Living, breathing universe vs. immersion ruining grind... Plea to overhaul the entire "materials" mechanic

csbeau1969

csbeau1969
Wow... I just followed d2ea's guide to purchasing the engineered FSD from a technology broker. All I can say is, what is FDev thinking? We should be able to earn credits however we choose and be able to upgrade our ships accordingly. Grind, for the sake of grind, is really old and truly hurts the game's potential. The grind ruins immersion. Log in and out to farm materials because it is more effective, rather than let us trade, bounty hunt, explore, or whatever we choose to do; earn credits and then upgrade our ships by following the game's economy. Not some random must-have grind materials. And yes, I know it is "better" now due to material traders, but the traded materials still require grind.

The game could be soooo much better without the continual grind mechanics. The framework is clearly here; however, it is time to get a more modern game design.

A true fix would be to make all materials purchasable with credits—one economy, not multiple "currencies" requiring grind. Let supply and demand drive the prices. And yes, some people have billions of credits; so what? They earned them in-game. We are your customers; let us decide how we want to play. Forcing grind mechanics is why many of us, myself included, leave the game after only coming back a few weeks. You do not respect our time or how we choose to play.

PS: I am not one of those with billions of credits. However, I have earned 100s of millions because I left the bubble before Horizons and only recently arrived in Colonia, exploring (discovery, fss, dss) along the way. Of course, I had to return to the bubble because to unlock engineers in Colonia, engineers must first be unlocked in the Bubble. Yet, another example of poor game design. Unlocks are simply lazy programming, do not make it interesting for the player, and do not respect our time.
 

lordzaz

lordzaz
I'm not going to complain about materials per say, its a different mechanic to other games and different is good because its not the same old same old. I'm sure however that it has been mentioned thousands of times that relogging to gather mats shouldn't be a thing, not because its a grind in of itself but because, as you say, it breaks immersion.
 

Achtung-Goomba

Achtung-Goomba
Now I’m not saying that engineering doesn’t need a look at, and the devs said as much before the recent balancing act that material gathering and trading rates were to be ‘looked at’, but I’m really not getting the feeling of grind from it, especially when this gets mentioned...

csbeau1969 said:
Log in and out to farm materials because it is more effective,
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I’ve never relogged for materials, and never even visited the prime farming sites. By the time I was unlocking engineers I’d gathered a reasonable stock of raws just from exploring geo and bio sites while exploring, and when I found out about the encoded and manufacturer materials I just took a few collector limpets with my combat builds and slapped a wake scanner on my recce-bubble-taxi, and lo and behold my small fleet is comfortably engineered up to G2/G3 for most modules, with all FSD at least G5. No grind or relogging exploits required 🤷‍♂️

I’m not saying there isn’t any element of grind to the game, especially if you want to get things done in a hurry, but for me at least the grind is mostly optional and I just don’t do it. If I don’t have the materials to engineer something I need done, I leave it in the hangar and take something else out or just do something else and come back to it later. Usually does the trick, with the occasional trip to the traders if I really need that experimental applying.
 

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos
csbeau1969 said:
A true fix would be to make all materials purchasable with credits
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Aha!

This was the latest thread asking for the same. You'll find all the usual arguments (both sides) here:

Is there any way that we can be able to purchase engineering materials from the material traders?

I'd rather have more diverse ways of earning materials than just making "mine a whole bunch of platinum and buy it lol" the catch-all method of collecting every resource in the game.
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

Amanojaku

Amanojaku
What makes you think - if Fdev made mats purchasable - that they wouldn't be so expensive you'd just end up grinding credits for as much time as you farm mats?

If you want game balance without at least 50% of the community complaining, that's exactly what would happen.

Again, as I've said before, the material rewards need to be better. We need more types of mats and raws from missions. We need mats added as rewards for achieving higher tiers in CGs and PP merits.

What we don't need is a lazy, tacked-on mechanic that allows you to buy G5s. There's no sense of accomplishment in it. Credits are EZ now.
 

skananote

S
Amanojaku said:
There's no sense of accomplishment in it.
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How could you possibly know what gives me sense of accomplishment??

Joking aside. Gathering mats is not bad. Can be done in many different ways. What is absolutely broken is the whole engineer unlocking thing... Amount of unncessary complications is just wrong... And in the consequence whole engineering is broken and not fun at all...
 

Amanojaku

Amanojaku
skananote said:
How could you possibly know what gives me sense of accomplishment??

Joking aside. Gathering mats is not bad. Can be done in many different ways. What is absolutely broken is the whole engineer unlocking thing... Amount of unncessary complications is just wrong... And in the consequence whole engineering is broken and not fun at all...
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That's true. Unlocking engineers is a huge pain in the asp. I have all the engineers in the bubble unlocked but still haven't been to Colonia to unlock the rest and pin their blueprints.
 

Factabulous

Factabulous
csbeau1969 said:
All I can say is, what is FDev thinking?
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They were thinking "How can we get people to engage with lots of different parts of the game and give a little extra reward when they do?"

What they weren't thinking was "Maybe a Youtuber will encourage people to not see the game as a holistic galaxy sim and will encourage people to focus down on specific parts and burn them out".

Probably that.
 

VR micmacmoc

VR micmacmoc
Doing the CGs at the moment I am picking up mats doing the combat bit, its no 'grind'. Cant see the grind argument. Sometimes playing a game isnt easy, imagine having a goal disallowed and then losing to a 97th minute penalty eh? Thats frustrating. UTB!
 

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos
skananote said:
And in the consequence whole engineering is broken and not fun at all.
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This is the second time I have seen that statement this week, and to use your own logic, how can you possibly know what I feel is fun?

I have been playing for around 4 years. I've never really focused on combat however, as a by-product of playing the game, my combat rank increased, so much so that to focus on it now would earn me my final Elite ranking giving me the Triple Elite status. After some advice on here, I buy a Krait, solely for the purpose of combat. In one day I was able to buy it, get the modules I want and engineer it to the spec suggested. No grind.

This was possible because as a by-product of the way I have been playing for years and all the things I needed, engineers, mats, were all available to me. I unlocked one engineer years ago, this opened up another and over time, I did what was required.

I grant you that someone new to the game is going to look at this like a wall to climb but then, I think it should be. Why should it be possible for someone in the game to have the same capabilities as someone who has been playing for 5 years or more. If I join Skyrim Online today, I should not be 'on par' with those who have been there from the start, within a couple of days.

I mostly see this with people fairly new to the game who want to PvP, they see the meta ship and want one in a week, tops.

Interestingly, this thread and the other one I saw like it this week, both OPs are explorers at heart. Indeed, OP of this thread said:

csbeau1969 said:
I left the bubble before Horizons and only recently arrived in Colonia,
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But he's following a grind video to upgrade his FSD, his 'game' wasn't awful before he had an engineered FSD, look what he was able to achieve without one! Now he wants one, his one exclusive style of play (Exploration only) means that he doesn't have the things he requires to upgrade instantly. This is a downside to only focussing own one aspect of the game. That is not a criticism of OP, it is an observation of playing this game. If you do a little bit of all of it, as you go along, you accumulate all you need.
 

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos

[PS4] Lorenzo Waringos
Darkman Returns said:
There seems to be a certain mindset amongst some people that you need to get through the game as quickly as possible
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Which when you think about it is nuts. There is no screen that pops up, to say'Complete', there is no part fo the game where the credits start rolling because you have done it all.

It's like a race with no finish line, inevitably, you'll get sick of running and just stop. Enjoy the walk.

Bottom Hat said:
Can I haz your stuph?
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He hasn't got any. That is the problem.
 

Ian Doncaster

Ian Doncaster
csbeau1969 said:
We are your customers; let us decide how we want to play.
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That's not really how games work. Games have to be designed around an expected way to play or they just end up in an incoherent mess. For Elite, that's in a fairly relaxed non-competitive fashion where your primary enjoyment comes from flying a spaceship and only secondarily from achieving particular goals.

If you're a competitive sort - and this applies both to the "I want everything as quickly as possible" and the "I want getting anything to be a challenge", depending on what they view their competition as being with - you can still try to play it like that, but it's not going to work as well. They could change the game to be better for one of those groups instead ... at the cost of making it worse for everyone else.

By analogy, the expected way to play Tetris is to try to clear as many lines as possible, but alternative options are to try to speed-run to a completed tower as fast as possible, to make the blocks on the screen at the end of the game form a picture, or to leave it running with a brick on the "yes, new game" key as a screensaver. Those aren't "wrong" ways to play it - do whatever you find fun - but they're not the ones the game designer expected to support, so there are probably better games for that, and you'll probably find yourself moving on to one of those fairly quickly.


(Which is not to say that the material and engineering system is in any way perfect - there are about twice as many material types as it actually needs to the point where most of them have very few actual uses, the ease of obtaining materials is not remotely correlated with how useful they are, and about 80% of the upgrades you can get with them are either useless or so inferior to another available one that they're not worth getting. It could be trimmed and simplified massively without losing any of the bits people use, or the incentives to try new stuff. But if you play in the expected fashion that's a minor inconvenience rather than a major barrier to enjoyment.)
 
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