I'm genuinely puzzled by all this. I don't spend the major part of my play time looking for engineering materials. I don't do things specifically to progress in engineering. I just collect stuff whenever it turns up, and it does turn up in heaps. Every time I buy a new ship I plan it in EDSY first and engineer to G5 with special effects wherever I want. Yet my material bins are always almost full.
My material bins are all almost always full too, because you never actually use most of the materials except for the few bottleneck ones (Core Dynamics Composites, Conductive Ceramics being the main ones).
Every time I engineer a ship I spend ~50 Core Dynamics Composites on engineering hull reinforfcements. They suck to gather even from HGEs since they spawn mixed in with G4 mats and sometimes you just get zero from a HGE. When the thargoid war started I engineered 3-4 different hulls for AX and that required repeatedly filling up on core dynamics composites while my other material stocks were untouched.
For internals I know what I want (lightweight the stuff that's not performance critical) - that means every ship I engineer uses up 50-70 Conductive Components (how do you get those from passive farming, do you just black out and go full murderhobo on traders often?). Conductive ceramics are also used for overcharged weapons and reinforced shield generators, basically all the meta stuff so they'll be a bottleneck for many people I'm sure. It's not a huge problem if you know you can get a lot of biotech conductors from missions, but it's annoying to have to visit a material trader to trade them down so often. (This is a case of bad recepie balancing imo).
You're not going to naturally fill up on those two materials in high enough amounts doing regular gameplay and trading other G5 mats for 50+ Core Dynamics would mean trading away like 300+ G5 other mats at the 1/6 ratio which won't be sustainable either without HGE farming.
The core dynamics stuff could be ignored and you could just go out there naked under the shields or transfer your enginered hull reinforcements to your new ship every time you switch ships. But the Conductive components issue remains if you use different ships because they will use different size internals.
I don't think it's just an issue where I'm at fault for engineering too many ships (engaging with the game too much), a new player who switches to a bigger ship after engineering their old one would hit similar bottlenecks.
I somewhat recently made an infinite beam turret anaconda that cost 80+ proto light radiators (G5) to fully engineer and it's not a build that really works with less engineering on the efficient beams. There's other fun Gunship/Challenger builds that will run you upwards of 60 of a G5 material. I'm not a T10 enthusiast and that's another ship that's hard to engineer fully unless you're already completely full on the main materials you need to engineer your 100 hardpoints. How do you passively get materials if you want a high-cap packhound T10? Military supercaps are one of the worst to target for deliberate gathering even with HGEs.
It worked. They made it so you had to log to desktop instead of menu. It's just a limitation of the way the game works, they could record the fact that you've already done a particular signal source in an instance on your commander, but that's a lot more work than just flagging it on the active client. If people are prepared to log to desktop to get a thing, maybe they deserve it?
It "works" for on foot stuff where if you crash/get an infinite black screen disembarking the next time you log in the settlement will have no loot and it's just a dumb frustrating thing because you can just enter/exit supercruise and land again or do stuck recovery/supercruise/land (proabably even faster than relogging for some in a speedy ship anyway). All the on-foot loot erasure stuff does is punish people who legitimately crash.
If HGE relogging was removed what would change for the players who currently do it? They spend minutes flying through deep space to another HGE which requires no player input for most of it? Maybe jump to another system before doing it to find a new set of HGEs. It's not better gameplay than relogging. Sure it's slightly more immersive but again, not for the amount of time you need to do it to engineer a ship.
The issue goes deeper than relogging which is why relogging is as tolerated by the community.
Let me get this straight, is the main argument really about time? That the game doesn't provide instant gratification like an arcade game does?
Time flies when you're having fun and if people had fun gathering mats for engineering the time part wouldn't matter as much.
Does anyone actually spend every moment of their gameplay 'grinding' for mats, hating themselves and the collection of such equally while doing so?
Not complaining, you realise, just an observation that I must be playing wrong...
No because that's an hyperbole.
How it goes for me is that I have a new cool/wacky idea for a ship build I want to do that I get excited about and then the joy is drained rapidly by the process of collecting materials for it. It's slightly better if I grind the mats to full before the next experiment so I can seperate the awful bits from the good bits more.
A clever lifehack to work around the crappy game design!
Maybe more G5 mats could be added to the mission reward tables, so you could get lucky and get a mission to assassinate a pirate lord for 5 PIs.
This risks making things worse because you'd have to board flip more to get the mat rewards you need with a larger pool of possible materials.
The way this could work is if missions that offered mat rewards offered you a choice between 3 types of materials instead of credits/rep/materials.
