So you cannot quote me saying anything like "I want 'all-included' shops" and "I ask break everything else in game". Nice try though.
Stop the grind, please!
- Thread starter Gaffa
- Start date
If you have 1 ship you love and use it for pvp you don't have to do that things "a lot" definitely.
Problem comes when you want to tweak everything or change ship(s). That means you don't need pvp itself, you need wins and understanding of the best build for it. You want urgently to change module and this enforces you to gather mats. So ultimate solution of that could be as I said "all-included shop" on PVP server where you can do experiments.
You're not interested in PvP as I understand, so I think there's no need to say more than "engineered is simply better and more enjoyable". It's off topic here anyway.
I wasn't making any kind of requests in this thread regarding possible new game mechanics or anything. I merely replied to a typical "the grind is in your mind" post and said it was not true. The grind is real in this game, a number of activities are clearly gated behind mindless, repetitive, low skill type gameplay, that's all.
The take I had was that the grind is gatekeeping access to certain activities. The initial point of discussion was "stop the grind".
Steve
Yeah I know what the title of the thread is, but that wasn't my take. Not that I disagree with it, it's just that I think it's pointless to ask for such changes as fdev will never bother to come up with a better access mechanism.
Fair enough, but let's not pretend that the current implementation is the best possible solution, because it's not.
Not by a long shot.
The meta FDL would be my last choice if I wanted a low skill path to seal clubbing (which I don't engage in). It's probably the hardest build out there to fly well, and is a sitting duck if you don't put in the hours. The reason it's the ship of choice for PVP is because its flight model has a very high skill floor and skill ceiling. If you learn to fly it well it can move in ways nothing else can.
And seal clubbing wouldn't be hard to do in an unengineered ship. Blowing up paper ships is possibly the least grind-gated activity in Elite.
I am not really bothered about the current implementation or interested in calling for change. I am happy playing the game.
In respect of PvP, if there was a better access mechanism say to allow access to PvP, I could see those benefitting from the better access going seal clubbing. And the targets would have access to all the top gear defensive stuff.
Interesting discussion though.
Steve
As @Landgull said, the meta FDL is absolutely not necessary if all you want to do is clubbing seals. It's not even the most efficient build for that, there are way better gank ships.
But you can use virtually anything if you want to shoot down an unengineered paperplane. I don't really participate in anything resembling seal clubbing, but the last time I shot down an AspX which turned out to be unengineered, I was in a shieldless Viper4 with PAs and rails and it was like 3 shots.
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Geez Im 77 and a new player glad to know I'm with same age company. Picked this game up to try to jump start my brain again.
They don't.
Both organic PvP and, as it functionally exists, mainstream organized PvP have Engineering as a content gate, as you note.
Some people think so. Others are dissatisfied with the specific requirements of the content gates that exist.
Personally, I'd like a game with a real economic simulation where fungible mechanisms of exchange could be supported without incentivizing tedious grind loops and some sort of shared simulator/arena mechanism where experimentation and the equivalent of in-game sporting events could occur without the need for any content gates at all, in exchange for not being able to influence the BGS (beyond the indirect effects of basic player knowledge and piloting experience that could be acquired).
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8000 online vs 1 system which has 2 billions of people ? I doubt those 8000 could visibly change something RT (and then scale it to 40000 populates stars).
I'll say also that for both AX and PVP, a highly skilled pilot in an unengineered build will dramatically outperform an unskilled pilot in a meta build. It's really the only area of the game where this is true. Compared to the git gud grind, the engineering grind is peanuts. For both of those I built the meta chief and the meta FdL in about a week, and have spent months trying to learn to fly them well, and am still not anywhere near the top of the skill ceiling in either.
The portion of the population with access to spacecraft have a very disproportionate impact on trade, and CMDRs have a disproportionate impact on them. My own CMDR has destroyed several tens of thousands of spacecraft--he and quite a few other CMDRs are each the equivalent of an entire u-boat campaign.
A fully engineered vessel has nearly three times the firepower and almost an order of magnitude more durability, as well as significantly greater mobility.
There are skill gaps large enough to make up for such opposing ends of the spectrum of ship capabilities, but they aren't easy to find. I'm a fairly competent pilot, but no where near the best and the best pilots that exist would not stand a snowballs chance in hell against my CMDR's Engineered combat vessels without access to Engineered combat vessels of their own.
When you put even a decidedly non-meta Engineered vessel against an unEngineered one in a similar class, stuff like this is the typical result:
I don't think the FDL was particularly experienced, but it really wouldn't have mattered much; the advantage provided by the vessel can be utterly unassailable as long as a very low level of basic proficiency has been reached. And, of course, the general spread between participants who generally know what they are doing (the majority of belligerents in either organic or organized PvP) is much less than what exists between an abject novice and a master.
Take a player who has never done PVP before and put them in the meta FDL, and put them up against someone with significant PVP experience in an unengineered build of choice - the skilled player will win. Certainly would have won against me the first time I tried flying the meta FDL, and it wouldn't have been close. My point was that the engineering is a barrier to entry but the practice is a bigger barrier to entry - just having an engineered ship won't mean you can actually do it. It's just an entry ticket to get started on the git gud grind.
Take a player who just bought the game and give them a T9 with a docking computer and engineered thrusters and FSD, put him up against a guy with 1000 hours of trading in a stock cobra mk3. The new player will make far more cr/h. Same with exploration, or mining, or (non-AX) PvE combat. In all of these activities it's equipment that is the progression path much more than skill.
It's pointless, like playing chess with a pigeon.
In the end, somebody will just shout "tHe GrInD iS iN yOuR mInD", "you want a fully engineered Anaconda at start!!" or "you don't have to play the game" and pretend they've won the argument.
Before Engineering existed my CMDR was once pulled over (while in his FDL) by a wing of CMDR bounty hunters, who had negligible PvP experience, consisting of an FDL and two Vultures. The result was that I shot down both Vultures twice and the FDL once, then forced the FDL to flee before being destroyed a second time, and left with a mostly intact ship.
If any one of that wing had had the FDL that's sitting in my CMDR's storage now, I'd likely have lost against just that pilot. They were PvE pilots who had never really engaged in PvP before and didn't know the first thing about fighting other CMDRs, but I'm pretty sure they had all their controls bound and could muddle through the tutorials...which is proficient enough to close a huge gap with a sufficiently superior vessel. I'd have to be landing shots ten times as often to win, which is only going to happen against a very new player trying use plasma against me.
Learning combat is an enjoyable part of the experience of becoming a better combatant. Even for those that view combat as a means to an end--which is a position that's increasingly hard to justify--skill progression is quite organic.
Having to do things one would never otherwise do, or repeat them far more than one would otherwise find enjoyable...that is a barrier. That's why Engineering is problematic.
The majority of my CMDR's friends list haven't logged on in years because when 2.1 showed up and dropped this massive barrier between them and the main activities they had already been enjoying for thousands of hours, they left for greener pastures. If it were a simple matter adapting to new tactics, or new ships, and learning new skills, like we'd all done a hundred times before, that would have been fun. Radical overhauls of fundamental mechanisms, incredible power inflation, which transformed combat into something almost unrecognizable, all cordoned off behind collecting thousands of units of inexplicable garbage and jumping through Engineer unlock hoops---not so much.
A rather spurious correlation. The master in the Cobra struggles to keep up not because of a lack of Engineering, but because of the order of magnitude greater cargo capacity of a T9; which is something anyone who's been playing for a thousand hours could readily afford. If you're a trader who is learning trading skills, you're going to make the money required to outfit a better trading ship simply by trading, which is the kind of organic progression that everyone had before Engineering. You won't get the Engineered defenses or increased jump range that way, but piloting, cargo capacity, and learning routes are significantly more important.
Same goes for exploration; the equipment matters even less here. I can do almost anything with just a million credits, because that's more than enough to put an FSD, fuel scoop, SRV bay, and scanners on a Hauler. Won't have the same jump range, but 99.95+% of the galaxy will be within reach and I have more than enough experience to make the hazards of exploration trivial, no mater the ship.
Combat benefits more from Engineering than anything else, by far. This isn't to say that skill isn't important--obviously it is--but Engineering is also mandatory for much combat content and Engineering doesn't really occur organically, except at a glacial pace, unless one has very diverse interests. I probably had less trouble with it than most, but it was still a lot of senseless repetition to reach the specific goals I was aiming for.
The "skilled player in a Sidewinder" argument is commonly used to defend the state of engineering in the game and is functionally no different from the "you don't have to do it if you don't like it" argument, which is the ultimate boiled down version of the "it's not a grind, you're doing it wrong, here is how you do it by skipping as much of it as possible" argument.
Almost every counterpoint to any discussion, that's trying to suggest this part of the game could be improved, is centered around the concept that you don't have to do it, to varying degrees. Very rarely does anyone champion it because engaging in it completely is fun. The only argument that manages to avoid both extremes is the "it should take a lot of time/you shouldn't be able to get everything in a week" counterpoint, which is just slippery slope anyway (how much time we invest is very rarely the issue, it's what we do in that time, so few of us are suggesting it take no time at all). It's possible for progression models to be very fun and require a lot of time and this is usually achieved by directly tethering progression to the fun activities one wants to progress for - example, "doing pvp gets you pvp progression". This need not be at a cost of "difficulty" either. The new AX EDO missions are a good example of content that rewards well (good progression compared to most EDO content) , is challenging and yet can be accessed without needing to complete progression first. The opposite of that is 90% of ship combat in the game since 2.1, which does reward very well potentially, is fun but has a very sharp gradient for new players (you must engineer as soon as you hit novice; I challenge anyone who disagrees to actually try a new commander for themselves and fight in an A class small ship versus the engineered competent+ level ai the game throws at you as soon as you hit novice, then still state it's equally fun/efficient as when you've upgraded).
Elements of engineering are fun. I hate how bloated it rendered ship balance for combat but there are parts of the process that can be enjoyed, at least the first time. But how many of us honestly think it's an incontrovertibly beautiful system that's the most fun they've ever had?
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I think the important thing is variety. Some cmdrs like one activity others have different preferences and some of us like to switch activities to avoid repetition. EDO actually offers that variety quite well though the RNG can be frustrating.
It's the ship based engineering tends to result in the relog "gameplay".
Even there there are options though these perhaps aren't as visible and the overemphasis on "efficiency" (at the expense of enjoyment) is the issue.
It's the ship based engineering tends to result in the relog "gameplay".
Even there there are options though these perhaps aren't as visible and the overemphasis on "efficiency" (at the expense of enjoyment) is the issue.
AFAIC, it's a system that works and that is rewarding.
It requires a certain degree of effort, which gives a certain value to each of the ships i engineer and it's worth the effort because the improvements in ship's performance are significant
Even at medium levels (G3), the improvements are quite significant especially compared to the effort required for G3 engineering.
Can the system be improved? Definitely*
But IMO not by dumbing it down so the "I want it all and i want it now!!!" type of players can finish the game in 50h (and move to the next game that is trendy and/or may catch their short span attention)
* especially by improving the material gathering (even adding ALL G5 materials as mission rewards, as it's happening with on-foot engineering/mission-boards will go a long way)
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I still enjoy (non-AX) PvE combat in unEngineered small vessels, but it's certainly not very efficient.
There is something about not being able to boost on demand that is usually lost in the current state of the game, but the same number of kills can be done in less than a tenth of the time...which makes intentionally handicapping one's self like this counter-productive from any perspective other than simply enjoying the basic flight model.
The day Engineering went live, I already had ~3k hours in this game and wasn't anywhere near finished. 2.1+ didn't really add more content for me (with the exception of SLFs, which they broke in 3.4 and never fully fixed), it just derailed from a significant fraction of the content I had previously enjoyed, and once I had done all the Engineering and reEngineering I felt was useful, the game had been so transformed and so many of my peers had left that it barely even mattered.
Progression should never have fixated on equipment, nor all the time and effort spent on Engineering been diverted from other issues and other potential content, IMO.