I feel with 2.1 that I need to take a break from Elite. This isn't a whine or a rage quit. I'll be back at some point I'm sure. This is coming from a player who is triple elite and plays the game enough that it could be considered a job, with about 9 weeks of in game time on the clock. Here are suggestions that explain some of the reasoning:
1. Elemental rares are too rare. You find nothing but very common materials in bronzite chrondrite and type 1 outcrops, yet the same very common materials can easily spawn from mesosiderites and metallic meteorites. In my opinion mesosiderites and metallic meteorites should always spawn common, rare or very rare materials, never very common.
2. Man made rares are too rare. I've been sitting in an anarchy nav beacon killing haulers, type 6, type 7 and type 9 for around 3-4 hours. 70 or so ships dead and not a single drop of chemical manipulators. All rares are too rare, full stop.
3. Some engineers have requests that border on insanity. Quent and Palin are bad enough but Vatermann wants 200 units of lavian brandy, of which 1 unit spawns every 10 minutes in Lave. Is it really acceptable to expect the player to wait in the station, fill up every 10 minutes until a full 10 units have spawned and deliver over and over again for what could amount to 40 hours... This has to be an oversight, or a very bad attempt at delaying the player reaching that content.
4. Bugged missions. Wasted so much time on missions that don't complete or send you off to a place you can't deliver to.
5. Mission board is woefully inadequate. There are many times that, out of the 7 or so contacts, most of them have 0 or less than 3 missions. In what world is that useful to anyone? Each contact should have at least 5 missions, there should be at least 1 mission of each type (exploration, combat, trade) available, there should be a larger range of missions that award commodities. There should be more missions weighted to match your pilot's federation rank.
6. Commodities that are only available through missions aren't commodities. This seems like a cheap decision to force people to use the mission board. The definition of a commodity means it can be bought. Either change the name or make the gamey commodities realistic by having at least one source for each commodity, where it can be bought.
7. Too much RNG. RNG on what ships spawn, RNG on what materials ships drop, RNG on what result you get from engineers.
Ultimately it's because of these reasons and many other small things that contribute to an overall feeling that the game is - wasting my time.
Hopefully tweaks are made and the game will be enjoyable again for me, we'll see.
To those that say "just play the game" and see what happens, don't worry about specific materials; that's not how I choose to play (that doesn't work anyway due to the ridiculous 600 material limit that you will hit in a number of hours). I'm a completionist and that's how I choose to play, so please respect that. The 2.1 content is called "The Engineers" so don't expect me to just ignore that content.
