Also a lot of the time you get 3 mats at a time.
I dont get why everyone thinks Ellite is such a grind
- Thread starter DR Grandreefer
- Start date
Also a lot of the time you get 3 mats at a time.
Just play the game like you'd normally do. I have it on good authority that the materials will magically appear in your inventory that way.
Well, you always get three from USSes and surface prospecting. Not sure when you just get 1 actually? Missions reward in multiples of 1 (so 5 means 5, not 15), but that's fine.
Mats trading and the new mat storage handling has helped an awful lot.
The solution is for the devs to develop some content for the game, instead of disconnected RNG events. There's no excuse for the state of some parts of the game, eg. naval rank missions, shooting rocks on planets etc.
The mat traders are great, really handy especially for ditching the stuff you get loads of like phase alloys.
Grind example:
Spent over an hour looking for pharmaceutical isolators.
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high grade! Nothing there when I dropped in
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Spent over an hour looking for pharmaceutical isolators.
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Only bother looking for them in HGE's. That, and if you're in the appropriate system, Anaconda's in a RES will drop them sometimes.
I employ what I (rather unimaginatively) call the "5 And Out" system.
If any system I visit doesn't yield a result within 5 minutes, I give up and go elsewhere.
If I've been scoring HGEs (or whatever) in a system and I don't get one for 5 minutes, I turn around and go back the way I came.
If I still don't get a result after another 5 minutes, I give up and go elsewhere.
Aside from anything else, it provides a little bit of excitement as you watch the time ticking by.
More importantly, sometimes it seems like the RNG just decides to take a dump on you.
When this happens, there's no point in fighting it.
Give up, go elsewhere and/or do something else.
5AO FTW. [up]
I was looking in HGEs. I dropped in to the only one I saw, nothing was there (bug?).
The rest I just identified, didn't drop in. I used to get them quite easily in outbreak systems a long way out from the star (deep space of course but 5K Ls or so out). I can find imperial shielding by the droves but there are some high grades I cannot seem to locate.
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One of the strategies I employ now is to just farm HGE's in a system that I know for sure spawns them and just trade across for whatever specific mat I need. It's miserably boring, but it seems to work.
Wait; so it's not a grind, and people are being silly and just don't have to do things (you don't have to study to be a private pilot, you can just drive a car around instead, you know?) until suddenly there's a bit that you, personally, think is a grind. Really.
So 17+ pages of proselytising it's everyone else's fault for not just playing correctly and stuff will happen, yet there are (in fact) several things that require actual focus to complete, because they simply will not occur during natural play? No kidding. That's actually intentional.
No-one is going to scan the same beacon 20+ times 'organically' as part of play. It requires a specific action. And it's not the only one. Just one of the more obvious. People habitually refuse to accept that something they've invested so much time in, could be a grind. Un-possible? No. It's a fairly common attribute of a great many games. The really good ones, reward and nourish the player during the journey, so that such repetition and grind becomes part of the fabric (and a path to travel) rather than an actual key feature.
Elite does succeed for some of said repetition. But it's far from all of it. None of which precludes satisfaction and enjoyment entirely by default. Which I tend to believe is the knee jerk reaction; protect the thing, ignore the logic. Go go go!
Ultimately, Elite has rested it's laurels on an over-reliance of repetition, RNG and procedural generation and that has become the proxy for the experience, that should otherwise exist, but does not.
It's the great lie we've all accepted. The game is really just grind. That's it's key draw card now. In a sort of abused-spousal arrangement we log in and go through the motions and love it because we've been conditioned to love it because there is nothing else. Occasionally, something comes along (Guardians, Engineering..) that wakes us from the dream and we realise this is all the game is.
Frontier have a lot of work to do, to make this less the core experience, and more part of the journey. As it was almost certainly originally intended. The problem is, how many now believe this endless repetition, is how the game should be, and will resist Frontier actually adding content and context, beyond find a thing, or scan a thing, or move a thing, repeatedly.
That's Frontier's challenge now. How do they make it more than just (very pretty) repetition?
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The trading of copious materials, for less copious is a joy and as much as the trading numbers are, frankly, farcical and asinine, the intent behind it is great. Which is sort of a metaphor for a moderate amount of the game, the intent is definitely there, and you can see there's good in it, but the 'numbers' are all the same farce.
It's that hint of greatness, that I think keeps people going at this point.
I don't mind it, I only trade up or at a loss with stuff that I'm always maxed out on. And there are multiple ways of getting everything so it's no biggie.
That's your choice to spend an hour looking for them. Lols like self imposed grind. Personally I have never spend an hour looking for one mat.
The mat trade numbers at the brokers are fine. At the moment you have to decide whether to trade or go get the mat itself. If any cheaper it becomes a no brainer to trade and no body would bother getting the rarer mats.
It gives option. Cheaper will remove those options. So no I think they are have it about right.
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This is an illogical statement; it's asinine to suggest trading is currently fine, when it entirely invalidates lower tier materials value, which ignores the disparity between rarity and distribution. There is a flat transfer ratio, across materials with wildly different distribution ratios.
One cannot physically collect 81 duplicates of the same grade one material, within the same time frame for a number of the frequently distributed grade 5 materials (ie, they have a high statistical drop rate). In fact, the mechanics encourage exactly what you suggest; just collecting a narrow range of tradable materials, and then trading them.
Options are great. I am a fan of options, however you haven't described or clarified what "cheaper" represents. Suggestions have been to cap the factor at 3, which seems at least partly sane. Again, given distribution of materials has almost no relevance to their rarity, the entire thing is moot, regardless.
Frontier picked a set of ratios which are essentially disconnected from the distribution and rarity model previously implemented. A flat trade, which is easy to understand, with truely nonsensical values.
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Honestly? I don't believe you. Apologies, I just don't. Fly safe. o7
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At this point, the question is what should we be doing in-game if nothing should be done deliberately.
This approach just doesn't work. Nobody will one day go "Oh boy, looks like I accidentally unlocked the Guardian puzzle 60 times. Too bad the Thargoids are already extinct by now."
Likely : forever. Assuming you play "naturally" as you say, then the only way to "stumble" on guardian sites where the data is present are :
1) Exploration and dumb luck. Collect one data and keep going. Mabye find a few sites. I think it's possible that someone could unlock one module or one weapon that way.
2) Doing ram tah second mission. You might get enough data for a weapon xor module or maybe not. Depends on luck and what sites one is visiting.
So, doing it in a natural manner will lead you to 1 or 2 modules if lucky.
The chances of randomly stumbling on 60 guardian sites with data points is... low. To say the least.
But presumably your Gaming experience isn't complete if you've say merely unlocked Guardian Gauss Cannon to help with Thargoid Combat (You'll easily end up with 4+ Weapon Blueprints merely from the Ram Tah Mission)...Presumably its only enjoyable if you (in a vaguely OCD fashion) unlock access to Meta Alloy HRPs AND Gauss/Plasma/Shard Weapons AND Power Plants/Distro's/FSD Boosters AND...AND...AND...
Then you wonder why the game feels "grindy"