General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System

[Northpin]

Which, if I may add to this, is not really an early game concern, is it?

Not only it's not a early game concern, but it's the biggest time sink in the game and whoever gets into BGS manipulations is in for PVE filling the buckets day in day out, for as long they are into BGS.
A much bigger time sink than engineering - and who's in the BGS also need to be heavily engineered to be as effective as possible in shifting influence around.

 

[Northpin]

Yeah it goes deeper than engineering, stuff like piracy and mining are affected by it and it's not just collector limpets, but prospectors and others too that get delayed due to having to wait for some cargo scoop stuff.

Is is?
I did mining worth of 100 bn or so and i never felt the collectors were delaying my mining.
With good positioning 6 collectors will get bored from time to time when using 3 medium mining lasers. Sure if you mine from 500m from asteroid - yea, collector speed becomes an issue. But a totally different issue.

I cant comment on piracy
It's nice to read about "pleasant" experiences about it, but i never fell for it and i fail to see how someone can pirate a cmdr that knows how to fly and has a ship built for open.

The issue here isn't that it's ultimately hard to get materials

That's exactly the issue.
I mostly see people complaining about getting materials and/or not being able to find materials, less about unlocking engineers and even less about other stuff, like for example, the need to visit a number of engineers to apply experimentals (which imo is the most time consuming part when i decide to build another ship)

And let's be serious - after fully engineering 70+ ships and like 12-15 suits and 30+ weapons, I can tell you that Ship engineering is waaaaay less time consuming than EDO engineering, and if we remove relogging and carrier trading out of the equation, the differences are even bigger to even almost impossible* to unlock certain engineers


*(SDP anyone? i got like 4-5 per account in the legit way - aka missions or normal looting rest came from relogging or trading - and i did that for 3 accounts already)

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

With good positioning 6 collectors will get bored from time to time when using 3 medium mining lasers. Sure if you mine from 500m from asteroid - yea, collector speed becomes an issue. But a totally different issue.

Yeah it's mainly the prospectors in mining where the delay is actually felt because you can fix collection delays with more limpets (unless it has the same problem as cargo trading does where server lag delays limpet pickups).

That's exactly the issue.

There's games where getting the materials to upgrade your gear is really hard but no one complains (Dark Souls unique boss drops) because the amount you need is low (just one) and the challenge is appropriate/fun enough. There's obviously opposite examples from MMOs and I dunno, idle games where you need a lot of mats that are ultimately easy to gather individually but the amount you need for decent odds just adds up to some huge grind.

Elite does not hit the right balance here, it stumbles and misses in multiple and unique and bizarre way due to the complexity.

And let's be serious - after fully engineering 70+ ships and like 12-15 suits and 30+ weapons, I can tell you that Ship engineering is waaaaay less time consuming than EDO engineering, and if we remove relogging and carrier trading out of the equation, the differences are even bigger to even almost impossible* to unlock certain engineers

I've fully engineered at least that many ships, but less odyssey stuff and with ship engineering the god damn clicking and waiting for every roll from G1 to G5 on all my pinned blueprints takes at least 1h before I can even get to the part where I fly around and do the rest/put on experimental effects. Odyssey engineering at least doesn't have that even if the material collecting is similarly bad with not as many HGE/Jameson style workarounds. It's another small issue like limpet speed that adds up and just makes engineering ever so slightly worse and it all adds up so even if there was a good system underneath the overall experience would feel crappy.

 

[DemiserofD]

Hmmm... In context to my comment: If Frontier were going to change engineering (specifically) - demands for such being raised since before I was a member here - they might have implemented them already, if this was their intention.

I'd say they've made progressive tweaks as the game has gone on, even to engineering, and at least one major change already to reduce the overall grindiness.

Is there a rebuttal to my statement that picking up G1 mats is like picking up every 1 gold junk item in a bethseda RPG (or something like Divinity Original Sin that has a lot of junk for immersion). It's actually worse in Elite since you basically have to do the equivalent of a lengthy lockpick minigame to be able pick up anythign at all.

I agree with that viewpoint completely. But if they made collection much faster, then picking them up would make a lot more sense.

Complaining about collectors collection speed? That's rich.

Have you run out of thigs that annoy you and want them changed?

Edit: i mean, seriously - that's a really a freaking non-issue for engineering.
Just collect materials in a small and agile ship and dont use collectors if you feel they're slowing you down.

New players don't have either of those things. For me, personally, engineering is a non-issue, because I grinded them all to the cap ages ago. But when I was new, looking at that massive list of random junk I needed actually made me quit for a good while.

Try to see things from the perspective of a new player. Elite loses a huge number of potential long-term players because of engineering, and it would take a relatively small amount of changes to improve that situation, from a new-player perspective, dramatically.

remember I am on the take your time side of things there is no need to collect every mat at once.
If materials could be collected instantly it would be another step to the dark side of being an arcade game.

The problem is, this causes the game to feel 'grindy' to many players. You can still take your time even with faster material collection; there's no reason the game can't be for everyone.

My ideal point is players arrive at engineering with a decent stockpile of engineering mats already in the bank, because it doesn't take any extra effort to grab them. That way, they're prepared ahead of time, and instead of needing to grind EVERYTHING, they just need to grab a few more things.

That's a lot more tolerable to the average player.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

for longer than most singleplayer games take to complete

I'm also not making the mistake to take ED as a game that can be played for less than 500-1000 hours

This is essentially the issue, of course. ED was designed by, and originally marketed towards, people who'd played the original games for thousands of hours and wanted more of that. So things like "it takes a long time to do anything" or "of course, you won't particularly play towards a specific quantitative goal" seem fairly reasonable in that context ... but it's an enormous amount of time to play a single game for, you don't get new 1000-hour players if the first 10 and first 100 hours aren't also solid, and most of the income is going to come from people who buy it, play for maybe 100 hours, have fun, and move on.

Notably, the original games weren't like this - yes, people could and did play them for 1000+ hours, but you didn't need to spend that time just building your ship: getting a fully-equipped ship, including learning how to fly it, could take the 20-40 hours of a more conventional game without needing any sort of hyper-optimisation ... and then if you wanted to keep playing, there was plenty still to do with that ship afterwards (getting the ranks could take quite a while, if you wanted a long-term goal - it's interesting that ED has ended up with most of the ranks being very quick but getting the ships relatively slow)

 

[Brrokk]

Yeah it's mainly the prospectors in mining where the delay is actually felt because you can fix collection delays with more limpets (unless it has the same problem as cargo trading does where server lag delays limpet pickups).


There's games where getting the materials to upgrade your gear is really hard but no one complains (Dark Souls unique boss drops) because the amount you need is low (just one) and the challenge is appropriate/fun enough. There's obviously opposite examples from MMOs and I dunno, idle games where you need a lot of mats that are ultimately easy to gather individually but the amount you need for decent odds just adds up to some huge grind.

Elite does not hit the right balance here, it stumbles and misses in multiple and unique and bizarre way due to the complexity.


I've fully engineered at least that many ships, but less odyssey stuff and with ship engineering the god damn clicking and waiting for every roll from G1 to G5 on all my pinned blueprints takes at least 1h before I can even get to the part where I fly around and do the rest/put on experimental effects. Odyssey engineering at least doesn't have that even if the material collecting is similarly bad with not as many HGE/Jameson style workarounds. It's another small issue like limpet speed that adds up and just makes engineering ever so slightly worse and it all adds up so even if there was a good system underneath the overall experience would feel crappy.

I'll admit taking my own advice for suit engineering. The only suit I wanted for the gameplay I'm interested in was the Artemis. Looking at engineering options, I couldn't see any that I really needed for exobiology and a pre-engineered G3 suit was available. Therefore I'm yet to purposefully collect any suit engineering materials or visit any suit engineers. I don't feel that my gameplay has been restricted at all.

 

[Hellrider]

In my opinion the best way to do HGEs is to fly to the first one in the system, collect everything you can, then fly to the next one and do the same. After you run out of HGEs go for the other Emission sources, logging to the menu isn’t fun logging out of the game is worse. Logging out should happen at the end of a session or because of a crash anything else you aren’t playing the system you are gaming it.

Sounds not bad, but I'm doing it a little different way.
If I have some assasinations/massacres/SaR missions, generally anything what "require" scanning nav beacon to system, where after scan I see some HGE, I'm just going here before jumping to missions. Of course, way slower than relog farm, or even than hunting signals, but I can do when I'm doing other stuff.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

This is essentially the issue, of course. ED was designed by, and originally marketed towards, people who'd played the original games for thousands of hours and wanted more of that. So things like "it takes a long time to do anything" or "of course, you won't particularly play towards a specific quantitative goal" seem fairly reasonable in that context ... but it's an enormous amount of time to play a single game for, you don't get new 1000-hour players if the first 10 and first 100 hours aren't also solid, and most of the income is going to come from people who buy it, play for maybe 100 hours, have fun, and move on.

The irony of it is that designing around delaying progression or having infinite diminishing progression is kind of a failed paradigm - games that significant amounts of people play for hundreds or even thousands of hours don't get played for that long because the grind demands it and people get suckered in*, but because their actual core mechanics are rock solid and fun (example - roguelikes). This applies to Elite too.

Having even below-average grind/progression systems can help grease the wheels a little either in the initial stages or the early endgame, but it also risks just plain making the game worse overall and putting more strain on other systems as players have to try to cope with that.

It's really hard to judge the risk/reward for developers here because the actual implementations vary so much, have more games been ruined by having bad progression systems or by not having progression systems?

* the exceptions being games that put fostering addiction over anything else and brute force their player counts by just advertising a lot.

 

[Greasetrap42]

It's a death by a thousand cuts situation here and the fixes have to start somewhere instead of neglecting everything (due to a lack of resources).

.....

The slow collector speed is maybe also a necessary component in explaining why material collecting in it's current state feels so bad and just ignoring issues is detrimental to the discussion if the systems are so intertwined.

You are describing material collection for engineering mfg mats like a mandatory thing that players must do as a continuous non-stop activity whenever doing combat. Which is ridiculous. The collection of mfg mats from combat aftermath is easy, but can obviously be done selectively and only when a cmdr wants to accumulate some more.

Do I scoop up the mats of every crappy ship I destroy? Obviously not. Typically only elite Anacondas and Corvettes and only when convenient, typically at the end of a series of combat. And obviously only when I want to top up my mat bins. Obviously there is no point in trying to collect mats if the mat bins are all full. Or when I'm more focused on other activities and can't be bothered.

Edit:
Okay, yes I am an established player with a fleet of ships and bins full of mats. So maybe I'm out of touch with a new cmdrs trying to get established? Perhaps, but somehow I became an established cmdr collecting mats whenever I like. And I stil do. Once or twice a year I go on a ship building binge, use up half my mats... and then refill them. Not a big deal. Also, having an established fleet of ships doesn't make collecting mats any easier or faster. A cmdr only needs one(1) combat ship with a limpet controller and a cargo rack of limpets. And a desire to pickup rewards after combat.

 

[DemiserofD]

Okay, yes I am an established player with a fleet of ships and bins full of mats. So maybe I'm out of touch with a new cmdrs trying to get established? Perhaps, but somehow I became an established cmdr collecting mats whenever I like. And I stil do. Once or twice a year I go on a ship building binge, use up half my mats... and then refill them. Not a big deal.

I'm glad you recognize this. The important thing to remember is, this game already succeeded at retaining you. It worked - for you.

But the goal here isn't really you; it's all those players the game hasn't retained. Even small differences can make really big impacts statistically; if you assume that the game retains maybe 5% of the players who get started, then getting even 1% of that remaining 95% still increases the playerbase by 20%.

So my main goal is changes that will make the game more appealing to this huge pool of potential players, without breaking the game for me. The way I approach this is by trying to figure out things that bug me a little bit, AND bug new players a lot, and then find a way to fix that problem for both of us.

That way, hopefully, EVERYBODY wins; I get a slightly better game, new players get a much better game, even the players who don't really benefit from the change personally at least benefit from a larger playerbase.

That's an ideal change.

 

[Greasetrap42]

But the goal here isn't really you; it's all those players the game hasn't retained. Even small differences can make really big impacts statistically; if you assume that the game retains maybe 5% of the players who get started, then getting even 1% of that remaining 95% still increases the playerbase by 20%.

You are making a HUGE assumption in your line of reasoning. Based on your own thoughts and ideas.

Certainly ED retains ony a small percentage of players. All games only retain a small percentage of players. Including some of my favorites that I no longer play like Tetrris, Pac-Man, Halo, and WoW. Making the massive assumption that low player retention is because of a singular activity or feature that you personally don't like is silly.

Making an arguement that your desired game feature change should be impleented in the name of player retention is silly.

 

[DemiserofD]

Making the massive assumption that low player retention is because of a singular activity or feature that you personally don't like is silly.

How do you tell what makes the biggest problems in a game?

The simplest and most straightforward way is to see what players don't like. Steam reviews, forum threads, ingame conversations. The solutions players suggest are often wrong, but their opinions on their own enjoyment are always right. They don't like it; that's perhaps the most useful comment a player can give.

That's how I try to identify what needs to be changed, not just my personal opinions.

 

[Greasetrap42]

That's how I try to identify what needs to be changed, not just my personal opinions.

There is no need for you to speak on behalf of others. Post your own thoughts and ideas. Not others. You don't have the tools or data available to be making claims for other people on large scale. Pretending you do is silly.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

You are describing material collection for engineering mfg mats like a mandatory thing that players must do as a continuous non-stop activity whenever doing combat. Which is ridiculous. The collection of mfg mats from combat aftermath is easy, but can obviously be done selectively and only when a cmdr wants to accumulate some more.

Do I scoop up the mats of every crappy ship I destroy? Obviously not. Typically only elite Anacondas and Corvettes and only when convenient, typically at the end of a series of combat. And obviously only when I want to top up my mat bins. Obviously there is no point in trying to collect mats if the mat bins are all full. Or when I'm more focused on other activities and can't be bothered.

This is why making limpets faster would only be the first part of untangling the mess of material gathering.

Having players ignore 99% of the loot that drops while complaining about the grind is insane.

Ignoring the loot here is absolutely the right thing to do and I went on a whole long rant about why earlier in the thread.

Obviously posts in this thread are evidence that not everyone ignores all the loot and not everyone thinks the grind is too much, but I think it sums up how extreme the situation is overall nicely.

Most of it isn't conceptually hard:

• Loot should be convenient to pick up except in rare cases
  This is where making limpets faster comes in and you could design scenarios around not being able to use limpets, like forcing players to pick up stuff manually in HGEs
• Loot from defeating equal power level opponents should be at least somewhat worthwhile to pick up.
  This is where elite really messes it up - most enemies are trash tier with a decent engineered ship and the hardest enemies in CZs and pirate activity detected signal sources are dropping the same crap everything else with ship type being the main thing that matters.
• Some free loot should be available to prevent players from getting stuck in their progression, but not in infinite amounts (HGE's, Jamesons) so it becomes the main method of gathering devaluing everything else in comparision.
• There is no sane solution to having hundreds of different material types
  It's just impossible to balance and has to be streamlined somehow.
  The easiest way is to improve material trader rates and further improve them if trading in the same category and add an prompt to auto-trade any of the materials needed for a recepie at the engineer bases with a slight (10-25%) convenience fee compared to the now vastly nerfed regular material traders (could also just be a flat credits transaction).
  Traditional RPGs have loot tables for bosses so if you need an item for a certain build you can figure out what boss to farm, Elite has a version of that with loot varying by ship type but it doesn't work because of so many things (Too many mats, Too many worthless G1 mats dropping, Too much randomness in ship spawns, Many rare drops needed to complete all G5 rolls for a single item, Too big recepie/loot tables to memorize, Too confusing overall).
• Interesting engineering progression is just impossible via certain playstyles and that's bad if the game wants to pretend to be a sandbox where you can pick your career, but that's actually hard to fix since it requires new mechanics and content.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

There is no need for you to speak on behalf of others. Post your own thoughts and ideas. Not others. You don't have the tools or data available to be making claims for other people on large scale. Pretending you do is silly.

By replying with a quote you're literally posting his ideas, oh the hypocrisy

There's a difference here between an appeal to popularity and just considering how these things affect other people which can be missed and interpreted in a way that makes striving for any consensus based decision impossible.

 

[Greasetrap42]

By replying with a quote you're literally posting his ideas, oh the hypocrisy

I do have the data and tools to reply to a single post on an internet forum. I do not pretend to have data to make grand statements on large populations based on some steam reviews. I speak for myself, not others. Confusing a forum reply with speaking for others and on their behalf is silly. And very foolish.

Using the silly argument that compiling steam reviews gives data to what changes would improve player counts (which is REALLY silly)... how would the lost player count be measured from implementing these changes? Where is your data for both gains and losses for a given change?

 

[Jack Winter]

I don't think it's a hard nut to crack at all, or even that it takes much imagination to recognize the problem and come up with solutions to address it. Maybe giving players like yourself a reason to do activities besides the "slow collection trickle" gameplay loop? I mean, the ideas are already here on the forums and have been for many years, such as in the thread I linked. The ball's been in Fdev's court this whole time. It's on them for not doing anything with it and remains up to them whether to do anything with it.

FWIW, I'm definitely not against engineering being updated once again, nor would I pretend that it's perfect and needs no changes. Personally I've adapted my play style to how the game works, and don't feel it's vary arduous, or time wasting. Of course that's just my personal point of view. What I wouldn't want to see is the game being made more arcade like to please short time players with the nowadays far too common short attention span.

I'd imagine that Frontier is very well aware that some players are deeply unhappy with engineering and the so called grind. Personally I think the grind is just part of the game.

That said there are many other systems that I'd much prefer that they spend development time on, like for instance BGS/PP/C&P, making more interesting and diverse missions, integrating the Horizon era ground bases into Odyssey on foot play, expanding the new on foot game play, etc.. Or heaven forbid even new stuff like maybe EVA and boarding abandoned ships or the Titans.

 

[æryn]

Sensor engineering only affects normal space, not supercruise. Wide angle is generally not advisable to use, long range has better utility.

That's not true. I've been using wide angle sensors for a long time to collect encoded mats while in supercruise.
Fully engineered wide angle sensors allow you to scan any ships in your forward hemisphere in both normal space and supercruise.

 

[DemiserofD]

There is no need for you to speak on behalf of others. Post your own thoughts and ideas. Not others. You don't have the tools or data available to be making claims for other people on large scale. Pretending you do is silly.

Sure I do. Like I said, I've been playing this game for 6000+ hours, and have been speaking with others, reading reviews, and engaging socially throughout that entire time. If I don't have the necessary data to make suggestions such as these, nobody does.

 

[Greasetrap42]

Sure I do. Like I said, I've been playing this game for 6000+ hours, and have been speaking with others, reading reviews, and engaging socially throughout that entire time. If I don't have the necessary data to make suggestions such as these, nobody does.

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