Hello FD. Hope you will find time to read this heap of feedback. I have been playing in Beta and provided some then, but the beta was too little time with not having access to the full picture. This is after putting some 20 hours into the game since 2.1 went live and after givinig it some breathing space to settle down and adjust, I must say, unfortunately, that that didn't seem to happen.
1. Engineers and material gathering
There has been a lot said about this particular can of worms. On the whole i think this is a great idea with loads of potential... But the execution of this idea has been absolutely terrible. What was the goal of this addition was a whole new loot and crafting system that would allow pretty much infinite number of possible ship configurations. What it turned out to be is grind for the sake of grind for the sake of grind that has been run through and through with RNG wherever possible. On the whole players have to spend tens of hours looking for stuff they don't need to be able to get upgrades they don't want. I'll touch on some of the major points>
1.1 Mission-acquired resources
One of the examples of criminal lack of foresight. You know you need a particular material. You know you can only get this material from a mission. You have no idea where to look for this mission so you are left with having to jump from station to station for hours trying to look for that mission. Then it turns out the mission is something pretty much impossible for you to do IE take down an elite anaconda with a wing of 3 pythons or take this parcell across the whole bubble and dont get scanned. This particular way of getting resources is the one i found to be the most frustrating and infuriating. Closely followed by 1.2.
1.2 Mining
Why, frontier? The fact that only a minority of people in the game were mining was not a clue enough? Imagine you do not want to do something, because you find it mind-numbingly boring (in a game that is supposed to be entertaining, mind) and somebody says, "Ok, we are introducing this awesome new featrue, but if you want to make use of it you first HAVE to go do this boring thing.". You are now left with two options. a) You just say "screw it, i'm not putting up with this" and don't play the game until this gets fixed, or b) You grind your teeth and suffer through the boredom, which will eventually make you resent the game and make you stop playing anyway.
1.3 SRV
Oh the good old surface material hunting. To this day I haven't seen a single piece of yttrium or pollonium. And I spent tens of hours driving around surfaces in my SRV.
1.4 Possible solutions
Now all this can be solved, mostly by simple means. One word. Information
1.4.1 - a) Where can I find a mission that will give me this material? b) Make the missions something doable. Like light bounty hunt, combat bond mission, or courier missions.
1.4.2 - a) If a material can be mined, then it should also be sold at markets, albeit might be treated as a rare commodity. Praseodymium would be an example. b) also again, tell us where these parts can be located, what rings, around what planets etc. in 3302 there would be this information freely accessible, yet you deliberately make it difficult.
1.4.3 - a) Information, information, information. What planets might the mineral be found on? Which rock formations? b) with a DSS you could give us a detailed planet composition, which upon scanning would show what materials are to be found down there and what percentage chance is there to finding them
1.5 - This video
Although i very much disapprove of the sarcastic tone mr. Kornelius decided to take and I'm not a fan of the style of delivery he employs, I must say he has a point and I agree with a vast majority of what he says in that video. If any devs are reading this, I bet you've already seen it, so won't go into detail.
2. RNG when crafting
There is nothing like spending 3 and a half hours hunting down one material, and getting it back to the engineer only to have it turn out that RNGesus is not with you and you end up with a de-grade instead of an upgrade. This needs to go away. But how?
One possible solution could be adopting a system that is similar to the one in Division. Once you craft an item it has various random attributes. Now instead of a complete re-roll the player would be offered to reroll 1-2 particular attributes on the currently applied modification. After this, the game would remember which attributes were rerolled and would only allow the player to further reroll those same attributes again. Or let him do a complete reroll.
Another way to mitigate the resource grind would be allowing us to scrap unwanted modifications and salvage 50-75 % of the resources used to craft the modification. With additional 100% chance of keeping the rarest resource used. (for instance in FSD range 3 that would be modular terminals)
3. Combat
This is my subjective opinion, as someone who had his share of combat before engineers. Even after the removal of modified weapons I still feel like the NPCs are too powerful. I don't know how the rest of the community percieves this.
As an example i'll use an incident from my yesterday's session. I jumped into an anarchy system to try to hunt some haulers for materials. (context: my current combat level is about 50% to Deadly, I'm in a Python with 3 A SB with grade 2 heavy duty upgrades) So i'm hunting, only collecting materials, when suddenly an FDL jumps in, immediatelly goes hostile and attacks me... I turn around to fire, but almost instantly my shields go down and I am forced to withdraw (curiously the FDL was using huge multicannon).
This is either some bug, or the AI has gotten way too good.
4. Conclusion
These were my 3 major problems with 2.1 Engineers. To your credit, FD there were some excelent features added too that had been sorely needed for some time, for which you get high kudos. For instance that would be Galaxy Map functionality additions or Mission system improvements.
However please do learn from your mistakes and minimize the grind required to use the Engineers. We play Elite for enjoyment not for a second job. I mean I spend less time with external sources and online spreadsheets when I do homework assignments from my university. I hope this collection of thoughts has been useful... And (I've been trying to resist, but.. I.. Just... Can't...)
Make Elite Great Again!
Thanks for reading
CMDR Majogl
1. Engineers and material gathering
There has been a lot said about this particular can of worms. On the whole i think this is a great idea with loads of potential... But the execution of this idea has been absolutely terrible. What was the goal of this addition was a whole new loot and crafting system that would allow pretty much infinite number of possible ship configurations. What it turned out to be is grind for the sake of grind for the sake of grind that has been run through and through with RNG wherever possible. On the whole players have to spend tens of hours looking for stuff they don't need to be able to get upgrades they don't want. I'll touch on some of the major points>
1.1 Mission-acquired resources
One of the examples of criminal lack of foresight. You know you need a particular material. You know you can only get this material from a mission. You have no idea where to look for this mission so you are left with having to jump from station to station for hours trying to look for that mission. Then it turns out the mission is something pretty much impossible for you to do IE take down an elite anaconda with a wing of 3 pythons or take this parcell across the whole bubble and dont get scanned. This particular way of getting resources is the one i found to be the most frustrating and infuriating. Closely followed by 1.2.
1.2 Mining
Why, frontier? The fact that only a minority of people in the game were mining was not a clue enough? Imagine you do not want to do something, because you find it mind-numbingly boring (in a game that is supposed to be entertaining, mind) and somebody says, "Ok, we are introducing this awesome new featrue, but if you want to make use of it you first HAVE to go do this boring thing.". You are now left with two options. a) You just say "screw it, i'm not putting up with this" and don't play the game until this gets fixed, or b) You grind your teeth and suffer through the boredom, which will eventually make you resent the game and make you stop playing anyway.
1.3 SRV
Oh the good old surface material hunting. To this day I haven't seen a single piece of yttrium or pollonium. And I spent tens of hours driving around surfaces in my SRV.
1.4 Possible solutions
Now all this can be solved, mostly by simple means. One word. Information
1.4.1 - a) Where can I find a mission that will give me this material? b) Make the missions something doable. Like light bounty hunt, combat bond mission, or courier missions.
1.4.2 - a) If a material can be mined, then it should also be sold at markets, albeit might be treated as a rare commodity. Praseodymium would be an example. b) also again, tell us where these parts can be located, what rings, around what planets etc. in 3302 there would be this information freely accessible, yet you deliberately make it difficult.
1.4.3 - a) Information, information, information. What planets might the mineral be found on? Which rock formations? b) with a DSS you could give us a detailed planet composition, which upon scanning would show what materials are to be found down there and what percentage chance is there to finding them
1.5 - This video
Although i very much disapprove of the sarcastic tone mr. Kornelius decided to take and I'm not a fan of the style of delivery he employs, I must say he has a point and I agree with a vast majority of what he says in that video. If any devs are reading this, I bet you've already seen it, so won't go into detail.
2. RNG when crafting
There is nothing like spending 3 and a half hours hunting down one material, and getting it back to the engineer only to have it turn out that RNGesus is not with you and you end up with a de-grade instead of an upgrade. This needs to go away. But how?
One possible solution could be adopting a system that is similar to the one in Division. Once you craft an item it has various random attributes. Now instead of a complete re-roll the player would be offered to reroll 1-2 particular attributes on the currently applied modification. After this, the game would remember which attributes were rerolled and would only allow the player to further reroll those same attributes again. Or let him do a complete reroll.
Another way to mitigate the resource grind would be allowing us to scrap unwanted modifications and salvage 50-75 % of the resources used to craft the modification. With additional 100% chance of keeping the rarest resource used. (for instance in FSD range 3 that would be modular terminals)
3. Combat
This is my subjective opinion, as someone who had his share of combat before engineers. Even after the removal of modified weapons I still feel like the NPCs are too powerful. I don't know how the rest of the community percieves this.
As an example i'll use an incident from my yesterday's session. I jumped into an anarchy system to try to hunt some haulers for materials. (context: my current combat level is about 50% to Deadly, I'm in a Python with 3 A SB with grade 2 heavy duty upgrades) So i'm hunting, only collecting materials, when suddenly an FDL jumps in, immediatelly goes hostile and attacks me... I turn around to fire, but almost instantly my shields go down and I am forced to withdraw (curiously the FDL was using huge multicannon).
This is either some bug, or the AI has gotten way too good.
4. Conclusion
These were my 3 major problems with 2.1 Engineers. To your credit, FD there were some excelent features added too that had been sorely needed for some time, for which you get high kudos. For instance that would be Galaxy Map functionality additions or Mission system improvements.
However please do learn from your mistakes and minimize the grind required to use the Engineers. We play Elite for enjoyment not for a second job. I mean I spend less time with external sources and online spreadsheets when I do homework assignments from my university. I hope this collection of thoughts has been useful... And (I've been trying to resist, but.. I.. Just... Can't...)
Make Elite Great Again!
Thanks for reading
CMDR Majogl
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