So, being fed-up with trying to play the bgs game with the current broken state of missions, I've headed-out into the black once again and am beginning to think that the present gameplay around resource gathering (nodes only dropping grade 1s, whilst bronzite cordite, metallic meteorites, etc function as they always have) is actually WAD and, further, I think I like it! 
I'm theorizing that the old nodes (piceous, frags, clusters, & needles) are now just place markers for where to find volcanic activity to progress one's codex entries and, as such, will just yield whatever element is predominant on the planet, whilst bits of space debris (meteors and such, especially around crater impact sites) will hold the more exotic elements. In the old system with say 2% yttrium, one could land at a geo site, find a horde of needle crystals, and pull copious amounts of the stuff... nice and "gamey", but hardly realistic; 2% of any element should be just that: you're only pulling 2 out of every 100 bits found.
Now, I'm no geologist, but the representation as it stands now in ED:O seems to me to be a much more faithful portrayal of the struggle to find resources in the wild than ED:H's gameplay. Yes, it's considerably harder to source one's jumponium: 'takes longer, you have to hunt quite a bit using the wave scanner, and the chance of coming-up empty handed is high... but, for me at least, it feels so much more like "exploration" than what ED:H gave us. And hey, if you want to be raking-in large amounts of any element then it seems to me that one should be doing mining for a career, not exploring!
This all of course may be totally off-base, and it surely would be good to have some insights from the devs about the mechanics at work here, but if it is actually WAD then I'll gladly eat humble pie for complaining about the new system!
Thanks for your patience with this wall of text and hope to hear your observations,
ym
I'm theorizing that the old nodes (piceous, frags, clusters, & needles) are now just place markers for where to find volcanic activity to progress one's codex entries and, as such, will just yield whatever element is predominant on the planet, whilst bits of space debris (meteors and such, especially around crater impact sites) will hold the more exotic elements. In the old system with say 2% yttrium, one could land at a geo site, find a horde of needle crystals, and pull copious amounts of the stuff... nice and "gamey", but hardly realistic; 2% of any element should be just that: you're only pulling 2 out of every 100 bits found.
Now, I'm no geologist, but the representation as it stands now in ED:O seems to me to be a much more faithful portrayal of the struggle to find resources in the wild than ED:H's gameplay. Yes, it's considerably harder to source one's jumponium: 'takes longer, you have to hunt quite a bit using the wave scanner, and the chance of coming-up empty handed is high... but, for me at least, it feels so much more like "exploration" than what ED:H gave us. And hey, if you want to be raking-in large amounts of any element then it seems to me that one should be doing mining for a career, not exploring!
This all of course may be totally off-base, and it surely would be good to have some insights from the devs about the mechanics at work here, but if it is actually WAD then I'll gladly eat humble pie for complaining about the new system!
Thanks for your patience with this wall of text and hope to hear your observations,
ym
