Player Feedback On Proposed No-Engineered-Ships Limitation Of Squadron Carriers

[CMDR Mechan]

Dear FDEV Product and Engineering teams,

Creating this thread to gather player feedback on the proposed No-Engineered-Ships limitation of squadron carriers, while also contributing my own view on this matter.

While sentiments will certainly differ, hence the opportunity to gather a variety of perspectives, I will personally say two things:

• Love the concept of squadron carriers; it's has so much potential! But ...
• ... the no-engineered banking of modules/ships limitation feels entirely artificial, unnecessarily punishing, and broadly crippling of the usefulness of said Squadron Carriers

I believe that it is high time that you let players share engineered modules and ships with each other. It will make for a far better community experience. Intentionally disabling the ability to do so, while introducing "squadron carriers" which can only carry unengineered ships (which, let's be honest with each other, no moderately active squadron uses with any degree of regularity) feels to me like a sad oxymoron (I really want you to share, but nah not really.)

I say the above with full appreciation of the consequences (which are vast) which introducing engineered module/ship trading would bring to the game. I believe those are net/net majorly on the positive side.

Please consider removing said restriction from the final version of Vanguards.

Respectfully,

CMDR Mechan

 

[Vlad plus]

I assume this limitation is related to RMT

 

[Hanerib]

Yeah it all seems really quite pointless.
Lending a temporary clone of an engineered ship could be very interesting. Because they are built for something. An unengineered ship you can just buy anywhere basically free.

 

[Dillon Fallon]

In it's current state, I'm not sure what's gained with this idea. Sure, the recipient of the ship saves a few credits (is this really an issue for players in the vast majority of squadrons?), but if you've got to engineer the whole ship yourself, have we really gained much over someone just having a Coriolis/EDSY/Inara link posted in Discord chat and just building the thing ourselves?

With no change I'm predicting another mechanic like selling ships and modules from our carriers for the same price (or more expensive) than what you can buy in the system next door.

 

[anShpan]

I believe they are trying to limit spread sharing of eng. modules among alt. accounts. For example, if I would create 3 alt accounts, then I'm just paid 10 mil for squadron and stuffed my (now Squadron) FC with eng. modules and in a matter of hour(s) all my alts are flying fully G5 FDLs.

 

[Peter Wolfson]

So, what do we do with the many ships we bought from Store with Arx that are engineered? Is that a way to tell us that we shouldn't buy any of them and to not trust in Frontier ever again? That is commercially wise, indeed...

 

[jellowiggler]

Quick thoughts:

The biggest time commitment and largest gains for a ship is the engineering. You aren't saving anyone any time or money at all to provide an A rated ship to start engineering on. Say a new commander does pick up a ship from their SC to engineer, then they won't be able to land back on the carrier once they have a single module done. Providing this level of ship, potentially for new commanders in the squad isn't really valuable.

Usability for commanders: All of my ships have engineered modules. As soon as you are able to use engineered modules commanders do. Even the pre-buy ships have engineered components. They are also refused landing on a squad carrier? SCs that don't allow ships with engineered modules wont' be used, at least not for transporting, loaning, trading or storing ships.

Either the squad carriers will not be used to carry ships or they will just be used to provide ships to other players in an A rated state. As money and time to get an A rated ship are of no consequence at all I don't see what good the feature is if engineered ships can't participate.

 

[CMDR Lefty Jackson]

No engineering on ships attached to a squadron carrier?

Without more details as to why no engnieering...NO!

 

[Dillon Fallon]

I believe they are trying to limit spread sharing of eng. modules among alt. accounts. For example, if I would create 3 alt accounts, then I'm just paid 10 mil for squadron and stuffed my (now Squadron) FC with eng. modules and in a matter of hour(s) all my alts are flying fully G5 FDLs.

Seems like they're between a rock and a hard place with this then. Either its too much of a short cut for them to contemplate, or it's a waste of time.

 

[Weps]

feels entirely artificial

Not sure if that's the case, to me it feels as if FDEV are having a hard time working around the technical aspects of this.

Making only credit-cost assets available in the bank really sounds as if the players would be donating that asset to the bank permanently. Even in the event of any sort of dispute, you can always recreate that asset from scratch and just deduct the credits somewhere else. It's clean - from an "accounting" point of view. With engineered modules, this "value for asset" definition gets murky, and you need a robust ownership system with an even more robust backend to support it.

It's the classical example of a spacehobo joining a squadron, picking up the nearest fully-engineered PvP ARX-only ship (that the owner carelessly put into the bank) and then leaving the squadron and going to Discord to make fun of him (because honestly, who is gonna use squadron chat or whatever).

How do you get that ship back to the paying customer before the support tickets start flooding in? What happens to the player that's flying it, while live on Twitch with a "GTA6 in space" caption? etc. etc. The easiest game design approach would be to not even put yourself in this position as a company, by making bank donations permanent and covered by a disclaimer. And thus credits only.


Don't get me wrong, I think this is completely the wrong approach. And it will make the squadrons bank feature DoA, as many were saying in the stream chat. But it's just FDEV playing it safe as always.

 

[Morbad]

Remove Engineering entirely. Problem solved.

 

[Hanerib]

So, what do we do with the many ships we bought from Store with Arx that are engineered? Is that a way to tell us that we shouldn't buy any of them and to not trust in Frontier ever again? That is commercially wise, indeed...

Those should be bought for cosmetics. However these are usually far from optimal builds and more or less all internals should be changed anyway.

I believe they are trying to limit spread sharing of eng. modules among alt. accounts. For example, if I would create 3 alt accounts, then I'm just paid 10 mil for squadron and stuffed my (now Squadron) FC with eng. modules and in a matter of hour(s) all my alts are flying fully G5 FDLs.

I don't know why alts should matter either. They would need to be in the same squadron. Commander that has unlocked those engineers would have to manage the operation. And it's you still playing anyway.

 

[Falcon911]

@Weps If you leave a squadron.. should be like when you leave a power. You lose all ranks and start from scratch. Could be that if you gain a "ship" from a squadron member and you then leave. That ship is no longer yours since your only "borrowing" it from a squadron player. BUT if you stay with the squadron and that member you borrowed the ship from" leaves the squadron...Do you still lose the ship? I think yes...

The credits hopping is more interesting.. You jump from one squadron, get credits. Leave and join another squadron add credits to your account, rinse and repeat... Now THAT might get abused...

I can forsee ALOT of Cutters, clippers and Corvette coming out of the woodwork now since new player would not have the grind for rank any more to gain these valuable ships.

As far as Engineering goes...not really hard to get all the mats for a new person vs what us old timers had to go thru, so showing a new person the ropes is pretty easy.

 

[EvillNooB]

yep, dunno about modules, but any ship should be shareable imo, however the ship should remain the squadron's asset even when you take it out, there should be a "rebuy allowance" after which it returns back to the carrier, and you also should not be able to change any modules; use it as is or return it

way better than sharing boring basic ships, but also does not mean that you skip the grind entirely

 

[Thorfin]

I don't necessarily find it very limiting, we go from not being able to do anything between players to already being able to give each other ships and modules, that's already not bad. I find that engineering remains a very personal thing anyway, to really make your ship your own way of playing. I don't know if you already realize how open it is to be able to directly give each other sums of credit via a bank and directly ships and modules, not even engineers. A day one player will already have 500 million and all the ships if he joins the right squadron. If you don't even have to unlock engineers, you really have nothing left to do in the game...

 

[Starshot_Jigawatts]

I second the OP. This is the single dumbest way to gimp the new Squad Carrier before it leaves space-dock lol. Like FDEV, what are you thinking!?!???

 

[Brammmers]

If you can enforce the "loan/bank" aspect correctly to prevent abuse, then engineered modules and ships should definitely be allowed.

That will really heat up the pp2.0 conflicts they are trying to drive.

J

 

[Thorfin]

Frontier sells engineered ships for real money, imagine what it would lose by letting players make even better engineered ones available to players for free...

 

[Sylow]

Remove Engineering entirely. Problem solved.

Best suggestion i read here since a long time. Seriously.

 

[aRJay]

I think we have too little information to come up with a sensible response.

It might be a little irrelevant if the predictions from another thread are correct and the majority of squadrons remain single player who are they going to lend the ships too?