I made a reddit post a few days ago concerning Material gathering, specifically suggestions on how to improve the whole process and make the RNG factor seem less painful. I'm adding the same post here to the forums in the hopes that a developer will read it and consider these suggestions.
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/4lw849/how_could_material_gathering_be_improved/
So like many other CMDR's out there I appreciate what the Engineers update is trying to add to the game; a more in depth sense of customization while potentially adding more game play in the process. However I believe it falls short due to one elephant in the room: RNG (Random Number Generation).
In it's current state it is possible to narrow your material searches slightly by adhering to certain search zones, for example scrap materials from destroyed ships, elements from planets surfaces, and data from scans or up link stations. However even with these rough ballparks you could end up spending hours searching for one common material because the pool from which the spawns are calculated is just too big.
Here are some of my humble suggestions for ways to improve / reduce the frustration of unrewarding game play:
1) Material & Data Bartering
Even in it's current state the Engineer materials have a rarity value associated with them (very common, common, rare, very rare). What I propose is to use this rarity associated with each material in a station market where players could trade for example a very common material for a different very common material, a rare for another rare etc. Going further maybe something arbitrary like 24 common materials could go up against 1 single rare material or so on. These markets could be available at select places in the galaxy or even have preferences as to what they would trade; for example in a high tech system the preferential material type would be Data, or in a refinery / mining system they would prefer planetary surface elements.
2) Material upgrading
Some materials seem to have certain tiers associated to them, for example Chemical Processors, Chemical Distilleries, and Chemical Manipulators. Each of these aforementioned materials are used in the grade 1, 2 and 3 recipes for Dirty Drive Tuning respectively. If Chemical Processors were to become abundant as a common material wouldn't it be nice to be able to combine for example 2 Chemical Processors to create 1 Chemical Distillery, 2 Chemical Distilleries to create 1 Chemical Manipulator and so on. This would open up some material storage space while giving value to lower grade materials even as we get to higher grade recipes.
3) Specific sources to generate specific materials
As already mentioned above it is possible for players to narrow their search but at the moment it is impossible for players to guarantee their search. In game we have some hints suggesting that X material has a chance to be rewarded by any faction from missions, it could however be that X material is always rewarded by X faction. Players would then be encouraged to travel to specific hubs within the bubble in search for the materials they need for the upgrades they are after, this would be much more rewarding on an individual level and also create hubs of activity in open play similar to how community goals do.
4) More sources to generate materials
This suggestion is inspired by Diablo III's loot 2.0 system. Essentially for those of you who don't know Diablo is a loot grind fest with the most sought after items being legendary / set items. These items used to be exceedingly rare and players could spend days on end playing the game before they saw one drop and even when they did there was no guarantee it was actually useful for them. The developers then massively increased the drop chance of these items which allowed players to effectively brute force the acquisition of the items they actually wanted because legendary drops were so frequent. This same principal could be applied to Elite Dangerous in a sensible manner. Currently while super cruising signal sources take a while to generate and even when they do there's a chance they're not the type we're after. My proposition here is to effectively increase the rate and number of signal sources that are generated. This same principal could be applied to planetary points of interest and even mission boards. While driving around in our SRV's why wouldn't it be possible to come across "material dense" areas with lots of nodes to shoot down. Similarly why is it that some minor factions only offer 2 missions when others can offer up to 10. Increasing the available mission pool would increase the chances of a mission with the reward element sought after appearing.
5) Lower material pool
Finally this last point is the least likely to be implemented but; lowering the diversity of materials would mean that we would be more likely to acquire individual sought after materials but would require FDev to remove some redundant elements (for example turn the Chemical Processors / Chemical Distilleries / Chemical Manipulators into a single material). Due to the fact players have already gathered these diverse materials it would be unlikely of FDev to remove them from the game but this point still serves as a useful guide line for future content: Going forward please DO NOT add new materials for future recipes and expand the mateiral pool even further hurting RNG even more without first considering one or more of the above suggestions.
I understand that these are complex changes and some of which may not even be possible due to server constraints but numbers can always be adjusted for balance reasons or server reasons, think of these propositions as a template for FDev to work from. Please keep the discussion and criticism constructive, I'd be happy to hear what other ideas people have for improving the current material gathering system.
Original post: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/4lw849/how_could_material_gathering_be_improved/
So like many other CMDR's out there I appreciate what the Engineers update is trying to add to the game; a more in depth sense of customization while potentially adding more game play in the process. However I believe it falls short due to one elephant in the room: RNG (Random Number Generation).
In it's current state it is possible to narrow your material searches slightly by adhering to certain search zones, for example scrap materials from destroyed ships, elements from planets surfaces, and data from scans or up link stations. However even with these rough ballparks you could end up spending hours searching for one common material because the pool from which the spawns are calculated is just too big.
Here are some of my humble suggestions for ways to improve / reduce the frustration of unrewarding game play:
1) Material & Data Bartering
Even in it's current state the Engineer materials have a rarity value associated with them (very common, common, rare, very rare). What I propose is to use this rarity associated with each material in a station market where players could trade for example a very common material for a different very common material, a rare for another rare etc. Going further maybe something arbitrary like 24 common materials could go up against 1 single rare material or so on. These markets could be available at select places in the galaxy or even have preferences as to what they would trade; for example in a high tech system the preferential material type would be Data, or in a refinery / mining system they would prefer planetary surface elements.
2) Material upgrading
Some materials seem to have certain tiers associated to them, for example Chemical Processors, Chemical Distilleries, and Chemical Manipulators. Each of these aforementioned materials are used in the grade 1, 2 and 3 recipes for Dirty Drive Tuning respectively. If Chemical Processors were to become abundant as a common material wouldn't it be nice to be able to combine for example 2 Chemical Processors to create 1 Chemical Distillery, 2 Chemical Distilleries to create 1 Chemical Manipulator and so on. This would open up some material storage space while giving value to lower grade materials even as we get to higher grade recipes.
3) Specific sources to generate specific materials
As already mentioned above it is possible for players to narrow their search but at the moment it is impossible for players to guarantee their search. In game we have some hints suggesting that X material has a chance to be rewarded by any faction from missions, it could however be that X material is always rewarded by X faction. Players would then be encouraged to travel to specific hubs within the bubble in search for the materials they need for the upgrades they are after, this would be much more rewarding on an individual level and also create hubs of activity in open play similar to how community goals do.
4) More sources to generate materials
This suggestion is inspired by Diablo III's loot 2.0 system. Essentially for those of you who don't know Diablo is a loot grind fest with the most sought after items being legendary / set items. These items used to be exceedingly rare and players could spend days on end playing the game before they saw one drop and even when they did there was no guarantee it was actually useful for them. The developers then massively increased the drop chance of these items which allowed players to effectively brute force the acquisition of the items they actually wanted because legendary drops were so frequent. This same principal could be applied to Elite Dangerous in a sensible manner. Currently while super cruising signal sources take a while to generate and even when they do there's a chance they're not the type we're after. My proposition here is to effectively increase the rate and number of signal sources that are generated. This same principal could be applied to planetary points of interest and even mission boards. While driving around in our SRV's why wouldn't it be possible to come across "material dense" areas with lots of nodes to shoot down. Similarly why is it that some minor factions only offer 2 missions when others can offer up to 10. Increasing the available mission pool would increase the chances of a mission with the reward element sought after appearing.
5) Lower material pool
Finally this last point is the least likely to be implemented but; lowering the diversity of materials would mean that we would be more likely to acquire individual sought after materials but would require FDev to remove some redundant elements (for example turn the Chemical Processors / Chemical Distilleries / Chemical Manipulators into a single material). Due to the fact players have already gathered these diverse materials it would be unlikely of FDev to remove them from the game but this point still serves as a useful guide line for future content: Going forward please DO NOT add new materials for future recipes and expand the mateiral pool even further hurting RNG even more without first considering one or more of the above suggestions.
I understand that these are complex changes and some of which may not even be possible due to server constraints but numbers can always be adjusted for balance reasons or server reasons, think of these propositions as a template for FDev to work from. Please keep the discussion and criticism constructive, I'd be happy to hear what other ideas people have for improving the current material gathering system.