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

[Jack Winter]

Not really. I would define "new player friendly" as intuitive, accessible, easy to understand, easy to use, safe to use, minimal drawbacks/trade-offs being made, while still offering the means to improve as a player.

There is a great deal to learn about the options available in the game to get the best out of it, indeed - which is really the rub here. Getting started with misleading ideas or impressions is a quick path to frustration.

Yes and no. I'd agree that some things could clearly be improved but part of the fun is also to figure things out.. Really not sure that minimal drawbacks is a good thing, isn't that one of the main complaints about engineering?

I suspect that many new players are being misled by minmaxing tutorials..

 

[Jack Winter]

Nothing about this statement makes any sense. Use of the word "most" has nothing to do with opinions vs factual observations. It is more true to say "most" instead of "all" or "none" or "few". Sometimes I think you're just out to grind my gears, honestly....

If I may permit myself, I have the impression that you are in the habit of presenting arguments on behalf of other players instead of as your own opinion. I suspect that is what Ratty picks up on and taunts you about.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

Ah, the usual inclusive 'most' - so opinion, rather than fact.

It's almost a tautology though, players quit the game because they don't like it, players don't like it because they find enough stuff to hate to quit before they find enough stuff to like to stay.

If you'd say all players do that then someone would barge in saying that you don't speak for the players that quit the game because they love it just too much even though that doesn't really contribute to the discussion.

Most people would say that this feels like petty nitpicking over how people phrase their rhetoric when their arguments would be as valid if worded differently.

Oops I said "most people" I guess my argument is invalid.

 

[V'larr]

If I may permit myself, I have the impression that you are in the habit of presenting arguments on behalf of other players instead of as your own opinion. I suspect that is what Ratty picks up on and taunts you about.

These are observations I've drawn from watching, playing with, arguing with, and otherwise observing other players of this game, on twitch, on discord, on reddit, on these forums, since the start of my engagement with the game.

The engineering megathread alone should serve as enough evidence to draw these observations yourselves.

Many of the players I'm referring to have presented their arguments, already, across many years playing the game, buried in archived & locked posts and steam reviews - and are no longer playing the game because of the things they've observed. Particularly poignant for me are the many big names in Elite streaming that no longer touch the game. ObsidianAnt, Djtruthsayer, CMDRHughmann - none of the names I used to recognize and watch in the Elite scene so much as touch the game nowadays.

So suffice it to say I'm not amused by the premise that I'm 'misrepresenting my opinions as fact'. This is observably untrue on every level, and it tries my patience every time the presented observations & facts are swept aside with some vague attempt at sophistry.

 

[V'larr]

Yes and no. I'd agree that some things could clearly be improved but part of the fun is also to figure things out.. Really not sure that minimal drawbacks is a good thing, isn't that one of the main complaints about engineering?

I suspect that many new players are being misled by minmaxing tutorials..

getting posts out of order here, the way pages update on these forums is still something I'm not used to, honestly

So...sure, there's some give and take, but being able to figure things out to begin with is part and parcel to being accessible & easy to use.

In the presented ship example, having no thermal damage, no hitscan options, no gimballed tracking options, and questionable module sniping options are all going to be things making life harder with no real educational gain about combat mechanics, except specifically for all-fixed non-hitscan weapons. And let's not forget cannons of different sizes have different travel times, adding another layer of inconsistency and potential confusion.

Consider instead a 'typical' setup of 2-3 pulses and 2 multicannons. You have thermal damage, hitscan options (by de-targeting if using gimballed lasers), gimballed tracking to make dealing with agile/smaller opponents a more feasible option, you don't suffer from slower projectile speeds, and you have the means to reliably target modules once shields are dropped, particularly if you focus on mastering distance control. And it teaches you a little more about managing your distributor properly, without being unwieldy.

This is what I'm referring to in terms of "minimal drawbacks", when presenting a build as good for newer players.

Now, on the separate topic of engineering? Absolutely, it's a problem that the 'interesting tweaks and trade-offs' is not what we have in practice, like Morbad's stated with more words the balance of the game was thrown out the window. If the drawbacks we had were as severe as the massive gains we get through Engineering, I'm not sure that would be the right idea either, just more imbalance but in both directions.

There's definitely also give-and-take with tutorials, but in terms of Engineering, "min-maxing" is just that: minimizing the pain and unfun aspects so you can get on with maximizing your benefit and enjoyment from it. It's the sensible thing to do, if hoovering arbitrarily bloated amounts of materials and playing HGE RNG lottery is not in fact the main reason you picked up a ship simulator game in a shared authentic Milky Way galaxy.

 

[Jack Winter]

These are observations I've drawn from watching, playing with, arguing with, and otherwise observing other players of this game, on twitch, on discord, on reddit, on these forums, since the start of my engagement with the game.

The engineering megathread alone should serve as enough evidence to draw these observations yourselves.

Many of the players I'm referring to have presented their arguments, already, across many years playing the game, buried in archived & locked posts and steam reviews - and are no longer playing the game because of the things they've observed. Particularly poignant for me are the many big names in Elite streaming that no longer touch the game. ObsidianAnt, Djtruthsayer, CMDRHughmann - none of the names I used to recognize and watch in the Elite scene so much as touch the game nowadays.

So suffice it to say I'm not amused by the premise that I'm 'misrepresenting my opinions as fact'. This is observably untrue on every level, and it tries my patience every time the presented observations & facts are swept aside with some vague attempt at sophistry.

Would you entertain the possibility that these players have played the game for thousands of hours, and actually consider that they finished the game and find nothing that interests them anymore? I mean even someone like OA recently named Elite as one of the best space games of 2023..

 

[Brrokk]

To me it seems like the game is too safe and predictable, you mostly have to mess up badly to be in any danger. To be honest I'm not sure I like that..

I like a bit of excitement, but on the whole I enjoy the "fairly safe" opt-in game design.

My approach is that I RP as a real space pilot. At the present, no space vehicle is launched if there is any identifiable risk to its crew or mission until that risk has been mitigated. (At least, that's the theory. Paradoxically I think the Apollo missions were pushed too hard for political reasons). I expect this to remain true in the far future and it's how I treat my Elite flights.

I prefer a situation where every ship destruction is because I did something wrong, and I can learn from it. I find that I more-or-less have this in ED.

 

[V'larr]

Would you entertain the possibility that these players have played the game for thousands of hours, and actually consider that they finished the game and find nothing that interests them anymore? I mean even someone like OA recently named Elite as one of the best space games of 2023..

Of course, that's rather the point, isn't it? Even though Elite does remain one of the best space games even throughout 2023, the outstanding flaws - or frustrations with it otherwise - causes players even with lots of indicated playtime to stop playing, even though it's structured as an 'open universe' style game that has no clear endpoint or real reason to feel 'finished' with it.

I view that as an indicator of issues that deserve remedies, as opposed to being something to shrug about.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

I don't think this is at all the game players wanted, however - the mountain of discussions and feedback just in these forums, let alone the reddits & discords, is a testament to that. I feel there's been a distinct issue with clarity of vision & direction with the game that has manifested in all the problems that active players have all learned to live with, to whichever varying degree.

I think in part the problem is that it's the game the (early) players wanted, and that implies unclear vision and direction.

The Kickstarter sold, and the DDF documents also presented, "FFE, but a MMO". That's what we have, even though it implies a whole bunch of contradictory requirements. Engineering had a bunch of unforced mistakes on top of that, sure, but most of the biggest problems - or at least, their underlying causes - were locked in long before 1.0.

With ten years of hindsight I can see the problems that I couldn't at the time, and probably so can Frontier, but most of them are baked in too deep now.

Many parts of the galaxy exist only at the far end of a long period of sunk time. That's a big flaw as a game experience.

It's the basic unsolvable problem of space games, I think.

If the scale and emptiness of space is portrayed with any amount of realism (ED, KSP, FE2/FFE, NMS) then it mainly only exists to be travelled through as a source of compartmentalised encounters, and the travel between those encounters is essentially uninteresting and it's just a question of how quickly you can get between them.

If the scale is shrunk to the point where the content isn't compartmentalised and "travel" and "gameplay" are the same thing (X series, Elite/Oolite, Starfield, Tie Fighter), then it starts to raise questions around "this is fine, but for the number of square/cubic kilometres involved it could also have been set on a planet surface and had things like terrain and weather and cover and other interesting things space is renowned for not having"

(the original Elite of course avoids the criticism in the second part because with the hardware of the time getting it to work in space was hard enough ... but expectations are higher nowadays)

 

[Jack Winter]

getting posts out of order here, the way pages update on these forums is still something I'm not used to, honestly

So...sure, there's some give and take, but being able to figure things out to begin with is part and parcel to being accessible & easy to use.

In the presented ship example, having no thermal damage, no hitscan options, no gimballed tracking options, and questionable module sniping options are all going to be things making life harder with no real educational gain about combat mechanics, except specifically for all-fixed non-hitscan weapons. And let's not forget cannons of different sizes have different travel times, adding another layer of inconsistency and potential confusion.

Consider instead a 'typical' setup of 2-3 pulses and 2 multicannons. You have thermal damage, hitscan options (by de-targeting if using gimballed lasers), gimballed tracking to make dealing with agile/smaller opponents a more feasible option, you don't suffer from slower projectile speeds, and you have the means to reliably target modules once shields are dropped, particularly if you focus on mastering distance control. And it teaches you a little more about managing your distributor properly, without being unwieldy.

This is what I'm referring to in terms of "minimal drawbacks", when presenting a build as good for newer players.

Now, on the separate topic of engineering? Absolutely, it's a problem that the 'interesting tweaks and trade-offs' is not what we have in practice, like Morbad's stated with more words the balance of the game was thrown out the window. If the drawbacks we had were as severe as the massive gains we get through Engineering, I'm not sure that would be the right idea either, just more imbalance but in both directions.

There's definitely also give-and-take with tutorials, but in terms of Engineering, "min-maxing" is just that: minimizing the pain and unfun aspects so you can get on with maximizing your benefit and enjoyment from it. It's the sensible thing to do, if hoovering arbitrarily bloated amounts of materials and playing HGE RNG lottery is not in fact the main reason you picked up a ship simulator game in a shared authentic Milky Way galaxy.

Unfortunately when I started playing there was already engineering (the initial iteration). IMO it's completely unbalanced with mostly only positives for the player, which has led to making the game too easy in PvE, and far to time consuming in PvP (except for seal clubbing where the noob is at a terrible disadvantage).

As regards material gathering I really don't see a big problem except maybe that it takes a lot of time. What I do consider a fault is that a player can't reasonably get the materials he needs at the moment. I'd welcome either more varied mission rewards and/or loot drops, or the ability to haggle with mission providers for materials that the player really needs. I don't consider the material traders very good for this purpose due to the exchange rates.

My comment about minmaxing tutorials was more directed at relogging at HGEs, guardian sites, etc.

Since I'm on vacation without a hotas I've been doing on foot the last weeks. Not that it really applies to ship engineering but we have touched on foot engineering in this thread. Yesterday I must have picked up some 40-50 MIs (well over 30 after I started counting in the evening).. Three of us did 2 settlement raids last night, that resulted in 3 x 2 x 5 MIs (10 for each of us) in about 45 minutes of playtime, and it only took that long as the others wanted to pick up all the loot laying around.

 

[Disemboweled Ego]

What if the materials that drop from ships (and mission rewards) were explicitly weighed in the players favor by giving the materials they have the least of higher chances to drop as long as they are in the loot table?

A lot of games do this to make sure players don't get too unlucky (comes up often in crit/dodge based builds).

It could even make picking up lower grade stuff feel* worthwhile since it increases the chances of the next drop being something better or eliminate the pee and the poo from the loot table if you're full.

* It still wouldn't actually be worthwhile with the current material trader ratios.

 

[Jack Winter]

I like a bit of excitement, but on the whole I enjoy the "fairly safe" opt-in game design.

My approach is that I RP as a real space pilot. At the present, no space vehicle is launched if there is any identifiable risk to its crew or mission until that risk has been mitigated. (At least, that's the theory. Paradoxically I think the Apollo missions were pushed too hard for political reasons). I expect this to remain true in the far future and it's how I treat my Elite flights.

I prefer a situation where every ship destruction is because I did something wrong, and I can learn from it. I find that I more-or-less have this in ED.

It might add a bit of spice if things occasionally went wrong but fast reations or clever thinking could get you out of it. Not sure what to bring up as examples though..

 

[Ian Doncaster]

even though it's structured as an 'open universe' style game that has no clear endpoint or real reason to feel 'finished' with it.

Sure. But players can define their own endpoints just as they define their own goals in the first place.

I play a lot less than I did, say, five years ago and that's basically not something Frontier can "fix". It's just another game that I've enjoyed, played a lot of, still find fun to pick up now and then, etc. Frontier could fix every single problem in the game as I perceive them (excluding the ones inherent to it being "Elite Dangerous") and everyone else would quit I still would probably play something else most of the time, because I think I've done everything I want to in the game.

(The one thing which would make me more likely to come back is not having to pay another £50 for an alt - the £15 of Steam sales is more the sort of amount I'd consider worthwhile for the amount of enjoyment I'd likely get, but I can't be bothered to go through the hassle of installing Steam for one game, they never seem to have it on sale in their own store, and I don't want to reset my existing account because it does still get some use. This is a sufficiently weird and personally-specific reason that I have no intention of asking Frontier to do anything about it, or expecting them to!)

 

[angusmadmac1]

It shouldn't even have to be a consideration. Many parts of the galaxy exist only at the far end of a long period of sunk time. That's a big flaw as a game experience.

Why ?
I got immense pleasure eventually getting to beagle point and beyond ( 6 month trip to get there 2017) and again in 2020 . Or even visiting all 42 regions or unlocking all EDH engineers or collecting all the permits I can ( I don't have the cqc one ) .. So why is that classed as a flaw ?
Yes there are flaws in the engineering , Powerplay and BGS and certain game play so it's not ideal but because someone doesn't put the effort in why should they get award ?

 

[Jack Winter]

I think in part the problem is that it's the game the (early) players wanted, and that implies unclear vision and direction.

The Kickstarter sold, and the DDF documents also presented, "FFE, but a MMO". That's what we have, even though it implies a whole bunch of contradictory requirements. Engineering had a bunch of unforced mistakes on top of that, sure, but most of the biggest problems - or at least, their underlying causes - were locked in long before 1.0.

With ten years of hindsight I can see the problems that I couldn't at the time, and probably so can Frontier, but most of them are baked in too deep now.


It's the basic unsolvable problem of space games, I think.

If the scale and emptiness of space is portrayed with any amount of realism (ED, KSP, FE2/FFE, NMS) then it mainly only exists to be travelled through as a source of compartmentalised encounters, and the travel between those encounters is essentially uninteresting and it's just a question of how quickly you can get between them.

If the scale is shrunk to the point where the content isn't compartmentalised and "travel" and "gameplay" are the same thing (X series, Elite/Oolite, Starfield, Tie Fighter), then it starts to raise questions around "this is fine, but for the number of square/cubic kilometres involved it could also have been set on a planet surface and had things like terrain and weather and cover and other interesting things space is renowned for not having"

(the original Elite of course avoids the criticism in the second part because with the hardware of the time getting it to work in space was hard enough ... but expectations are higher nowadays)

I've often thought it would be nice if I could use the FSS scanner while in super cruise, or possibly fire off some FTL drones during the jump to arrive in an already mapped system. Or basically anything to do except just flying a parabolic path to avoid possible interdiction (in an inhabited system). Anything to keep me busy in game, instead of switching to the forum to troll or argue, or discord to have a laugh with the mates..

 

[Hellrider]

I prefer a situation where every ship destruction is because I did something wrong, and I can learn from it. I find that I more-or-less have this in ED.

Understable, but as long, as we havent random, critical malfunctions after boosting too much it could be still true.
We could just set bar in a little different spot, so rebuy could be caused by something like "little mistake", not "massive mistake repeated for hours".
And honestly, elite is much closer second approach.
Why not changing anarchy systems (true anarchy, controlled by anarchists, not inhabitated systems) and maybe low security systems into truly dangerous areas? Yourh deat still could be caused by your mistake, "jumped to wrong system, which he can filter out", or true threat from some missions? For me it is kinda weak game design, if I can complete "elite", "max threat" in any medium combat ship, as long as I'm not fly like drunk monkey.
Engineering, with true tradeoffs, instead straight "only positive" could lead to something similar. Toasted thrusters after flying for whole time on boost, because you had maxed dirty, or something like that? Well, it was choice, and consequence of choices.

 

[V'larr]

I think in part the problem is that it's the game the (early) players wanted, and that implies unclear vision and direction.

The Kickstarter sold, and the DDF documents also presented, "FFE, but a MMO". That's what we have, even though it implies a whole bunch of contradictory requirements. Engineering had a bunch of unforced mistakes on top of that, sure, but most of the biggest problems - or at least, their underlying causes - were locked in long before 1.0.

With ten years of hindsight I can see the problems that I couldn't at the time, and probably so can Frontier, but most of them are baked in too deep now.

I agree about the unclear vision and direction, but I can't think that the issues are such that they just can't be remedied. We can't know, of course, because we haven't seen efforts made to do so, but like I said earlier in the thread, Fdev have a massive treasure trove of ideas and suggestions that would greatly improve most aspects of the game experience.

Where there's a will, there's a way, as the saying goes.

It's the basic unsolvable problem of space games, I think.

If the scale and emptiness of space is portrayed with any amount of realism (ED, KSP, FE2/FFE, NMS) then it mainly only exists to be travelled through as a source of compartmentalised encounters, and the travel between those encounters is essentially uninteresting and it's just a question of how quickly you can get between them.

If the scale is shrunk to the point where the content isn't compartmentalised and "travel" and "gameplay" are the same thing (X series, Elite/Oolite, Starfield, Tie Fighter), then it starts to raise questions around "this is fine, but for the number of square/cubic kilometres involved it could also have been set on a planet surface and had things like terrain and weather and cover and other interesting things space is renowned for not having"

(the original Elite of course avoids the criticism in the second part because with the hardware of the time getting it to work in space was hard enough ... but expectations are higher nowadays)

Sure, and given the shared-galaxy aspect time dilation is obviously out, but when supercruising inside star systems takes astronomically more time than travel between star systems - and is by and large void of encounters to consider? It just doesn't make sense, and it ostensibly affects perception of the game as a timesink. And the solutions don't have to be contrived - there's what I've suggested what feels like eons ago in the thread in my signature, and there's the subject of making the encounters themselves feel cool, fun, immersive, and worthwhile.

Certainly I'm not stating that I think it should be shrunk in scale or that the task of undertaking a journey should be trivialized - and absolutely I don't condone the loading screen approach Starfield took - but it could also not be, plainly speaking, an arbitrarily forced time waster.

A criticism that is just as valid for the barrier to entry for Engineering, I'd have to say, just for distinctly different reasons.

 

[V'larr]

Unfortunately when I started playing there was already engineering (the initial iteration). IMO it's completely unbalanced with mostly only positives for the player, which has led to making the game too easy in PvE, and far to time consuming in PvP (except for seal clubbing where the noob is at a terrible disadvantage).

As regards material gathering I really don't see a big problem except maybe that it takes a lot of time. What I do consider a fault is that a player can't reasonably get the materials he needs at the moment. I'd welcome either more varied mission rewards and/or loot drops, or the ability to haggle with mission providers for materials that the player really needs. I don't consider the material traders very good for this purpose due to the exchange rates.

My comment about minmaxing tutorials was more directed at relogging at HGEs, guardian sites, etc.

Since I'm on vacation without a hotas I've been doing on foot the last weeks. Not that it really applies to ship engineering but we have touched on foot engineering in this thread. Yesterday I must have picked up some 40-50 MIs (well over 30 after I started counting in the evening).. Three of us did 2 settlement raids last night, that resulted in 3 x 2 x 5 MIs (10 for each of us) in about 45 minutes of playtime, and it only took that long as the others wanted to pick up all the loot laying around.

You're not wrong, but PvE is also structured to be purely about quantity vs quality. Why Fdev have never seen fit to change the combat rank experience point system is utterly beyond my ken, it's by far the longest grind in the game - which means it only makes sense to try and optimize for it.

For PvP, yeah, hitpoint inflation obviates things becoming a tedious attrition slugfest - and I'll never understand the reasoning for introducing special effects with Engineering that are solely tools for gankers to wreck new players... which is also exacerbated by the hitpoint inflation problem making the difference between vanilla vs Engineered, and noncombat vs combat loadout, miles apart. That seems like an obvious undesirable thing worth removing, to me....

If we had more control over mission rewards/loot drops, that could certainly alleviate the material grind woes.

HGE relogging means having to only go through the tedious process of locating one once or twice per material, as opposed to have to repeat the process as many as 15 times as often (if my rough math is right?), so I mean... that's an awfully sizable difference. Guardian sites, it's kind of the same deal... you can relog at 1 site, or go to multiple sites and take up time travelling from one to the next & looking up a map guide for each to make sure you're not missing any of the things you're there at the sites to collect.

If the game didn't require an arbitrarily large amount of things for you to collect such that just a visit or two to any given site would get you to what you need, instead of probably at least a half dozen such visits to unlock a new module, that would address the impetus for relogging at Guardian sites.

I've yet to dive into on-foot things, outside of exobiology, because I can't cope with the aliasing. Maybe someday if I ever get a new PC that won't struggle with the unreasonable amounts of supersampling the aliasing problems require; anyway, I can't comment on the Odyssey grind - I only have the observation that it's almost universally reviled as being unreasonable.

 

[V'larr]

Why ?
I got immense pleasure eventually getting to beagle point and beyond ( 6 month trip to get there 2017) and again in 2020 . Or even visiting all 42 regions or unlocking all EDH engineers or collecting all the permits I can ( I don't have the cqc one ) .. So why is that classed as a flaw ?
Yes there are flaws in the engineering , Powerplay and BGS and certain game play so it's not ideal but because someone doesn't put the effort in why should they get award ?

Getting to beagle point & traversing the galaxy from star system to star system is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things as mundane as visiting various stations in multi-star systems within the Bubble - that could arguably take longer than a dedicated player could get to Beagle Point nowadays riding a neutron highway....

 

[aRJay]

I've often thought it would be nice if I could use the FSS scanner while in super cruise,

I thought the FSS only worked in SC or do you mean at speed which would be bad as you can’t see where you are going while in FSS.

or possibly fire off some FTL drones during the jump to arrive in an already mapped system.

But then you would have less to do in the system.

Or basically anything to do except just flying a parabolic path to avoid possible interdiction (in an inhabited system). Anything to keep me busy in game, instead of switching to the forum to troll or argue, or discord to have a laugh with the mates..

I find the forum too distracting to use when I am playing except for Hutton Orbital class journeys.