Remove the Engineers

[gorankar]

I played extensively befor engineers and after. My only compliant is that they took it too far. The benefits should have never exceeded 15 or 20%, and should have had a tradeoff that was in the 15-20% range.
That said, as already noted, that ship has sailed. Be careful what you give gamers, they really toss a fit if you take away things they have. Considering how much time and expense I went to, to engineer or obtain some of my modules, I would be one of the loudest complainers should they take away engineering.
Maybe a mode that remove engineering is possible.

As an aside, there is no content unavailable to ships without engineering. You may need some tech broker unlocks to go after Thargoids properly, and you will not be competitive in PvP without engineering, but that is it. You will just have a harder time of it.

 

[NAKEDnick]

If anything, I'd say engineering should stay, but improve it. Given that the biggest problem with it is just the slog of doing it, perhaps a page out of the personal equipment modification would help. For starters, open up and allow the trade and sales of ship engineering components between players. Plenty of people out there are willing to pay for someone else to do the leg work, and it proves. Why not allow players to capitalize off of that. Second, maybe allow for ship engineer facilities to actually sell pre-engineered components. Limit these components to a maximum of grade 3 and have them just be RNG modifications, sometimes with an experimental affect already applied. They should be expensive, because you are fast tracking your engineering, but at least it would give seasoned players something to spend their massive hoards of credits on. And it would give the more casual players an opportunity to try out engineered components.

 

[Darth Ender]

I played extensively befor engineers and after. My only compliant is that they took it too far. The benefits should have never exceeded 15 or 20%, and should have had a tradeoff that was in the 15-20% range.
That said, as already noted, that ship has sailed. Be careful what you give gamers, they really toss a fit if you take away things they have. Considering how much time and expense I went to, to engineer or obtain some of my modules, I would be one of the loudest complainers should they take away engineering.
Maybe a mode that remove engineering is possible.

As an aside, there is no content unavailable to ships without engineering. You may need some tech broker unlocks to go after Thargoids properly, and you will not be competitive in PvP without engineering, but that is it. You will just have a harder time of it.

it would have been impossible to create "upgrades" that retained balance when the majority of activities you use your ships with do not scale with the player. Engineers weren't created to answer a need players had with existing content, nor a need players would have for new content. And indeed, the desire fdev has to make everything optional guarantees that you dont need engineers for anything (that you're asked to do solo in the game). All that matters for engineers is that it draws players into playing longer without incurring additional costs for fdev to need to continually create reasons for players to continue playing.

I dont think we would have to worry about creating some pointlessly crippled upgrade in order to retain balance if engineers coincided with new content that the engineering mods were tailored to that did not overlap with the base gameplay. Also, if engineered mods did not get restored upon insurance claim.

But fdev's has painted themselves into a corner with elite dangerous. They sell this idea that you can do whatever you want in order to get whatever you want and so now they can't even introduce something like thargoid combat needing thargoid centric weapons without a bunch of crying from the playerbase about how they have to equip thargoid weapons that are only good for fighting thargoids and that involves doing things they dont wanna do sometimes. So much of this game would make so much more sense for fdev and be so much better for the players if they just made it single player with third party servers so players could mod it up and play how they want. That would be the most natural state for this game. Instead we get this poor compromise of a multiplayer game that restricts what can be done and leaves us with none of the best of what multiplayer or single player games offer, but all of the drawbacks to both.

 

[Chaparral]

I could, but I see no point in "proving" anything to randoms from internet.
Also- why cobra? I said "unengi", not "unengi small". I participated in AX CG without any engineering, survivid, and smh was in top 25%. So for me it means that without engineering I can do AX. Do AX. Not "tank whole CZ alone since first kill to hydras appearing".

My initial comment was in regards to a post about doing the game in an uningeneered cobra.

You want to let wingies tank the work in AX Groundbase CG while you are in an unengineered conda (Corvettes and Cutters don't count because of their rep grindwalls), you haven't really accomplished anything.

The claim that you finished a CZ without an unengineered ship would extend to the other people carrying your water in an AX CZ to commander. 07

 

[Darrack]

Walk the walk. Unengineered cobra. Post the vid go.

Really
Do i look like a youtuber? Believe me or not i couldn't care either way.

O7

 

[Fixitman]

This is not a general gaming forum, it's specific to Frontier games. Mentioning another developer's (unreleased) game in the first sentence invalidates anything afterward for me.

 

[Morbad]

With out them you wouldn't have any reason to land on planets to collect raw materials.

I put at least 10000km on the SRV before there were Engineers and even post-Engineers, I put a lot of time on the surface of planets while my CMDR had completely full raw material bins.

The collecting garbage to keep up with an arms race that shouldn't have existed was a requirement for being competitive in PvP, but never something I found enjoyable.

I think more options to circumvent Engineering, and the associated material grind, would be good.

The process is tedious, but a large part of my annoyance with Engineering is the end result. It's a collection of highly inflationary absurdities that would require a radical rework for me to think that just pulling the entire system wouldn't be for the best.

Not that I expect either to happen, of course.

Next "things impossible without engineering" please.

Matching pilots of similar combat experience who are piloting fully Engineered combat vessels.

I think what we are all trying to get at is that 'Most' of the core base game can be done without engineering

This is a given.

since everything in the game doesn't matter and is optional, engineer grinding is never a problem until it's between you and a goal you have.

Exactly. It's an arbitrary barrier to what was my main challenging activity and even after personally overcoming that barrier, it had so altered that activity, both by intrinsic gameplay effects, and through the demographic changes it forced upon the participants, that I never really got that activity back.

Considering how much time and expense I went to, to engineer or obtain some of my modules, I would be one of the loudest complainers should they take away engineering.

This whole sunk cost idea seems nuts to me. I've got upwards of 6k G5 rolls (acquired without anything I considered an exploit, so no relogging or otherwise cheesing materials) on my CMDR and if I logged in one day and discovered that Engineering had vanished, I'd be overjoyed. As you mention, engineering took things too far, and the only reason I ever bothered with it was an attempt to keep from falling too far behind the competition. If they can't have it, I certainly don't want it. It doesn't matter how much time I dumped into Engineering, I could only gain from it's absence.

Mentioning another developer's (unreleased) game in the first sentence invalidates anything afterward for me.

The OP's argument reads exactly the same without the Starfield reference.

 

[Fixitman]

The OP's argument reads exactly the same without the Starfield reference.

The OP's argument didn't need that reference then. As such, I see it as a form of hyperbole. I prefer to ignore all the hype I can (an interesting challenge in today's world).

 

[Morbad]

The OP's argument didn't need that reference then. As such, I see it as a form of hyperbole. I prefer to ignore all the hype I can (an interesting challenge in today's world).

Yes, the reference was utterly irrelevant, but neither it, nor any hype you may associate with it, should change or shape the rest of the post in any way. The only clear hyperbole in the post has nothing to do with any game other than Elite: Dangerous.

 

[Scoob]

The process is tedious, but a large part of my annoyance with Engineering is the end result. It's a collection of highly inflationary absurdities that would require a radical rework for me to think that just pulling the entire system wouldn't be for the best.

Agreed. Engineering often makes too much of a difference to a given module, totally transforming its utility, making the cost perhaps seem more reasonable, despite the tedious grind involved. If they'd gone for more subtle improvements, while also introducing more "specialised" modules, that might have been a better take. Still, they really cannot undo people's many hours effort grinding materials to rebalance things now. It's too late.

 

[AdhaiGrey]

Engineering is a fine thing, but needs quite a fine-tuning.
I think it would fare better with less grind, and more diversity, thus you'd really need to make difficult choices.

 

[Martind Forlon]

Engineering allows me to do things faster, easier and ships works more efficiently. I never needed to "grind" mats as they were coming with sufficient amounts naturally when I'm playing this game. And upgrading ship sufficiently enough is now mostly matter of time to visit all needed engineers and some material dealer, so again it is not a problem. Game balancing issues? ... meh, this game have so many balancing issues (either real or potential) so I simply do not care ... I do not play ED for PvP competition and thus engineering is not any serious obstacle, it is much more just an occassional activity which I enjoy when I'm in mood for it.

 

[Miscellaneous]

blah blah blah

Same here. Engineering is just a different level of the game you might get to once you've done all the early stuff like figuring out your ship, your system and galaxy map, the faction dynamics, combat rules, Crime and Punishment, narrative, etc. That can take a while if you don't play all day every day. You can spend countless sessions in wings just killing stuff in RES sites or Conflict Zones. If you're scraping along and making Credits in the process, a lot of your game reward comes from the cooperative element of the wing sessions. I started engineering once my friends stopped playing the game and I was in solo. Then I still wanted to do the same activities only I wasn't as effective as I was in a wing where I could get a couple cheap shots in and score credits still. Before wings you couldn't even do that, you'd have to kill steal . Good times.

It gave me a couple of ideas, there could be some gating like collecting an introductory set of materials likely to suffice for your first jobs, to get introduced to a first engineer. Then the user might not feel like every engineering starts blocked by materials, and, get in a hobby of doing what they learned, stock up for future jobs. I got to ruminate on that. Might not that be a healthier outlook for the new player. Or gate it behind that plus reaching some rank.

Yeah I always play open but only formed a wing once, that was fun actually. So much to do. I mainly hunt pirates, lords, politicians off the mission boards. Pretty good considering I took 420 days to make mostly harmless! Ha ha

Spoiler: historical recall

Newcomer / Intro - What are you up to?

Only differences between fleet carriers are cosmetic if you spend ARX and what you spend credits on to add modules to them. It doesn't matter where you buy it - any system with a fleet carrier vendor will do. Originally there was a difference - you would see a logo showing either Empire or...

forums.frontier.co.uk

. Now it's been 448 more days, wish I thought to check four weeks ago. That woulda been dang symmetrical

I'm trailing off away from my point now.. hey I don't think engineering should be removed but I feel a little spoiled after the work I did on my vulture recently.I think I will build its unengineered equivalent for periodic reality checks! Fun game so many ways to play!

 

[BackToTheMud]

Unlocking most of the engineers will teach you an aspect of the game. So while some tweeks should be made, the engineers should stay.

 

[Chrome]

Engineers themselves are not a bad idea, but the way you progress through engineer levels (and how you unlock some of the engineers) is just mindnumbingly boring.

It'd be nice to make at least the process of gathering materials more fun.

 

[SteveWW57]

Engineering is a fine thing, but needs quite a fine-tuning.
I think it would fare better with less grind, and more diversity, thus you'd really need to make difficult choices.

A number of CMDRs do not like making difficult choices, they want it all. There have been a number of threads about making improvements over the years. One was to allow cargo to be stored in the flight cabin as there was room for a couple of tons, and this would free up the slot that had to be used for cargo for other, more important things.

Steve

 

[Ian Doncaster]

For starters, open up and allow the trade and sales of ship engineering components between players. Plenty of people out there are willing to pay for someone else to do the leg work, and it proves. Why not allow players to capitalize off of that.

I suspect what would happen is much the same as with foot engineering components:
- there are way more people looking to pay a vast amount of credits for Manufacturing Instructions than willing to farm them for the same vast (but ultimately useless) amount of credits
- sure, people will generally hand over their spare Opinion Polls or whatever to help you out if you ask nicely

It'd still be interesting to see what happened if it was implemented, though.

Second, maybe allow for ship engineer facilities to actually sell pre-engineered components. Limit these components to a maximum of grade 3 and have them just be RNG modifications, sometimes with an experimental affect already applied.

I think this is a good idea, and they wouldn't even need to be all that much more expensive than a regular module: the material costs for a G3 blueprint are pretty trivial already (you could engineer an entire ship to G3 for less than the cost of maxing a single G5 blueprint) so it'd mainly be for the people who find any material collection so unpleasant that they refuse to even take the material reward for missions they were doing anyway ... and the people who find anything called "engineers" so unpleasant that they'd prefer to collect double the materials to get the tech broker "V1" FSD rather than give Martuuk a Soontill Relic.

 

[MUTILADOR]

In the hype for Starfield I decided to download Elite Dangerous again, and a few minutes later I realized why I had uninstalled it before: it was extremely boring and tedious having to make engineers.

I wanted to be able to play exploring, or fighting ships and Thargoid, but without engineers it's impossible to have a good experience.
Collecting materials is okay, but there are so very many engineers and modules and each one does one thing and very far away from each other, engineering a ship for combat for example is extremely demotivating, your jump is tiny, until you go all the way between one engineer and another you've already abused the game.

If I ever see any news that engineers have been removed, I'll install and play this beautiful game again, but until then I see no reason to play it.

The engineers were the only way the team could think of to keep you playing E.D.

undistinguished ? Yeah.
idiot? also
boring?, I would say tedious.

 

[Rat Catcher]

I'll assume that the OP, while requesting that engineers be removed (not something I'd be entirely against) is intimating that all of the fully engineered gear should just "be available" to a player...

Perhaps the game should just give the player every ship, suit, module & weapon all "click & collect" engineered, pick then apply? Do the same with PP modules and Bob is your auntie's live in lover....

 

[Tyres O'Flaherty]

Not sure I'd dump the engineers, but I would like to be able to have more tan one blueprint per - and, while we're at it, be able to pin the experimental effects.