months i think, maybe longer.

Looking at the poll - it is sad how many people want iWin button.

Diablo died in the same way what Elite is going to. Easier, easier and easier because people want everything just right now.

 

[Weps]

Don't care really.

It's the "ships which cost billions but have no maintenance cost" design all over again. Grinding for some higher level unlock just because you know will be better is not my cup of tea. I prefer radically different sidegrades, which may be available after a short to medium unlock period, with dramatic advantages and disadvantages, which force the player to think, mix-and-match, theorycraft, make decisions.

The fact that we're discussing time-to-play (how fast you're getting an upgrade) instead of how-to-play says it all.

 

[frostypaw]

What's the endgame?!?

Rather agree about levels of desirability - launching the whole thing with the fancy weapon mods and sending the NPCs out armed to the gills was, in retrospect, a total face-plant of a bad move. If they had remained secret and tucked away in odd places (rather than taunting you with a third of the screen) then it could have been 6 months before anyone had put 2+2 together such that the race for the SFX started

Hopefully if folk answer honestly it can help them work out how to pitch the next desirable toys

 

[goemon]

i don't know what to pick

actually, i have L5 access since some days with two engineers i found most usefull for my playstyle (FSD+thrusters). this very much qualifies as "I wwant it now!"

now, i wouldn't mind if it will take for the others as long as it took me to get a rear admiral in the federal navy --- something like 9 month, playing missions here and there on the regular, but without targeting for it.

i don't see me going for "all engineers at grade 5", but i surely want to meet them all (i love their bases).

 

[Sylow]

6 months i think, maybe longer.

Looking at the poll - it is sad how many people want iWin button.

Diablo died in the same way what Elite is going to. Easier, easier and easier because people want everything just right now.

.
You conclude that from a rather small part which used the "now" button? Interesting. I think the distribution around "one month" and "three months" is informative and actually reasonable.
.
That being said, I voted "I don't care". My problem is not "now, tomorrow or in a year". I don't mind if getting upgrades takes a long time, as long as doing so is fun. Unfortunately the current implementation is far from that, it not only is a timesink, but also feels like one. The problem is not so much that the game wastes my time, but that it also very much makes me feel that i am wasting my time on it. Would it provide me with a fun and rewarding experience, i would not complain at all.

 

[Ralph Vargr]

I'm thinking a year, per engineer.

Frontier has this ten-year plan......

 

[CMDR Mansoul]

I don't really fear the grind and would be fine with whatever.

What I don't like is that we can't store cargo and modules. Really FD, just add that and we're good on engineers.

Oh and ship naming. You're still on the hook for that. After that remote ship management (outfit, selling). And other things after...

 

[Murmeli]

Given that the lower level upgrades are completely useless, I don't mind that you can access grade 5 pretty easily. Otherwise I might be ok for a little longer time.

 

[EValve]

I think there's a fundamental issue in your poll.

Someone who has 4 hours a day to spend on gathering mats etc versus someone who puts in an hour a day.

Lets say the first one takes a month to get all ranked up, the latter will require 4. Where do you draw the line?
It's near impossible to "force" longevity as some will grind hard and others will have a more casual approach.
Setting back those that grind hard for longevity is severely going to affect the more casual player.
This is what we're seeing now.

Your average play-time is unrelated to the ultimate goals you wish to achieve, as such, the casual player will see that he's 4 months away from getting done this will be off-putting and motivation will be very low to continue playing.

I for one was really excited about some specific power-play weapons to test them out, when I saw I had to arbitrarily wait 4 weeks with no regards to the effort I may spend during my first 3 weekends ( whether I play 4 or 12 ) I just threw the whole idea out the window because it's just a sad waste of time.

 

[VR Jay Le Chardon]

I voted 6 months - basically I'm going to pursue some other goals which will probably keep me busy until then, and hope that by the time I have completed them they have reworked RNG to something acceptable. If I have to learn how to read a wave scanner, that is like a ww2 sonar, and drive about planets for hours on end to get materials, I want full control of what the engineer makes from them.

IMHO a much better game design would have been:

• make the sliders user selectable, sliding one slider towards a benefit adds a negative side effect
• put a lock button on each slider, so the player can lock in a good value and dial out to some degree a negative side effect - at the expense of introducing really rare materials to the recipie
• special effect on weapons a pull down menu,
• The more benefit wanted from the upgrade, the more and rarer the materials required to provide to craft the upgrade.

This would make people who want the iWin button have to grind their skulls out getting obscure bordering unobtainable materials yet let more players with more modest goals could controllably craft modules with specific great advantages at the expense of side effects, the greater the benefit the greater the side effect. For example, player wants to hop up their beam laser, sure they can hop it up to 40DPS if they really want a deathray, however they will have to live with a ridiculous thermal load. They want the deathray but not the thermal load it puts on their ship, then they have to scour the galaxy to get some extremely rare materials to allow the engineer to mitigate the thermal output.

 

[Codger]

I would like the time to create a given set of upgrades to very short, but the time to settle on which loadout / upgrade setup you like best to be quite long (due to a large number of compelling options, possibilities, and combinations). I want the time to mod a given upgrade to be fairly short do that I can try a wide variety of options. If it takes too long to mod a ship one way, then creativity and trying new bold approaches / ideas is disincentivized.

This. It's the tinkering that's fun, but with the current system you can't really do that. The time is too long and you can't store a module to try something else. So people will just do the upgrade based on what seems best and then never do the process again (because the process itself is not much fun). It's a waste of what could be an awesome addition to the game.

 

[Cosmos]

So I hear someone's unlocked Grade 5 with all the Engineers - which seems pretty quick to me.

How long do you think the upgrade path - for you personally - should take? Do you want this now, or do you prefer it as a journey of months - are you not aiming to reach top ranks at all?

Please to avoid too much agonising over how the process is done now, we've lots of threads for that, it'd be interesting to know just how quickly people think this content should be consumed, and why so really.
For me it's a long term thing, but I'm more into survival than the heat of battle

Having understood what I was previously doing wrong re unlocking the Engineers and their mods I happen to think the present pace is fine. One of the guys who unlocked them all said he just put in 3 hours a day since it was released. That's not THAT much game time. If we consider someone might play for a third of that time a week then your talking a few months to unlock everything.

With the point update they just did, it makes things even more accessible. If we get storage it becomes simpler still. One thing I don't think would be cool is for everyone to blow through it in a month and then start complaining there is nothing to do.

 

[Sams]

I'm amazed that someone can do that so quickly... do you think they were in wings helping each other do it faster?

I have level 5 for my FSD and level 1 for The Blaster. Only reason I have level 5 with FarSeer is because of exploration data for the first four levels.

It's taking me ages to get that far. I've said 6 months but I think it could be more like a year at the rate I'm going

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Had Frontier not made such a big deal with Engineers and positioned them as the side feature of 2.1 I would have said "as long as it takes - does it matter ?"

However, Frontier positioned them as the major talking point of 2.1 - Engineers is 2.1 and so naturally people are going to flock towards it as everything screams "do it now" (including the game changing how it responds to you carrying engineer cargo but no storage) and as such the answer depends ... 40 hours is reasonable for a game these days - how long that take you depends on how often you play.

EDIT:
I am talking here about unlocking them all - not fully fitting out your ship as sadly FD used a triple layered RNG approach that kind of ruins the experience. (Any weapon upgrade without a special, for example, is garbage .. it might be better than what you had but knowing specials are out there if you don't get one :x[where is it][down] )

 

[avow555]

Current format it's gonna take way to long to get an optimised loadout on one ship never mind multiple ships.

Games that reward high hours players kinda blow.