Yeah but that's not an idea most people would take seriously enough to even consider so I fixed it for you.
It's also easier to speculate about the impacts of less drastic changes than something as radical as the original suggestion.
General Overhauling Engineering: A Family's Request for a Streamlined Upgrade System
- Thread starter Daniel Dusk
- Start date
It's also easier to speculate about the impacts of less drastic changes than something as radical as the original suggestion.
It didn't need fixing - but thank you for such a pointless consideration to make my comment invalid.
It is even easier to speculate over the removal of perceived stumbling blocks that, allegedly, have been place into the path of players solely to drive them away - according to some...
Amazing how there are 2 sides (at least) to every stance on what makes gameplay, isn't it?
I'm one of the minority that thinks the effects of Engineering are as bad as the process. Upgrades are essentially purely inflationary and hugely so. The initial system was at least five times as potent as I was expecting/hoping for, and then 3.0 overhaul had to broadly outdo the very best of what was possible in that system, pushing things into levels of absurdity I probably would have simply left the game over, if that's what was announced back in early 2016.
In particular, post-Engineer combat is almost unrecognizable to what we had before Engineering...and I much preferred the earlier mechanisms and feel. Ironically, I also think that the introduction of Engineering significantly reduced the functional variety of ships and tactics. There were always 'metas', but subverting them and still having a competitive vessel could still be done. More apparent options, but fewer meaningful choices; that's what repeat synergistic inflation did to the system.
At least three-quarters of my CMDR's total rebuys are in the vette despite only 20% of his hours being spent in one. It's much easier to over-commit in a slower vessel and easier to make mistakes in ones that are more complex to fly.
Never lost a 1v1 against an FDL while in a vette (though a couple of top pilots came close)--the ship is a firepower and durability monster, not to mention more agile than she looks--but the vette isn't the sort of ship you bring to only fight one CMDR at a time.
This is true. Applies to the game too.
There are 138 people on my CMDR's friends list. Maybe a dozen of them still play regularly. A large chunk vanished shortly after Engineers and never came back. Most only pop in around the time of updates to see if anything has changed.
An edge is an edge and any advantage will produce statistically meaningful changes to outcome over a long enough period of time. For example, my CMDR has survived several engagements with 1% or less hull, at least a few with only a few seconds of life support left...and lost due to similarly slim margins at least as many times. There is an immersion/verisimilitude aspect to this as well. I wouldn't willingly go into a real fight without stacking the odds in my favor as heavily as possible, and I've always played my CMDR as a pragmatist who was never totally confident in that ejection seat.
Sooner or later those material bins are all going to be full anyway and there was never any much reason for me not to max out everything, especially once the final outcome stopped being random with 3.0. Purely combat focused players may have a harder time though.
Skill plateaus as well. Twenty G5 rolls of materials takes less time to gather via entirely organic means than my skill is going to improve after 8k+ hours, especially when I have enough trouble keeping up with the biological aging of my body and the wear and tear on controls I no longer have motivation to replace or teardown every year.
This wasn't always the case and Engineering is a large part of what changed that.
I'm still sitting at ~6k G5 rolls according to my CMDR's stats page and the bulk of those materials were collected while not explicitly out collecting materials and none of them were collected with exploits.
I also keep the extra HRP. Manually scooping tens of thousands of pieces of space trash is why I'm a better than average pilot.
Out of all the video games I've played, I still have the most hours in the original Battlefield 1942...a match based tactical shooter with no ranks, no unlocks, no money, and without server-side mods, no stat tracking. You selected your class--which does nothing other than determine starting loadout--from a list, then you get to work on accomplishing tactical objectives.
Most 'progression systems' do nothing for me at all. I do like persistence, from an immersion and simulationist perspective, but the moment such mechanisms cross into the overt 'this is a game' kind of thing, the entertainment value is sacrificed.
I think it's entirely possible for ED players to organically acquire whatever is needed, if they play enough and aren't hyperfocused on certain activities. However, I still think all of these mechanisms, and most of what they unlock, are net negatives.
Every time.
In the PvP scene, everyone (well, everyone that also had appreciably more skill than myself) was obsessive (or cheaty) enough to make sure all of their critical combat components were god rolls. Personally, I never had a competitive set of drives for my CMDR's FDL until 3.0 came out, despite sinking several hundred rolls into them.
Doing this once a month for over a year, only to still be behind the curve, was a frustrating experience:
It would also make clamping down on cheats much more critical and would still result in old modules being absurdly potent. As bad as I think previous and current systems are, an uncapped system would be even worse.
They found Acornsoft, already one of the biggest names in the field - who were willing to go with it, and get Holdstock in to take it further - on something like their second or third attempt. There were plenty of longer-run games out there already, too - the original Colossal Cave text adventure was 1976 and there were a lot of others, Moria was 1983, various other games with the expectation of keeping a long-run save state out there too. That one arcade-focused publisher was kicking themselves later for skipping the game of the year is a nice part of the story but does portray a somewhat misleading picture of what computer games were like in the early 80s more generally.
"Play for months" doesn't necessarily have to mean "be upgrading your ship for months", either. If we're talking about the original games:
Elite: You could get a fully-equipped Cobra III in the original Elite for a budget of about 40,000 credits (allowing for some uses of missiles and energy bombs along the way) and optimal trading would make about 1000 credits per run plus any bounties you picked up. In half that time you'd have everything except side military lasers (really difficult to aim) and the Galactic Hyperdrive (not needed until later anyway). 20 trade runs in safe systems could be done in a few hours ... in more dangerous systems double the time, perhaps.
FE2/FFE: these had the Sol-Barnards safe pair which could be ground out - if that was your thing - to get a Panther Clipper and all the equipment in four hours. Playing more conventionally the only real financial challenge was getting out of the starter ship (a bit easier in FFE because the Saker is slightly bigger than the Eagle and the Soholia Plague mission provides strong early income) - once in the Adder money starts pouring in from trade almost faster than you can spend it.
In both cases it would of course take a genuinely new player tens more hours to figure out how to dock, fly the ship, find profitable trade routes, etc. But once you knew what you were doing, getting a high-end ship was really straightforward. Didn't stop people playing them for years anyway.
Elite Dangerous has the advantage over a lot of MMOs in that it's much less abstract - the simulation side of flying the ship - so there's a lot more scope for skill to matter, and a lot more different areas with a reasonable amount of skill required - ship combat, ground combat, Thargoid combat, mining, racing ... there are plenty of people who are far better than me at any of those and it's not because I don't have access to their ship builds.
Someone who "only" plays an hour a day is unlikely to catch up to the older players any time soon, in that respect.
Plenty of other long-term-play games (predating computers, even!) give everyone exactly the same tools right from the start but you'll still have to practice for decades to be at international standard. The individual games might be fairly quick, but then, an individual trade run in Elite doesn't take very long either.
Whilst I don’t fill up each circle on the way through the tiers, I do like to get the final level I’m going to “filled” even when it makes zero difference - whether it’s G5 or I’ve decided I only need G3/4 for a particular module.
For some upgrades there’s just no explanation for it but if two of my MCs don’t have the exact same ammo count or my lasers have different ranges? That really bugs me.
I may have issues …
May...I may have issues …
One has to ask at some point who is exactly is responsible for Engineering even existing. You see I would have been perfectly happy with no engineering, everyone on the same baseline as it were, but the demands for more and more jump range and better weapons, shields, hull etc, well the player demand probably drove engineering as much as anything FDEV wanted to do. If players want more jump range what can you do? You can't just increase the base jump range of all ships can you, well you could, just say that new developments in FSD technology now let ships jump further (they sort of did that with Jumponium) but demands for more and more range just keep coming, so we have Neutron and WD boosting, Fleet Carriers with 500ly jump range, and it's still not enough for a lot of players. Engineering was brought in as the answer to people who wanted increased jump range, and while they were at it, better weapons, shields hull and etc. It was in fact an answer to all desires for upgraded gear rather than magically suddenly giving ships more jump range, better shields and weapons etc.
Of course it will never be enough for some players, we have the game the players wanted. Well of course not all of them, but you can never do that right?
As a general observation of our world, no matter what you do someone will always be unhappy..
Lack of imagination. It's an MMO right? Those have crafting right? So we do crafting, not creative enough to make something appropriate for the setting, we copy it wholesale from fantasy MMOs and give people +5 swords +20LY FSDs etc, and change the names of the recipes from fantasy ingredients to sciencey ingredients. Job done. 
Sorry I'm late!
I can sell most of that stuff to you if you'd like though?
The bartender for on-foot Engineering, can be very handy!
The only thing that would cause more complaints than current engineering would be not having it
i have 14 SDP on my fc. to get them and you are prepared to be notoroius,take the download missions.get into the command house.just shoot youre way in,download item ,log out switch of whatever is faster,back in .get out,on to the next one.no point trying that one again as the data panel will be dead.
Lol, everytime I put up SDPs for sale on my carrier, they're gone in a matter of minutes.
Always!
My fleet currently consists of 50 ships - 45 of which are completely maxed out...
CMDR Reggit - fleet | Elite:Dangerous | INARA
The companion site for Elite:Dangerous with the game database, market data, trade routes, outfitting, engineers, blueprints, crafting, Thargoid war, squadrons, logbooks, galleries, galaxy information and much more...
inara.cz
There would've been other ways to do it too technically by introducing ever more powerful base modules like a S or X rated FSD instead that just has higher base stats, but that would just have cluttered up the module storage with a much lower maximum when engineering was introduced. Again the permanent tech broker unlocks kinda fit here.
I feel like they already got too creative with the crafting system(s) by initially having an infinite slot machine approach and an excessive amount of materials.Lack of imagination. It's an MMO right? Those have crafting right? So we do crafting, not creative enough to make something appropriate for the setting, we copy it wholesale from fantasy MMOs and give people+5 swords+20LY FSDs etc, and change the names of the recipes from fantasy ingredients to sciencey ingredients. Job done.
An upgrade system doesn't need to be creative it just has to be well executed for the type of game it is. Using existing, easy to understand metaphors for what you're doing makes the game easier to understand. Should we also stop calling them space ships because that's just copying stuff from naval terminology?
There's plenty of reasonable justifications for making the system that complex in the first place - it's a sim game, the players want depth and they want their ships to feel unique. The main flaw of both systems was/is the overall grind (due to lack of interesting material gathering opportunities) not the overall design which could be fixed with a few recipe tweaks every now and then to balance things and shake up the meta.
I may have issues …
It's the games fault. (Half serious)...Maybe I should get tested for OCD?
If you are dev you have to decide, what add or change, and which requests of players should be ignored.
So sorry, but no.
"people wanted it" cannot be excuse, since, as you said "Of course it will never be enough for some players".
This is fault of frontier, and only frontier.
They added engineering with whole power creep, and broken balance of upgrades. They created stupid possibilities like "absurdly high raw hp AND resists".
Engineering could be fine as small tweaks, or huge benefits with HUGE tradeoffs.
Meanwhile now you can apply HD for hull, which will increase raw hp AND resists, or you can stack multiple shields boosters in way, which allow having dozens thousands of shields AND 70% resists.
Huge tradeoffs already exist, the tradeoff is that you have to collect mats to get huge benefits.
Lol, good one!
Just maybe, old friend?...Maybe I should get tested for OCD?
I guess Reggit should thank his stars he's not playing SC, imagine if one felt the need to own all ships...