Sandro Sammarco: Each Engi upgrade/roll will be better than the next

[Viking84]

RNG doesn't do anything about that situation other than make my Imperial cookie Cutter better than your Imperial cookie Cutter because I got lucky and you didn't.

Hear hear!

 

[her3sy]

I'm not 100% sure what you mean (and this is my first MMO, so I may not have understood properly) but in essence I'm playing a game with 2.75 million online players. OK, they're not all on at once ... but I'm playing a game with an absolute mass of online strangers.

I can't control how they outfit their ships. Only the Developer can, and only then via hard caps. Everything other than a hard cap is just a time gate.

I don't want a single build advantage over anybody else except one gained via build intelligence (not pre-grind). I just don't want others to have significant pre-ground build advantages over me.

Hence, I have no choice but to RNGineer as high as possible. It's just an arms race. I didn't make it but I can't turn my back on it except by ceasing to participate in ED Open-world PvP.

It's clear from the above and other comments that you think that those in my position are doing something wrong, but I don't understand how you think we could do it right? Max-speccing isn't a philosophy, it's a fact, same as a Formula 1 team has to make their car as good as they can, or find a different sport. You say that we should get comfortable with getting rid of a concept - but if the concept is that you play a motorised sport with the best machine, I don't understand ... how?

What I would like the Developer to do is to reduce the height of the hard ceiling, or to make the hard ceiling easier to reach. Either of those reduces the time PvP-ers will need to spend on PvE acquisition. It looks like Frontier are going for the latter option.

Personally (in PvP or PvE) I think diversity should come from having a very wide range of ships and weapons, all (in their own way) really good and interesting. That is, diversity via player creativeness in how we stack the lego blocks. Non-random tools and materials, diverse outcome via diversity of human choice. Put another way, painted portraits are not random, but they're not all the same.

I don't see a random distribution (build what you want with your lego, but you have to take each piece from a bag unseen and then roll a dice to see where you can put it) as providing a diversity I personally would appreciate. Or put another way, we all like a bit of Jackson Pollock but randomised paintings soon get dull.

Furthermore, although matters have improved a little, one of the many ironies of 2.1 was that it actually reduced build diversity, as some customisations were so obviously better than others. Far from creating an interesting spread of unique ships at CG's, the RNG produced cookie-cutters by an order of magnitude more than we saw in say 1.4, under the non-random A-ranked module system.

Love your point of view

 

[Truesilver]

Ideally, engineered modifications should be slightly better than vanilla modules, far less than they are currently. Just more "special" (with surprising negative and unwanted side-effects as a balance for better DPS or special effects.

Well, here at least we agree! Thank you for your other explanations also.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Well, here at least we agree! Thank you for your other explanations also.

This what I thought it would be. Not the stupidly over powered stuff we have.

 

[Truesilver]

This what I thought it would be. Not the stupidly over powered stuff we have.

I was still in Adle's Armada just before Beta 2.1 and I recall that most of us were expecting to have to make some very hard choices. Whilst perhaps not this specific, I think the general expectation amongst my old buddies was along the lines that each time we added +1 to something, we'd need to put -2 somewhere else.

I was actually expecting to choose to leave most of my modules at factory spec, as already well-balanced.

How naive it all seems...

 

[jasonbarron]

I was still in Adle's Armada just before Beta 2.1 and I recall that most of us were expecting to have to make some very hard choices. Whilst perhaps not this specific, I think the general expectation amongst my old buddies was along the lines that each time we added +1 to something, we'd need to put -2 somewhere else.

I was actually expecting to choose to leave most of my modules at factory spec, as already well-balanced.

How naive it all seems...

I think that was a tear of nostalgia that just trickled down my cheek...

 

[askavir]

This what I thought it would be. Not the stupidly over powered stuff we have.

+1.

The buffs to hull, shields and weapons are far too extreme, and created a balancing nightmare which is impossible to fix.

Also, this should have never been random, there should have been player controlled sliders, and sliders you "pushed" deeper into a "positive" value would push other sliders back into negative values. There would have been choices vs compromise. Not slot machines. I still can't possibly fathom which was the rationale behind the decision to make everything random, and am completely puzzled how someone thought of implementing this in a casino fashion could possibly think it would be fun or interesting for players. And it's a shame too, as ship customization on paper had everything to be a huge success.

 

[ROSS-128]

I remember when the idea first started being tossed around, I was expecting manual control of a variety of stats with clear tradeoffs. No RNG at all, just a requirement that you know what you're doing lest you screw up your own ship.

Of course, I was also expecting it to be a service at just about any station...

 

[jasonbarron]

I also remember when I used to believe in Santa Claus, and thought there were little people in the radio doing all of the singing

Ah, those were the days...

 

[Riverside]

This what I thought it would be. Not the stupidly over powered stuff we have.

Me too, although the vast majority of what I do is PvE with only defence built with PvP in mind. I remember Sandro confirming that yes, Engineered modules were intended to be straight upgrades so it is working as FDev intend.

 

[ROSS-128]

Hmm, in my example of how many mods simply aren't worth taking, I had forgotten that Clean Drives actually increases your power draw. Which of course means you generate more heat, meaning that Clean Drives actually negates its own advantage.

For example, on 6A thrusters you have a base power draw of 7.56 and thermal load of 1.3/s. On an A-rated power plant, drawing 7.56 power generates an additional 3.024h/s.

Putting Clean Drives on there reduces the thermal load by up to 60%, but increases the power draw by up to 25%. If you max both of those out, it will reduce the thermal load by 0.78/s, but the extra power draw will increase it by 0.745/s. This means that on a max roll, Clean Drives reduces your engines total heat generation by... 0.035/s.

If you happen to be unlucky enough to get increased power draw as one of your secondaries, it can erase that microscopic gain entirely. Or if you don't have an A-rated power plant, you'll generate more heat after getting Clean Drives than you did before.

Stuff like that is why we have cookie-cutter builds. We have mods that are practically must have, and we have other mods that are utter garbage.

 

[Cmdr Aeries Hunter]

The "point" of the engineers was that Fdev was trying to create a fun system that everyone used for a scattering of g5 rolls that they would then be happy with and call it good, and now they know that they missed that mark by a country mile and need to revisit the mechanic. Look, with all of the mod combinations and special effects that can be applied there is more than enough diversity for players, so I'm not buying the "But mah diversity!" argument. The engineers are a travesty that have driven many players away, and short of stripping them from the game completely, any proposal to make them more reliable is welcome to those of us who value our time and prefer to have our piloting/combat abilities measured by skill rather than blind luck.

I think you will find the travesty was with the grind, not the mechanics or the rolls. If materials where much easier to get and people could store what they find, then all those problems of the past would never have happened. It was putting on artificial limits and time sinks that caused the problems. Engineers is one of the best game elements added to Elite so far. Look how many people have used them and love their ships as a reuslt. This proposal will just end up with homogenisation. May as well just scrap engineerring and put everyone back in stock ships and sell guns with "special effects" like powerplay ones.

 

[Yure]

I fear this new change will unfortunately get rid of a lot of the overlooked benefits that engineering brings to the table. Right now if you need a cooler running ship you can do that. If you want a bulkier ship you can do that. If you want a faster ship you can do that.

You guys talk like grinding mats is a tedious task. Which it might be, if your trying to max out everything.

I enjoy that if I need to engineer my ship to stay under a certain power consumption, I can do that. With these new mechanics, I don't think you'll be able to go to lower on certain things with the new mechanics, which is really a shame.

I hope if this new mechanic is implemented, that they make each roll cost more mats and increase just a fraction of what it does now, just so y'all can whine more.

 

[Zeeman]

I think you will find the travesty was with the grind, not the mechanics or the rolls. If materials where much easier to get and people could store what they find, then all those problems of the past would never have happened. It was putting on artificial limits and time sinks that caused the problems. Engineers is one of the best game elements added to Elite so far. Look how many people have used them and love their ships as a reuslt. This proposal will just end up with homogenisation. May as well just scrap engineerring and put everyone back in stock ships and sell guns with "special effects" like powerplay ones.

Nah... Honestly, I'm good with doing the hard yards, I just want to have a known result at the end, not a dice roll with 150% variation between best and worst.

I fear this new change will unfortunately get rid of a lot of the overlooked benefits that engineering brings to the table. Right now if you need a cooler running ship you can do that. If you want a bulkier ship you can do that. If you want a faster ship you can do that.

You guys talk like grinding mats is a tedious task. Which it might be, if your trying to max out everything.

I enjoy that if I need to engineer my ship to stay under a certain power consumption, I can do that. With these new mechanics, I don't think you'll be able to go to lower on certain things with the new mechanics, which is really a shame.

I hope if this new mechanic is implemented, that they make each roll cost more mats and increase just a fraction of what it does now, just so y'all can whine more.

Which is why sliders would be awesome. you could actually adjust to your specific needs, for that specific ship, and engineering would become an in game skill.

I agree though, the new system, as some of us seem to understand it, will make certain things harder (like lower power outputs for for high output powerplants etc). Which means if that is what you want, you are still stuck with throwing dice at a wall an undefined number of times.

Z...

 

[Spacecat]

+1.

The buffs to hull, shields and weapons are far too extreme, and created a balancing nightmare which is impossible to fix.

Also, this should have never been random, there should have been player controlled sliders, and sliders you "pushed" deeper into a "positive" value would push other sliders back into negative values. There would have been choices vs compromise. Not slot machines. I still can't possibly fathom which was the rationale behind the decision to make everything random, and am completely puzzled how someone thought of implementing this in a casino fashion could possibly think it would be fun or interesting for players. And it's a shame too, as ship customization on paper had everything to be a huge success.

That's what's annoying. Rather than a balancing fix, this is a double down commitment to the grind mechanic, probably because FD were afraid of all the complaints they'd get if they nerfed everything across the board.