It is utterly ridiculous to assume that in this hypercapitalist future, if there are blackmarket-connected bartenders at every single station willing to buy Cat Media off of me, that there's nowhere I can go to buy circuit boards, optic fibre or elemental Arsenic. The idea that there's literally nobody willing to sell minerals or data to me - and the only way I can barter for them is a weird person trading a bunch of minerals for a bunch of other minerals - is completely absurd. Please just let us buy the things we need to do our jobs.
Just let us buy Engineering materials, goods, assets, etc.
- Thread starter Andreus
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It's not a job. You're playing a game ...
To do our jobs within the game. Please don't quibble on semantics.
One can quibble "with" something or one can quibble "over" something but one can not quibble "on" something, as to quibble is far more intellectually transient than the sedentary "on" would imply.
Semantically, speaking, of course.
But I absolutely agree with you, OP. We should be able to purchase anything we want in game for engineering. I've felt that way for years. I understand why we can't, but don't agree with it.
I find it weird too. You cant buy it, but somebody on some settlment has it hidden somewhere in a closet.
No one is using it, but once you steal it, everyone looses their mind. Its like hitting a chicken in skyrim.
I think ill start pointing guns at every person in a settlment asking:
Ok Buddy, where did you buy those? Tell me NOW.
its just copy pasted from horizons so you dont need to think about new stuff. copy a large amount of "content" or whatever.
i grind cause i want to play THE game VS grind is playing THE game
edit: its not about deleting things already existing but why not adding it? i mean the more options you can choose from the more interesting it is and maybe there is an option which fits perfect for you. the target on the long (or very long term in this case) is the same.
i grind cause i want to play THE game VS grind is playing THE game
edit: its not about deleting things already existing but why not adding it? i mean the more options you can choose from the more interesting it is and maybe there is an option which fits perfect for you. the target on the long (or very long term in this case) is the same.
I agree.
The root of the issue is how difficult it is to acquire engineering materials and the time required to spend in order to engineer something. The current requirements for engineering are difficult for the sake of padding out play-time without actively engaging the player. Some grind is good and fun, delaying the reward can lead to greater satisfaction, but there is a certain point at which it ceases to be delayed gratification and becomes an exercise in insanity.
The solution is to either lower the requirements to engineer something, thereby reducing the time spent and allowing for the player to get excited as they get closer and closer to an upgrade (but still short enough that they do not feel like they're being led along), or to increase the options or ease of acquiring the engineering materials required. Give more options to find those materials, whether that be buying them (in limited amounts to maintain a barrier of entry) or giving them out in more missions.
The root of the issue is how difficult it is to acquire engineering materials and the time required to spend in order to engineer something. The current requirements for engineering are difficult for the sake of padding out play-time without actively engaging the player. Some grind is good and fun, delaying the reward can lead to greater satisfaction, but there is a certain point at which it ceases to be delayed gratification and becomes an exercise in insanity.
The solution is to either lower the requirements to engineer something, thereby reducing the time spent and allowing for the player to get excited as they get closer and closer to an upgrade (but still short enough that they do not feel like they're being led along), or to increase the options or ease of acquiring the engineering materials required. Give more options to find those materials, whether that be buying them (in limited amounts to maintain a barrier of entry) or giving them out in more missions.
I'll sign the petition. The problem is that most ships are marginal without engineering. But engineering is ridiculously grindy. Go here, bust some rocks, go there scan some stuff, now here and scoop some debris from space. Just a few more hours and you'll have enough stuff to upgrade one module on one ship two levels. Well, after you upgrade seven other modules at a different engineer to get the recommendation for the engineer you want.
But is the solution really to allow us to just buy these things with credits?
Because if this was was added, this is how I predict how this would be, top tier engineering material will make Fleet Carriers seems cheap!! So instead of gathering material, you would spend somewhere around the same time gathering CREDITS... and seeing the direction FDev have taken in Odyssey, you would be spending MORE TIME gathering those required credits...
Because if this was was added, this is how I predict how this would be, top tier engineering material will make Fleet Carriers seems cheap!! So instead of gathering material, you would spend somewhere around the same time gathering CREDITS... and seeing the direction FDev have taken in Odyssey, you would be spending MORE TIME gathering those required credits...
Yes, but credits can be found everywhere. And I can get them doing stuff I enjoy.
Funny how you just took a sentence out of its full context, would you really be happy if you would have to spend something like 5 billion credits, to just buy the materials needed to upgrade a single ship?
Funny how you expect me to respond to an obvious red herring. But 5 billion might actually take less time to earn than it takes to farm those same materials. It would certainly be less tedious than bouncing between signal sources scavenging bits.
what red herring?
So how much have changed in engineering when it comes to material gathering?
We mostly do the same things as before.
We have gotten material traders, that allows us to trade material for other material, but at a bad trade rate for us. giving us some more choices in doing activities we like more, at the expense that we need todo it more, due to trade rates. So we got a change that meant that we had to grind MORE...
We also got a change that made it easier to find HGE signal sources, as these now spawned when we entered the system and we could scan for those directly, instead of having to fly back and forth waiting for them to spawn. So it got little bit easier to hunt for HGE, so this cut down on the waiting for HGE part, but you still had to fly to the signal source and then hope you got what wanted/needed.
Lets take a look at Odyssey, have material gathering been improved in the latest Engineering implementation?
We can also look at how FDev in the past was pretty quick to fix great credit earning methods. So most of the quick fixes done by FDev could be traced back to credit earnings. While at the same time, they could leave game breaking bugs unattended! FDev had for example patched out Exquisite Focus Crystal SEVERAL TIMES in engineering v1, making them impossible to get, this happened atleast 2 times, where these was impossible to get, and it lasted for weeks at a time.
So please enlighten me, where is this red herring you are talking about? What have FDev done to support any suggestions that they are willingly to remove the grind? without replacing it with another grind?
The change from engineering version 1 to version 2, did not really change the material gathering to be easier... I would say we got a more predictably engineering, where every roll made the thing better, at the expense of requiring more material to max out every module.
This ignorance of common sense is actually one of the most frustrating elements in ED. There's not one second thought if the way they introduce or present gamemechanics would be believable in a world setting.
Yes - but that works both ways.
People regularly complain massively about the supercruise time to distant stations - because 15 minutes of straight line travel is really boring in a game - but in terms of realism, it's not all that long, most people's commute to work is longer than that.
Crime and Punishment is really weird compared with any "real world" system, but in the real world you can't "play an alt" or "reset your account", which puts completely different constraints on it.
Piracy has never made any sort of economic sense in any Elite game - but the fundamental gameplay loops of the game depend on those NPC pirates showing up time after time to be shot down.
Community Goals require the delivery of enough cargo to supply a system for decades - potentially tonnes of cargo for every person in the system - or the destruction of more ships than the entire system population - because if they asked for any realistic amount they'd be over in an hour at best.
If the game was made realistic in terms of its depiction of a lot of the concepts, it wouldn't be much fun. You can certainly argue that it would be more fun if materials could be purchased for credits, but realism is neither here nor there.
Truth is, thanks to there being no rhyme or reason to the economy when it comes to pricing, there's no sane price point for materials.
Don't the game mechanics you mentioned not prove my point further?
The problem of supercruise is more that it is an online game. It's technically not possible to shorten the downtime. Except you would reintroduce the point to point jumps from the early design concepts. Which would have completely ruined the game because it would cut out the whole 'flying a space ship' experience and leave only the grind pois left and make all the grinding even more obvious by getting more exposed to it.
Crime and Punishment doesn't work really well because it's not thought out well. It's hard to understand for new players how it works at all. If you need an extra guide to tell you how this system works and why you were breaking the law and where it applies etc. it's bad game design. Almost every other game has a better - and even simpler - solution to this. That your account doesn't get nuked and you receive permadeath is a suspension of disbelieve an overwhelmingly number of players can accept. Especially if you have limited time.
Piracy is badly balanced because it is badly designed. From a player point of view acting as pirates and from npcs doing it. I get interdicted once in a blue moon, besides the initial early release weeks got never sucessfully interdicted besides being afk and when I got interdicted I could easily boost away and jump out again. I started over once with a new commander. I think I had to fight one time out of necessary. Elite Dangerous is one of the most none 'dangerous' gameplay experiences I ever had if you choose to not actively engage in combat. That's what makes supercruise often boring too btw. If I got more successfully interdicted, my jumpdrive would be disabled and I had the opportunity offerend to drop my cargo and npcs leave me alone after that it would be a great experience. If it would work with robbing npcs together with negotiation even more (use the negotiation mechanics from Odyssey). But npcs can't successfully interrupt me so far nor can they disable my jumpdrive. Btw I fly an unengineered Cobra MK3.
Community goals are mostly really boring because it's just a yes/no voting mechanic and you vote with the amount of grind you put into it. I don't really consider it a good mechanic in the first place and I agree with you that the numbers can become quite ridiculous. But the goal presented is often kinda wacky (= not realistic) from the get go.
Some game mechanics surely need more thinking time to figure out how they feel realistic (and natural!) and are implemented well into the game. But my point is often the total absence of common sense which would have been totally avoidable from the get go. Why can I only farm iron on rocks on a planet instead of just buying it? Why can't I sell it for credits? Why do I need to steal simple electronic stuff from random lockers to carry it to a galaxywide weapon dealer corporation to get my weapons enhanced? Why can't i simple buy night vision? Why do I have to switch suits to carry a different hand tool? Why sell random chemical stuff at the bartender? Why are people standing around offering (illegal) missions to every stranger that comes along their way (it's cool when it is a kind of desperate mission giver without connection to corporates and politics I have to admit)?
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Yes, it is. So are most of the rest I mentioned. No-one but me goes around thinking "but wouldn't it be both safer and massively more profitable for the pirate to sell their Anaconda rather than risking a 50:50 chance of death for ten tonnes of cargo a time?" - and that's been the case in Elite I, FE2, FFE and now, all of which have had different piracy mechanics. Negotiation, etc. really isn't the point - the basic economic problem with piracy is that even if the pirate interdicts their target who panics and instantly dumps all their cargo without a fight (every single time) and even if there are no space police or bounty hunters trying to kill them ... it's still generally more profitable to just trade the goods in the first place because of how long it physically takes to pick up several hundred tonnes of cargo.
And if this was a fantasy MMO rather than a space one, the idea that there isn't just a Wolfsbane shop in town and you have to go into the wilderness to get it, or that a +2 staff of power costs more than an entire cart+horses ... would just be accepted as well through suspension of disbelief.
As far as the engineering goes, it can be rationalised as:
- the cost of the engineering is not materials for actually doing the work. If the engineer needs a focus crystal for the actual upgrade, they'll dig it out of their big box of new focus crystals that they order in bulk from the supplier
- instead, it's a payment in kind for separate research that they carry out. A box-fresh focus crystal isn't useful to them. One that you fished out of wreckage that has unique wear and tear from use and combat is. Similarly, a lump of iron from the shop isn't any good - but one from a known and specific planetary location they can analyse for isotope counts for exogeology
...if you want to. But that, again, doesn't address the issue of "would it be more fun or not to buy materials for credits?" whether you can rationalise it or not.