Engineers Reduce the number of different materials to 20 or less, and solve most issues?

[Viking84]

FDev: I hereby present you with a solution that requires close to zero coding changes, and should solve most issues people have with the Engineers:

Take the 133 different materials and commodities required for blueprints and combine them down to say 20 different types. Ensure that each of these 20 materials can be acquired through at least two different activities. You will then solve most of the following:

Material/Commodity storage
No need to change any of this as you can carry 30 of each type within the 600 unit limit

Tedium of RNG loot gathering
RNG will remain as it is, but with only a pool of 20 mats to choose from you are guaranteed to get what you are looking for without it taking too much time. Ensuring that each material has at least two methods of acquisition gives players the option to avoid their least favourite activities and reduces the feeling of grinding.

Hatred of RNG results from Engineers
You will have more materials for the mods you want to perform, and hence more rolls to get what you want. I would personally prefer it if the results where narrowed down considerably, but if nothing else the suggestion above will reduce the pain of a bad roll.

The grind to increase Engineers Rank
This will be reduced because you are likely to have the materials needed for at least some of the upgrades your chosen Engineer can provide. Missions would still be preferable, but they are a long way off so this would at least help.


And best of all, if you ensure that the new materials are direct replacements for the old versions, then commanders will automatically be compensated for their previous efforts by having their material storage full of useful materials

Are there issues with this solution I haven't seen? Please speak up

 

[xondk]

Doesn't really solve it, this seems based around the fact that if you only have 20 materials there's a significant higher chance of getting said material needed. But how would you spread them out? how would it make sense?

There is meaning to the madness with the randomness that is currently, it is not entirely random.

Also remember that you do not really need to get the items again once you've gotten the thing you want? then the mod you want is yours.

Should you really be able to get say all the level 5 mods you want within say a week of release? or what is it that is expected? remember these things are meant to be special, if everyone can get them easily what's the point of them? it would just become tier 2 equipment, with nothing really special about them other then being 'better' then tier 1?

 

[Roadblock]

I think a solution like this is on the right track. There's just too many materials and not enough storage for them. Plus, if i want to hang onto the ones that require cargo space, I'm now locked out of flying my combat ships that don't have any cargo space. No fun .

 

[Derath]

I feel like the systems actually shallower than Its supposed to be, I feel like we were supposed to be able to replace components with higher grade ones to get better RNG/Special wep chance for example but it hasn't been implemented, as a result we have an enormous number of components, many of which have no purpose or only 1 (especially in the data category) that makes it seem like a waste of space.

I think however that reducing the number of materials would just be a sideways fix to the same problem, what they really need to do is give us storage and make sure every material is attainable in a fashion that makes sense and fits its rarity.

 

[Viking84]

Doesn't really solve it, this seems based around the fact that if you only have 20 materials there's a significant higher chance of getting said material needed. But how would you spread them out? how would it make sense?

There is meaning to the madness with the randomness that is currently, it is not entirely random.

Also remember that you do not really need to get the items again once you've gotten the thing you want? then the mod you want is yours.

Should you really be able to get say all the level 5 mods you want within say a week of release? or what is it that is expected? remember these things are meant to be special, if everyone can get them easily what's the point of them? it would just become tier 2 equipment, with nothing really special about them other then being 'better' then tier 1?

Personally I feel that there should either be RNG in the materials (and in our case heavy RNG coupled with 133 different types available meaning you are unlikely to find what you want even if you are looking in the right placce), or there should be RNG in the results from the engineers. Having RNG in BOTH means that you are a slave to luck in everything you do - there is RNG in mission rewards, RNG in loot drops from mined asteroids, from rocks on planets, from ships you kill, pretty much everything, and then if you are lucky enough to get your materials you might waste them all on a bad roll from the Engineer.

My suggestion reduces the likelyhood of bad luck during the material gathering process greatly, while simultaneously removing the need for material storage which is a much bigger coding task.

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I think however that reducing the number of materials would just be a sideways fix to the same problem, what they really need to do is give us storage and make sure every material is attainable in a fashion that makes sense and fits its rarity.

If material hunting was logical and reliant on procedural placement of the materials instead of random drops from rocks/ships/missions/asteroids then I would agree with you As it stands though it is only a source of frustration.

 

[electricmayhem]

Doesn't really solve it, this seems based around the fact that if you only have 20 materials there's a significant higher chance of getting said material needed. But how would you spread them out? how would it make sense?

There is meaning to the madness with the randomness that is currently, it is not entirely random.

Also remember that you do not really need to get the items again once you've gotten the thing you want? then the mod you want is yours.

Should you really be able to get say all the level 5 mods you want within say a week of release? or what is it that is expected? remember these things are meant to be special, if everyone can get them easily what's the point of them? it would just become tier 2 equipment, with nothing really special about them other then being 'better' then tier 1?

You are exactly correct. However, I don't like not knowing what I can get rid of, and what I need. Being able to only see one blueprint for a engineer is crap. Also, there should be a way to tag the items for the current pinned blue prints. so I know what I can throw out.

I do agree that the crafting commodities should NOT occupy a spot in your cargo hold. it should travel with the player.

 

[Eera]

it's true that 133 materials is a lot for a craft content who is at its beginning.

 

[Obidit]

I would propose 2 alternative approaches, specifically around the new items that have 5 grades of rarity (so this would not apply to the mined/prospected items).

A: remove Very Common and Very Rare variants entirely. So only keep C(ommon), S(standard) and R(are) variants. Grade 1 Engineer upgrades would on require 4C. G2 -> 2C+2S. G3 -> 4S. G4: 2S+2R. G5: 4R. A patch application would transform VC and VR that players collected into the C and R variants.​

B: allow transforming X units of a certain material into 1 unit that is one unit rarer on the scale (like Diablo does with gems)​

Obviously i would not consider having both alternatives implemented at the same time, as it would indeed cause an over-nerf of the entire system, and we are not asking for this to make the game easy. We just need it to be bearable in terms of enjoyment of playing the game and having enough things to do without being completely dependent on bad RNGesus.

 

[Tikigod]

The number of materials isn't so much the issue, more than some seem to come from EVERYTHING and others of equal rarity come from pretty much one single source which gets swamped by those materials that come from everything.

Last 2 days I've been poking around with mining belts and rings now that asteroids have their own chance of dropping materials and have found the following in terms of materials (and 3 Engineer related minerals) present:

Metallic source

Lots of
Iron
Sulphur
Carbon
Nickel
Phosphorus
Osmium
Praseodymium
Samarium

Some
Chromium
Vanadium
Germanium
Manganese
Zirconium


High Metal Content

Lots of
Iron
Sulphur
Carbon
Nickel
Phosphorus
Osmium
Praseodymium
Samarium

Some
Chromium
Vanadium
Germanium
Manganese
Zirconium

Once every few hours
Cadmium


Icy

Frak all of note. Same old things like Germanium, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Carbon. Resources you get there are worthless too. For the most part don't bother going Ice mining unless it's for a mission, and expect a very dull and drawn out time of it.




That's from sampling over a dozen different areas, spread across low reserves up to pristine... there's pretty much no distinction. No matter where you go for mining resources tied to engineer use you'll get a narrow set of resources that never differ. Want things beyond that scope? Then it's done to planets you go lad where destination source actually means something!

It just feels cheap, and like someone just lazily threw it in on their lunch break figuring they can always figure out variations and making mining locations tie in to what materials you get 'Soon™', but for the time being everyone can have this half effort.

There's signs of this larger picture environment where you can go mining in different locations for mass collection of all types of Grade 1 and 2 with the occasional grade 3 from logical sources, then find rarer materials easier on planets... but it seems that isn't what ended up happening. Instead it feels like someone just copy and pasted the same spreadsheet of data to everything and then called it done and moved on to the next thing.

Planet prospecting can give reasonable return but is much slower and prone to random factors, that doesn't really seem out of sorts at all. But mining which seems intended to be the route for more definite acquisition of general materials is just sourcing the same dozen things over and over and over and over again no matter where it is you're mining.

If Frontier sorted out the mining aspect, it would probably all slot into place.

 

[Lord Momo]

Doesn't really solve it, this seems based around the fact that if you only have 20 materials there's a significant higher chance of getting said material needed. But how would you spread them out? how would it make sense?

There is meaning to the madness with the randomness that is currently, it is not entirely random.

Also remember that you do not really need to get the items again once you've gotten the thing you want? then the mod you want is yours.

Should you really be able to get say all the level 5 mods you want within say a week of release? or what is it that is expected? remember these things are meant to be special, if everyone can get them easily what's the point of them? it would just become tier 2 equipment, with nothing really special about them other then being 'better' then tier 1?

The not entirely random debate is rather dubious to me, random is random. I have personally experienced times where I get the shaft several times and others got it first try, not due to skill, but just luck. IMO I prefer skill based games to luck.

This also applies to the debate you say about how long it takes. The way I believe a game should work is not time investment = reward, but effort investment = rewards. If you make it time based then after enough time whether it is days, weeks, months or years, the novelty wears off because everyone will get it eventually. You are just extended the time it takes artificially to make it seem special. Waiting isn't hard, but it creates the illusion of difficulty.

If you make it skill based then players would get it at different times and it would always retain the alue because you achieved something, not put 100 hours of your life into something because you wanted something special. If you can get the upgrades quickly that doesn't make them easy to get. You can solve a rubix cube in under a minute, yet someone else could take much longer, same difficulty, different amounts of time required based on skill, also more rewarding, you learned, improved, got better at something and were rewarded.

Tl;dr
Something can be hard, fun, and rewarding, while still being able to be completed in a relatively short amount of time given skill.