I'd prefer player adjustable sliders. Keep the bonuses, and make "favours" essential for special affects. I don't mind having to grind for mats so much, if I know roughly what I'll get at the end of it.
It's fascinating how people see different ways out for the same issue. I'm happy with random factor if I don't have to grind, while you're happy with the grind if you know what you're going to get.
I wonder if there's a halfway solution. Maybe increase material drop frequency slightly, but also allow manipulation of the tolerances for Engineer results rather than the results themselves? So you could narrow the probability for an FSD multiplier so it's right at the top end, but all the others would widen. I still feel there needs to be some random element to the results, even if it's only the "unwanted" results. The problem with allowing full manipulation of the sliders is that a meta would quickly emerge and everyone would immediately be flying identical ships again.
The root of all this is, as with many things, FD's failure to understand human behaviour. Their plan for the Engineers was that it would add some variety to the ships flying around the galaxy, to encourage players to do things they wouldn't normally do (mining, exploration), and to gate some content (Palin's racks are essential for interacting with some of the alien stuff).
They clearly figured any improvement over stock would be seen as a good thing and players would be happy with whatever they got, maybe returning later when passing by to have another go as part of the natural game loops. But they completely underestimated the human desire to have the best, to interpret a range of "blue" results not as a range of wins but as a range from loser to winner with full "victory" only attained with a maximum roll and a maximum bonus.
And that's just for PVE players. Factor in PVP, where the next guy you meet might have the perfect God-rolled ship, and you end up with players spending most of their time grinding the Engineers and the remainder shooting at other players who've been grinding the Engineers. I'm sure that's not what FD intended, but it's what they got. And anybody with a modicum of gaming knowledge could have told them that's exactly what they'd get, if only they'd fully revealed their plans for the Engineer mechanic beforehand.
Mind you, it could be worse. Can you imagine what the grind would be like if they'd kept the requirement for multiple materials and commodities per roll? Nightmare.
I don't know what the answer is, other than the ideas we've kicked around above. Maybe there could be multiple blueprints for the same modification, using different materials, and the rarer the material used the narrower the range of results? So you could roll lots of common materials over a long time, or a small number of rarer materials in a short time, and the outcome would be the same? Difficult to balance in a way that didn't favour one method over the other (or at least didn't give the
impression of favouring one over the other; back to Skinner's behavioural experiments). But if done right it would give players a choice between grinding for rare materials, or repeatedly playing the casino, but not force them to do both.
Or maybe keep the same blueprints, but allow the player to allocate his entire store of the needed materials in exchange for an improved likelihood of success, effectively offsetting the number of rolls against the quality of the final result? Or would that just encourage players to do even more grinding so they carried the maximum materials for a given blueprint? What if we then capped the system to allow a maximum of, say, ten of each material per roll? Would the psychology of that work, or are we now back to where we started but with a narrower target for the ultimate God roll?
Gah, humans.
I wasted 3 hours, and 20 odd dice rolls yesterday trying to improve my FSD (it's not a God Roll), and just felt like I had absolutely wasted my day when I didn't get a single roll even close to what I had. Now, for another round, I'll need to grind way more, as I have no arsenic and no DWE's. It really makes me want to just not log in.
It's awful. I spent
a week (somewhere between 7 and 14 hours) looking for one particular material without a single hit. In the end I exploited a quirk (some might say a bug, it's hard to know with FD) in the game and got what I needed after an hour. It certainly required a lot of relogging to reset the RNG. Neither of these is good gameplay.
