SO TIRED of trying to find Pharmaceutical Isolators & Military SuperCaps

That's a pretty big bandage to cover up "inept coding".

Material Traders looks much more like a very intentional game addition, not a quick bandage fix for a programming 'oops'. Comparing the probable cost/time/effort.
Nah it's not.
Can't code simple states and conditions to illicit a result.
Hence we have traders.
 
You are saying FDev implemented Material Traders to "cover up" a design oops? That seems equally improbable.

It is pretty obvious Material Traders provide an alternate method for getting mats. If there was an inept design/programming whatever "oops" I'm sure it would have been much easier to fix the oops by having more mat drops than implementing a whole new game element. As I said it seems like a very intentional game addition, not some bandage as stated by others.

I'll add this as another trope to look out for: implausible rationalizations.
 
Just this once. I like watching them gnashing their cute little teeth.



Just jumped back through one of the systems I was in at the weekend on my way to Achenar. Only five HGEs today, the most distant being 6,585 ls from the drop point. So I cleaned those out in 17 minutes.
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I make that 54 G5 materials and 9 G4 Proto Light Alloys thrown in for good measure. Or to put it another way, 9 of whichever G5 material a player might need at the moment after a trip to a trader, which is usually enough to do a full G5 mod.

For anybody who cares, the system was Cemiess, which serves as a pretty good template for the kind of system you should look at to do that regularly, at least when the states are favourable.

Enjoy.
See? Now add it up. Do it just 4 times and you've already wasted 1 hour of valuable leisure time you could have done something more entertaining.
 
That's a pretty big bandage to cover up "inept coding".

Material Traders looks much more like a very intentional game addition, not a quick bandage fix for a programming 'oops'. Comparing the probable cost/time/effort.

I’ve been playing since January 2016 and frontier have said multiple times over the years that they would fix the HGE problems (sometimes certain mats dissapeared completely for weeks), instead they gave in to player demands and added traders.
 
See? Now add it up. Do it just 4 times and you've already wasted 1 hour of valuable leisure time you could have done something more entertaining.

It was 15 minutes and I gained the most difficult to acquire stuff that I'll need to engineer a module. I'm just not sure what your expectation is in terms of the time taken to do that in view of what you wrote - 15 minutes doesn't seem unreasonable to me at all. It's certainly a lot more reasonable than the 3 hours or more I would have expected to spend on it back when you apparently stopped bothering with it. (I don't disagree with you at all that it used to be a massive drag, it just isn't now.)
 
You set your own tasks in ED, choosing to do ones you find boring repetitively is definitely an issue of the mind. Go solo some Thargoid interceptors or bang together a BH'ing sidewinder or something.
How many PIs would I get through that (just to pretend, that I want some)?
 
It was 15 minutes and I gained the most difficult to acquire stuff that I'll need to engineer a module. I'm just not sure what your expectation is in terms of the time taken to do that in view of what you wrote - 15 minutes doesn't seem unreasonable to me at all. It's certainly a lot more reasonable than the 3 hours or more I would have expected to spend on it back when you apparently stopped bothering with it. (I don't disagree with you at all that it used to be a massive drag, it just isn't now.)
I'd prefer time taken to be: None. I simply can't be bothered with this crap. But since they shove the bulletsponges in our face that's a decision I had to take.
 
How many PIs would I get through that (just to pretend, that I want some)?

Seven or eight maybe, six if you got lucky on the rolls.

Edit : obviously that's only if you start from scratch with a new ship, its less or none if you've already done stuff
 
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What's not fun, and what's repetitive/nonsensical?

Look... tonight, just before dinner, I went onto my usual hangout and grabbed six assassinations off the boards (no flipping/waiting for new baords). I came on after dinner and stuff around the house was done, and grabbed another three (again, no flipping/waiting, they were just on the board).

It took 30 minutes for me to flush them out, and grab two HGE's along the way and included:
  • One fight with a single corvette
  • One fight with a single FAS
  • One fight with a single Anaconda
  • One fight with two corvettes and a FAS
  • One fight with with three anacondas and a python (one of the anacondas was just a rando non-target along for the ride)

Those last two fights were really fun.

3 x Military Grade Alloys (salvage)
21 x Imperial Shielding (HGEs + Salvage)
3 x Pharma Isolators (Salvage)
10 x Biotech conductors (Mission Rewards)
5 x Exquisite Focus Crystals (Mission Rewards)

That's a total of 42 x G5 mats across five categories, just from 30 minutes of gameplay! And that's ignoring the =~ 80 G4 mats (each conda/corvette drops about 4-6 (x3) G4 mats) , which could've been another 10 G5s (within category) if I was desperate... but I really don't need to gather G4s.

Again, not putting up an argument for things like Military Supercaps... FD do need to revisit the distribution of some materials. But you can't say 42 x G5 materials in 30 minutes of gameplay is unreasonable. Granted, I've been doing this for a while so I'm pretty efficient at this, but even if that was blown out to an hour... G5 mats really aren't hard to come by.

EDIT: Oh, I got =~ 8m for my troubles, but if I wasn't pumping influence rewards instead of credits, it would've been more like 22m... I'm probably the only one who cares about that though since I didn't prostrate myself before the altar of the core mining grind.
This...sounds like a typical play session for me, as well. It's actually quite easy to accumulate mats/data just though normal gameplay.

Just wish raw was in there, as well.
 
Reset my main toon, and I decided to get my mats first before actually starting the game (mining do get 300 million in the bank first does not count). Been doing the imperial shielding collector limpet mat trader thing for about 4 days now. It's trash game play, but it is by far the most effectient way to populate the manufactured mats. I'm now on my tier 5 row. I figure 16 in each bin is enough to get my starter fleet going. Just dropped in 16 PIs through this method last night and haven't even unlocked Palin. Next stop Jameson cobra.

Honestly, this is stupid.

Just let us spend credits on the damn things. 5 million for each tier 5 sounds about right.
 
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