That's where vet players, esp PVPers, mod up and then club the noob seals with impunity.
Exactly why newer players should immediately be looking to engineer to even the odds.
Besides, it doesn't take skill to engineer. It just takes a lot of grind and tolerance currently.
The older farts enjoy that kinda stuff cos they're well into their years and enjoy stuff like mowing the lawn.
Younger players usually just bear with it and grind their way through, hoping that the fruits of their labor will be worth the pain
I'm all ears to a robust discussion about rebalancing engineering, but to suggest "newbies" need access to apex-level engineering mods out the door just because others might have it is a garbage argument.
Sure, it doesn't take skill to engineer, but it should take planning. You shouldn't just be starting out and going "Right, time to whack on that G5 mod". If that's the case, then what the heck is the point of G1-4 mods? Just remove them, collapse the requisite costs of G1-4 into the cost of the G5, rebadge the G5 mod as simply "the mod" and be done with it.
All the complaints about Palin's
temporary disappearance is fomenting the fact that engineering mods are too accissble, and too permanent, and that the player-base is now over-reliant on having "G5 mods or gtfo".
There's heaps of room for a discussion about rebalancing engineering mods. Maybe mods need to be more like Synthesis, in that any one of, or all of the following:
- Maybe you can't repair a module with a modification. Repairing it removes the mod.
- Maybe you can't remove a module with a modification. Removing it removes the mod.
- Maybe engineering modifications shouldn't be rebuyable on ship loss.
- Maybe modifications need more substantial negative drawbacks at the higher-end.
- Maybe (for a single example of the above) G5 dirty drives should result in overheating your ship every time you boost?
- Maybe prolonged use of a modified fitting causes degradation over time.
Suddenly, G1-G3 becomes your go-to every-day engineering, because it's cheap to replace and gives you a routine advantage in the fight, but when you want to guarantee being at peak performance, you mod a G4-5 module, knowing it'll be dead at the end of the day. The materials needed to do a G5 mod could fit out =~ 10 G3 mods, or even 80-odd G1 mods...
Then engineering, and specifically when and how you undertake that engineering, becomes an actual planned process which affects your game on a day-to-day basis, and not just a set-and-forget thing. Of course, someone might scream "But what about my optimised FSD while i'm 20KLY in the black?!?!". Again... robust discussion...
- Maybe (more expensive than the mod) synthesis can repair damage to an engineered module
- Maybe engineering can be done with a module in the field
- Heaps of other things I haven't thought of, or have but haven't written here.
Again, all this Palin stuff has brought to the surface the fact that Engineering is in a pretty sorry state at the moment, where people consider G5 mods as needing to be "Noob-accessible" where the reality is they were
intended for end-game outfitting. So yeah, a robust discussion on the problems with engineering... got all day for that. But the concept that G5 should be readily accessible to the new player is trashbin stuff.