the new engineer system for dummies

I think you may have mixed up your G3s and G5s somewhere in there, but yeah, I agree with what you're saying though, especially considering this needs to be done each time for each module we want to upgrade. I'm not seeing much point of the trader otherwise. The Engineers still seem like a meta gamer's grind game to keep them occupied rather than something players will be reasonably able to contend with otherwise.

Well, after all, grind is the fig leaf under which you hide your lack of compeling gameplay. That, or you are designing a freemium and want to push players toward buying premuim currency.
 
Specialized Legacy Firmware (G1) is far and away more common than Cracked Industrial Firmware (G3). Likewise with Modified Embedded Firmware (G5).

So I disagree. I think the conversion rate between SLF and MEB is a fairly important one. 1296:1 is just a bit too draconian. 81:1 would be far more reasonable. And 9:1 for G3 to G5 is still a significant slog and a balanced effort/conversion ratio.

36 G3s for a single G5 is a bit insane imo.

It doesn't take 36x the effort to get a G3 as is does a G5!! It doesn't even take 3 times the time! For a conversion ratio to make sense it needs to present both a marginal convenience cost for upgrading AND it needs to take into account the relative amount of time it would take to just grind for the target material in the first place. Even at a 3:1 rate between adjacent grades, the convenience cost is still VERY HIGH compared to the standard method of grinding materials in the wild.

Maybe im just lucky then, two evenings of running missions got me ~40 MEF 10 CiF and 8 SlF.

For other mat catergoris, like things which come from ships i often get 3-4 grade mats as my rankz mean i am facin dangerous to elite ships.

I had a very annoting experience the other day whete i couldnt relevl and engineer after using favours due to lack of g1. Mechanical scrap seems rarer than unicorn poop.
 
By and large, the people with the most engineering experience and those supplying numbers seem to agree this is going to be worse, while those who have never bothered with engineering much seem to be the most vocal supporters of the proposed changes.
 
Maybe im just lucky then, two evenings of running missions got me ~40 MEF 10 CiF and 8 SlF.

For other mat catergoris, like things which come from ships i often get 3-4 grade mats as my rankz mean i am facin dangerous to elite ships.

I had a very annoting experience the other day whete i couldnt relevl and engineer after using favours due to lack of g1. Mechanical scrap seems rarer than unicorn poop.

Mission rewards are a bit borked and unreliable, and are also tied to mission rank, which is in turn somewhat dependent on your personal rank and reputation - so you may have a point here were veterans and BGSers may be able to rely on luck and game the mission givers to use the material trader more effectively. However, if you do a bunch of base sneakins/assaults then you will uncover the unadjusted background spawn rate of these data samples, which is almost the inverse of your 2day sample set.
 
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I can't understand how so many people seem to be stuck on the fact that you have to level up each item...

In the old system, you could get a G5 straight away. Sometimes a good G5, but often a crappy G5. Most often, a mediocre G5. And you would then spend weeks of time trying to improve on that in the hopes that you could get a proper roll. And even then, there was always someone who would go out and roll 1000 times and get the an even better one.

In the new system, the benefits are oustanding to both casual and hardcore players.

For hardcore players, grind to get a top-spec G5 module is now monumentally less (on average, because most of the time you don't get a top G5 within 5 rolls).
For more casual players, a top-spec G5 mod is now within your reach in a much shorter, more predictable timeline.

Can't agree with that, sorry.

Here's some quick sums I did: https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/395173-Delay-update?p=6223283&viewfull=1#post6223283
 
The only point of the trader would seem to be to dump off junk you otherwise have no use for, rather than them being a reasonable means of Engineering progression.

So essentially, you'll still have to go out of your way if you want to progress with the Engineers and "level up" your gear. It isn't something that'll be able to happen "naturally" playing the game otherwise, at least not at any sort of reasonable rate.
 
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Mission rewards are a bit borked and unreliable, and are also tied to mission rank, which is in turn somewhat dependent on your personal rank and reputation - so you may have a point here were veterans and BGSers may be able to rely on luck and game the mission givers to use the material trader more effectively. However, if you do a bunch of base sneakins/assaults then you will uncover the unadjusted background spawn rate of these data samples, which is almost the inverse of your 2day sample set.

Yes i thought it would come down to method. It will be similar on wake scans i imagine and shield scans. Though it being easier for high rank playera to get high grade mata makes sense to me in gameplay terms.

On the other hand things like chemical processing componenets and heat disappation mats will be mostly in the g3-4 band as im experiencing.

The proof will be in the pudding as it were so this will hopefully be well tested in beta.

I will admit 6:1 seemed harsher than i expected but 3:1 may be quite easy. I'm also dissapointed we can't trade sideways. Like MEF for datamind wakes.

By and large, the people with the most engineering experience and those supplying numbers seem to agree this is going to be worse, while those who have never bothered with engineering much seem to be the most vocal supporters of the proposed changes.

As someone who has engineered all thwir ships ~15 in the last month of play time i am marginally positive this will be an improvement and eliminate the most annoying parts of mats without increasing grind.
 
By and large, the people with the most engineering experience and those supplying numbers seem to agree this is going to be worse, while those who have never bothered with engineering much seem to be the most vocal supporters of the proposed changes.

I take your point, the people most invested in the current system are those that have spent hours searching for those G5 components and then rolling alot of times to get a "good" result. the new system is showing that for n rolls per level you can guarantee that you can max out the benefit. So forgetting number of mats needed, you can guarantee a maxed out G5 result if you do 6 x G1's, 6 xG2's etc, up to 6 x G5's, rather than having to do 100 G5 rolls and still not max out your result.

I engineer for PvE so I don't worry about getting the maximum result, just good enough to dominate NPC's, the attraction from me is that I can get a maxxed G5 result if I do it enough and it wouldnt be 100's of rolls.

I also saw a stream where Kofyeh was searching for Core Dynamics, she found some, but only after 6 hours of searching (I didn't watch the 6 hours, just the 15 mins when she found them), for me the material broker gives me a way to circumvent the mindless searching grind to something more productive, farming G1 or G3 mats/data where you know that getting 100 of these will result in x number of G5 equivalent components is more productive gameplay.

From a material point of view I enjoy hooning around in an SRV, now I know that I dont have to ignore Mesosiderites or outcrops as whatever they drop will be of potential use. Heck with the ignore function now in mining I can go and blat a ring or two and get useful stuffs. The data side I am more unsure of, but the benefit of the broker showing what converts to what means I can concentrate on specifics to get the right bits to convert.

I can see why they want to slow down progression in the engineers, along the lines of that that the tinkering in Grade 1 is built on by the Grade 2 tinkering etc. so players wiklol have grade 3 MC's , grade 2 shields, grade 5 FSD etc and slowly improve their ship to the max.

The major part of this frustration is that players who have everything now, will have to go back to scratch and build up capabilities on each modification - ie. you ahd everything now and the new system takes that away from you. just remember that all players will be in the same boat, so no-one will have an edge.

I would prefer that all exiting modules were not grandfathered but converted to max level in the new system and given a free conversion to a specific experimental affect, so no "edge" cases would exist to make people hanker after the old way. But that is probably pouring petrol on hot ashes! ;-)

We will find out how "terrible" it is on Thursday, and I am sure the mnods will be busy closing duplicate threads about engineer grind that evening! ;-)
 
By stating this is engineering for dummies, you're implying the current system had any skill to it. Random dumb luck is not skill, is just random dumb luck.
 
I can't understand how so many people seem to be stuck on the fact that you have to level up each item...

In the old system, you could get a G5 straight away. Sometimes a good G5, but often a crappy G5. Most often, a mediocre G5. And you would then spend weeks of time trying to improve on that in the hopes that you could get a proper roll.
Some would. And for these players who keep rolling this system is beneficial. Those who already spent a lot of time engineering will like this new system

Those who would be satisfied with that mediocre roll (the casual player) now needs a whole lot more engineering and material collection than before, so this:
For more casual players, a top-spec G5 mod is now within your reach in a much shorter, more predictable timeline.
is clear and utter bollox.

In the current system, it takes me 2-3 hours to get a G5 rolled FSD drive that will do me. In the new system I can't see this happening in that time frame.
 
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Quick maths. Assuming fdev are not lying that max G4 in the new system will be equivalent to decent/max G5 in new system. To roll a new max G4 you will need

2 G5 of the main mat or 1 G5 2G4
1G5 or 2G4 of the second mat
1G4 or 2G3 of the third mat

To get the equivalent of a current G5 roll.

This is assuming 3 rolls per grade

Based on G4 roll is 1g4 1g3 1g2 mat

Seems much less to me...

And has the bonus of being reasonably guaranteed.
 
Yea its lunacy! I just cant understand how this is suposed to be better.

It cut out variation to just what special you have. We have gone from a tree to a stump.

Supposed to be an on going thing but you can reach the end and be done.. all grade 5 all maxed to the end.. no room for improvement.. so now what?
At least in the live build i can get good enogh and come back for better if i find more mats as i play and i can always try for more even after that thanx to rng! Every one hates it but it beats liniar grind.

I totally agree!

What the current rng based engineering does pretty well is distribution of module qualities! The bulk of engineered modules now are acceptable rolls, far from maxed out. It's getting rarer the closer it gets to a god roll. I wonder if there's ONE player who has every single module on his ship god-rolled. I guess it's not very likely. I'm sure even the best engineered ship there is in the game is not completely maxed out. I think it's great and it also feels right that modules get exponentially rarer the closer they are to the max!

With the new system I'm sure almost everyone who does a G5 module will max it out. You don't progress through G1 to G5 to stop there, do you? So a lot of ships soon will be more powerful than the 0.01% (or whatever) of the most powerful ships now in game! This is ridiculous! Instead of the pinnacle in a logarithmic curve we'll get a flat top ceiling.

It's boring.
It doesn't leave any headroom.
It increases disparity between engineered and vanilla ships even further!
It renders almost every ship engineered with the current system incompetitive against upcoming engineered ships, making most of our previous engineering efforts obsolete.
I could live with the latter if it was for a clearly better engineering system but unfortunately I don't see that.

Needless to say I hate the idea!
The material broker and the mat storage increase are fine. The rest is imho a clear change for the worse!
 
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In the current system, it takes me 2-3 hours to get a G5 rolled FSD drive that will do me. In the new system I can't see this happening in that time frame.

More like 2 to 3 hours to get 3 G5 FSDs, or 3 rolls for them, since it's much easier to get more of the same when you're already there and they're dropping.
 
More like 2 to 3 hours to get 3 G5 FSDs, or 3 rolls for them, since it's much easier to get more of the same when you're already there and they're dropping.

But, erm, you'll need to collect a heap of stuff from places where you're not "already there" as well.
 
But, erm, you'll need to collect a heap of stuff from places where you're not "already there" as well.

I'm not sure I follow. You will already be there to get those things anyway. I'm talking about how it is currently.

So what I mean is, currently, there's little difference between getting 1 G5 roll and 3 G5 rolls, for example.
 
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I can't understand how so many people seem to be stuck on the fact that you have to level up each item...

In the old system, you could get a G5 straight away. Sometimes a good G5, but often a crappy G5. Most often, a mediocre G5. And you would then spend weeks of time trying to improve on that in the hopes that you could get a proper roll. And even then, there was always someone who would go out and roll 1000 times and get the an even better one.

In the new system, the benefits are oustanding to both casual and hardcore players.

For hardcore players, grind to get a top-spec G5 module is now monumentally less (on average, because most of the time you don't get a top G5 within 5 rolls).
For more casual players, a top-spec G5 mod is now within your reach in a much shorter, more predictable timeline.

It's a win win.

And of course, as FDev have pointed out, this is for the future health of the game. I've engineered some, I wouldn't call myself casual but haven't been hardcore into it either. The system is confusing at times as it's not always obvious if a new roll is better than the old one, and any work you do is not guaranteed to be an improvement. That kinda puts me off collecting rare mats when it could all be for diddly squat.

Now, for the first time, between the materials trader and the new upgrade process, I'm confidant that I can hit top-spec G5 on all my ships without sacrificing my career and social life.

Just give it time! The new system won't be better for every single edge case out there, but over all, it's a huge improvement all round.
I'll speak for myself and maybe it will help you understand:

I didn't need and never sought after "god rolls". I would roll until I got a "pretty good" roll and move on. I'd usually get a "pretty good" roll in 1-5 tries.

I'm not someone who's interested in min-maxing, and I'd be playing another game before spending enough time to do 1,000 rolls in Elite: Dangerous.

For everyone who didn't care about "top spec G5" and really just wanted a decent G5, this is a huge increase in time required. HUGE. Before all you had to do was get an engineer to G5 and all of your internals on any ship you own could be G5'd as soon as you had the mats to do it. Now? You functionally have to start from scratch for every module you ever want to upgrade, on an individual basis.

This means an order of magnitude more time committed per ship after the first ship is done compared to the current system. For people that own many ships, the prospect of upgrading all of them like we were able to do under the current system becomes shocking.

Sorry, but this change sucks for everyone that owns more than a few ships or that does not have an obsessive-compulsive disorder that requires them to min-max in order to ever be happy.

Imagine if you owned 20 ships that you wanted to G5 just the engines on. Think about how long the new system would take you vs the current system. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

I'll try it once with maybe one of the new ships being added, but I don't see any way this isn't a giant increase in lifetime required to G5 a fleet of ships, even if mats are marginally easier to find/acquire than under the current system. I can G5 an entire ship 5 or 6 hours right now. I am skeptical that will remain true going forward.

I guess this is the end game?
 
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