Engineers Is engineers a joke?

[metatheurgist]

I'd just like to know their reasoning behind putting randomness in engineers. Cause that's just not how engineering works. It's like a doctor rolling a dice. "Sorry, sir. That didn't work. If you pay me another $200 we can try it again and see if we get better results."

It's a game. Games by definition are gamey.

It's as ridiculous as collecting polonium by shooting rocks, not being able to get carbon by burning something, passengers asking for tons of land mines for "entertainment", being paid millions to transport Biowaste worth 1000s, Anacondas being manufactured in enough numbers for hundreds to turn up in RES for you to collect 500K bounties (which are worth less than 1% of the ship), players changing the government of a billion population system single-handedly with a couple of days in a CZ. I could go on.

Please don't try to bring the "realism" argument in, it's all unrealistic. Can we try to stick to how to make the unrealism fun and balanced.

 

[m0rl0ck]

I'm not laughing.

I had promised myself I wasn't going to grind for anything, but the lure of greater jump range for my Keelback proved too much. I landed at Farseer, she asked me to get her Meta-Alloys from Maia, got them, returned them and then went through some kind of weird experience where I had to make decisions without any idea what the hell was going on. I ended up with a Keelback with LESS jump range than before I met the silly mare.

Is it possible to discard her nonsense?

It is just as well they have a harsh swear filter on this forum or the twotpuffins that invented this shandytoss might learn a few new naughty words.

Not very happy.

Hibachi.

Jokes on you brother. Not only did they take a on the game, they got you to buy it and laughed all the way to the bank.

 

[KellyR]

I can only assume there are some really dodgy car mechanics in the Cambridge area.

The real reason is they just didn't want it to be too 'simple' to get the good stuff, unfortunately rather than come up with something cleaver and fun they decided on the tedious and dull - but apparently that was still too easy, so they tried to think of some interesting skill based or experience based mini game, and failed - so we get virtual dice instead.

Imagine if, as a software engineer I applied the same principle - just keep throwing random lines of code into the program until it compiles and does something close to what I want. mmm maybe this explains a few things in ED

Well, I understand and agree with the RNG for the materials. That can be a crap shoot. And make them hard to find, no problem. But when they are found, there shouldn't be any more random generation of numbers. It should be "Great. With these materials we can do something. Now, I'll need 5000 credits (just an example, could be any 50 or 100 thousand or even more for the higher blueprints) to do the actual work of putting it together." Now that is engineering.

For the other posters, you don't just shoot rocks to get polonium or painite or whatever. You have to shoot a hunk off an asteroid, get it into your refinery, let the refinery refine out the junk, dump the junk, and repeat until you have ton (canister) of whatever you're mining. And you can get carbon from burning things, but it won't be refined enough to be of any use.

About the Anaconda's in CZ's, do you realize how many people are living in the bubble? There are thousands of trillions. There's enough to keep the Anaconda assembly lines busy.

 

[foebits]

go to outfitting -> the engineered module -> detail -> remove modification.

that said, if you applied the "increased jumprange" modification, i can't see how you ended with less jumprange.

The forums, youtube, and all the internet are rife with prime examples of the RNGineer mods giving you less than what they purport to improve since day one due entirely to the lazyazz RNG copy-pasta they implemented instead of anything remotely coming close to a crafting or player modding system; and you "can't see how it's happening"?

Way too many people like this. Those who can conveniently forget what's actually in the program past their rose colored glasses.

 

[Straha Yeagar]

Agree that the random element introduced with engineers is ridiculous... but to me, more egregiously, is how it completely unbalanced pvp with no hope of it being "re-balanced" (some may argue it wasn't balanced previous to engineers!). Simply put, engineers was a "content addition" done with little consideration for game balance but as a benefit to the devs, would cost very little (development wise) to do. There's very little actual content to it at all, and engineering boils down to long range fetch quests with crummy rng as the reward.

The thing about Engineers...first off, they are misnamed. They should have been called Tinkers.

Second, I don't think FDev ever intended, or even envisioned them being used in a min/max capacity. They were intended to be something that added a bit of variation between ships with some minor pros and cons, improvement here, draw backs there.

The biggest flaw in Engineers was how Frontier, as they are soooo prone to doing, grossly overlooked how these things work out in every other game out there that allows for a min/maxing mechanic. Add to that, Frontiers implementations often require some sort of artificial incentive to get people to use them, so they added significantly higher bonus' to entice people past the entry requirements for the higher level mods. This in turn led to grossly over powered ships, with so many different moving parts, stacking, bumping, tweaking, that finding any semblance of balance is near on impossible, not to mention the disparity it created between Engineered and non Engineered ships...and it just went on from there, creating a virtual arms race.

I am pretty much a PvE only player who's main focus is Exploration, and don't tend to be a min/maxer, and so playing the Engineers for what they are, and for what Frontier originally envisioned them to be...I actually quite enjoy them. I have myself a very nice, solid AspX with a 55ly jump range that can boost, cool running, SRV, AFMU, Shields, Mining Laser, and I only unlocked two Engineers, only have two grade 5 mods, the rest are grade 1 or 2. I had to do my poking around doing things that I never would have done otherwise, but was able to get everything I needed in more than enough time before it felt like a grind. My other ships, including a racing eagle, a viper mkIV, and a Fer-de-Lance all have minor mods that make them excel in the PvE activities that I do.

 

[X-Terminator]

It's like a fair-ground machine. You just insert your money and learn what happens. Keep doing it until you learn how it works

 

[Blackcompany]

So you're the one? I knew someone out there must actually like engineers!!

Personally I found it a dull grind to roll a dice to make sliders move random amounts with no clear idea at all what the end result will be or what most of the sliders actually do - it's like every recipe and slider has it's description written by a politician - it's just a bunch of words leave you more unsure and confused than before you read the damn thing.
Once i got a decent FSD range increase I never went back.
It's like having to fill out a mountain of boring paperwork, just to get a lottery ticket that most of the time just says - you lose.



Any major feature that requires you go searching the forums and reading a tonne of information before it starts to make any kind of sense is a badly designed feature - FDev rely totally on user created posts and web sites. No wonder they swiftly moved to make sure all the 3rd party web sites and utils came back online - most serious players rely on those sites daily and game would be tedious beyond playable without them. ( just try and find the nearest station to you that has an 'intergalactic broker' - I wasted 10-15mins clicking around the galmap last night to no avail ).

For my brief attempt at engineers I used: https://inara.cz/galaxy-engineers/

Absolutely agree. As I said in another thread, the RNGineers, to me, rank among the worst mechanics in modern gaming. Unlocking them is an intelligence insulting time sink rife with intentional wait walls the devs purposely placed to frustrate players. The RNG nature of finding the mats eliminates any semblance of skill from utilizing the upgrades. The RNG Nature of the upgrades themselves means you cannot plan a build or tweak for your play style. The language used to describe the results is indeed like something a lawyer or politician would say to a reporter during a news conference - useless, wordy drivel.

Its like something you would find in a shoddy, free to play mobile game. Except THAT game would sell methods to get around the grind and the wait walls. Which means that in a game like that, as shoddy as the RNGineers are, they would at least make sense from a business model standpoint. Unless Elite plans to go Free to Play - which, once the PS4 sales disappoint, I expect it will do - then the RNGineers, as they exist right now, not only dont make sense from an immersive sim standpoint. They also make ZERO sense from a business model standpoint.

Why, in a full price game desperate to hold onto players, do you develop mechanics intended to frustrate your player base? This isnt free to play (yet). You arent selling shortcuts. So why do things that will push the majority of your player base to just quit playing the game. (And before you ask about numbers, all you have to realize in order to reach this conclusion, is that when you compare buyers to players, the majority of people who bought this game are indeed absolutely NOT playing it).