There won't be any Storage in this update

[Spiridon]

Ed acknowledged our complaints on carrying the damn engineers' materials around - blocking the cargo space and being "big haul" magnet.

They came up with an elegant solution: from this patch on, all you'll need for upgrades will be data & micromaterials. No more Magnetic Emitter Coils and other stuff (which you can buy on the markers anyway). So you can sell / eject all this nonsense if it block your playing and wait a week or two for the patch.

 

[DragoonKnight]

Good job FD. Having to use commodities for Engineers was seriously annoying.

Now we just need module storage

 

[Ndarain]

Ed acknowledged our complaints on carrying the damn engineers' materials around - blocking the cargo space and being "big haul" magnet.

They came up with an elegant solution: from this patch on, all you'll need for upgrades will be data & micromaterials. No more Magnetic Emitter Coils and other stuff (which you can buy on the markers anyway). So you can sell / eject all this nonsense if it block your playing and wait a week or two for the patch.

Have they said anything about changes to data and material drop rates? I'm glad for the change, but worried that to compensate they'll make changes to drop rates of the remaining items.

 

[jasonbarron]

I think dropping the commodities as a requirement is a big mistake. I would understand making the spawn rate & frequency of certain hard to find commodities much higher, but doing away with them altogether is just going to make sure that everybody has high end upgrades rendering them pointless. Personally, I thought making them a bit harder to aquire was a plus.

 

[Bacalao]

Have they said anything about changes to data and material drop rates? I'm glad for the change, but worried that to compensate they'll make changes to drop rates of the remaining items.

They will be increased.

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I think dropping the commodities as a requirement is a big mistake. I would understand making the spawn rate & frequency of certain hard to find commodities much higher, but doing away with them altogether is just going to make sure that everybody has high end upgrades rendering them pointless. Personally, I thought making them a bit harder to aquire was a plus.

I don't see how frequency equates to utility.

 

[Silvergun]

Would Marco Qwent still need modular terminals to unlock his services though?

 

[vizvayu]

Materials shouldn't even exist. They are an aberration of nature.
Why is gold a commodity but iron a material? It's absurd.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Have they said anything about changes to data and material drop rates? I'm glad for the change, but worried that to compensate they'll make changes to drop rates of the remaining items.

Massive changes announced. In short, material/data gathering will be massively enhanced. Debate is about wheter getting SuperShips is now within everyone's range or not, and if thats good or not. From what I see, getting your ship modded is now available to even the most casual of players, and getting your ship modded all the way to lvl5 is doable within some months for intermediate players. Hardcore guys seem to be able to go balls to the walls and knock themselves out. All pending on actual first-hand experience, but it appears Engineers wil be more about choice/variety and less about time investment. Sounds good, but may remove the wind from the sails of longevity.

 

[Warwick Black]

I had no problems with needing commodities for the upgrades. Being attacked while carrying them was all part of the process ...
I don't see any gratification in making things too easy ...
At present when I get a modification I want, I feel a sense of achievement for the effort that went into it.

 

[jasonbarron]

They will be increased.

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I don't see how frequency equates to utility.

Utility in the sense that it would nudge the needle towards the "a bit easier" side of the dial, to appease the people who've been so bitterly complaining about the entire process. But doing away with the requirements entirely? Weak.

sleutolbos summed up my thoughts a bit more elegantly a few posts above.

 

[Moritz Norman]

Well, this is good news.

That said, the commodities are interesting to me -- at least that you have to hunt in certain types of system states for them. This led to really getting to know different systems and increased some immersion. However, bulletin board RNG and the high requirements for each roll was not fun.

 

[CMDR Cillian Raynor]

I had no problems with needing commodities for the upgrades. Being attacked while carrying them was all part of the process ...
I don't see any gratification in making things too easy ...
At present when I get a modification I want, I feel a sense of achievement for the effort that went into it.

what makes sense is for people to actually want to play the content. And yes i might now. I hadn't touched engineers because when i read the time commitment i just laughed rolled my eyes and said forget it.

 

[kofeyh]

I think dropping the commodities as a requirement is a big mistake. I would understand making the spawn rate & frequency of certain hard to find commodities much higher, but doing away with them altogether is just going to make sure that everybody has high end upgrades rendering them pointless. Personally, I thought making them a bit harder to aquire was a plus.

It's so darned confusing. Just be consistent and sell commodities like commodities are sold in commodity markets; not just some of them, all of them. Sorted!

Ugh. I <3 you frontier but you always, always take the difficult nonsense route to everything. It's so ridiculous. Let's just remove a thing entirely, rather than the logical "sell commodity at market" thing that's already there!

 

[Cupcake]

Ed acknowledged our complaints on carrying the damn engineers' materials around - blocking the cargo space and being "big haul" magnet.

They came up with an elegant solution: from this patch on, all you'll need for upgrades will be data & micromaterials. No more Magnetic Emitter Coils and other stuff (which you can buy on the markers anyway). So you can sell / eject all this nonsense if it block your playing and wait a week or two for the patch.

No storage until they can monetize it, simple

 

[kofeyh]

I had no problems with needing commodities for the upgrades. Being attacked while carrying them was all part of the process ...
I don't see any gratification in making things too easy ...
At present when I get a modification I want, I feel a sense of achievement for the effort that went into it.

Nonsense. RNG outcome is entirely random. I have had 3 FSD upgrades that were less than a percent from maximum, one class 4, two class 5; literally back-to-back between three ships on the first attempt. The third class 5 attempt was just awful. There's no skill in random chance, unless you can control the chance. We don't.

To improve, I would need to keep going ad nauseum until the secondary triggered a stat pull outside of the limit. I'm driving a cutter that is 34.47ly capable out to Jaques; I can probably crack 37-38ly if I make some minor changes after I have delivered cargo.

All I did was drive around a bit, shoot a bit, and collect a bit. And not die when it counted. That's it. I didn't slay eleventy dragons or pull eleventy ships into the Great Annihilator or craft Thor's mighty hammer from the heart of a Tauri star.

Drive. Shoot. Scoop. Trade.

For all intents and purposes the outcomes are arbitrary due to RNG. There is no 'skill' in collecting materials. No 'skill' in outrunning AI. No real 'skill' in collecting payouts from missions. People don't get a sense of achievement, it's a sense of relief. Because the entire thing is arbitrary in allocation of result to effort and it's a massive time sink.

It's done this way on purpose to ensure longevity of mechanic; and a very non-trivial percentage of people who would otherwise invest and keep frontier going, who love the game and will follow Braben into the gates of hades itself - are having none of it.

If they just added all of the engineered commodities to the commodities tables for the BGS, as this would be entirely consistent, half the issue would have been solved day one. The other half, is simply adjusting chance percentages as the community adapted to or rejected the mechanic. They could have still kept commodities and inserted them into the BGS commodity tables as of the next patch; most are already in there.

As I said above, I <3 frontier but would it kill people to find just a little consistency in mechanics?

 

[metatheurgist]

Yep, can't say I agree with the new direction. It seems they've overcompensated (again). They could've made how to find materials a bit more apparent, they could've made some rares a bit easier to get, they should've fixed the AI so 4 tons of commodities wasn't a "Big Haul" requiring a 100 million space ship to hound you for it; otherwise the grind was hard but it was doable. The really big issue was the chance of completely wasting all that work with a poor roll. Something else they could adjust without removing the RNG, simply by making the ranges a bit more favourable.

Now it looks like it won't be long before people are complaining that they've run out of material space, while trying to spam their 37th grade 5 FSD upgrade.

 

[Tom Melegaris]

Materials shouldn't even exist. They are an aberration of nature.
Why is gold a commodity but iron a material? It's absurd.

The difference between a precious metal and a common metal. Both may have some similar physical properties like malleability but gold and other precious metals have a historic universal conspicuous consumption factor.

Here look at this article ... http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957

 

[DragoonKnight]

Yep, can't say I agree with the new direction. It seems they've overcompensated (again). They could've made how to find materials a bit more apparent, they could've made some rares a bit easier to get, they should've fixed the AI so 4 tons of commodities wasn't a "Big Haul" requiring a 100 million space ship to hound you for it; otherwise the grind was hard but it was doable. The really big issue was the chance of completely wasting all that work with a poor roll. Something else they could adjust without removing the RNG, simply by making the ranges a bit more favourable.

Now it looks like it won't be long before people are complaining that they've run out of material space, while trying to spam their 37th grade 5 FSD upgrade.

Exaggerate much?
It is extremely unlikely for you to get 2 very bad rolls in a row. Even less likely to get 3 bad rolls in a row. You will have to try many times if you insist on having a perfect 50% increase from your level 5 FSD, but the rest of us that are happy with a 40% increase just wont bother.

And they are making the process of finding materials much easier. The detailed surface scanner will be able to tell you what materials a planet has. You wont have to guess or rely on forums.
The very fact that finding one piece of polonium / chemical manipulators / pharmaceutical isolators will now actually give me 2 or 3 units of that material is HUGE. That fact alone makes me very happy because it means I can get some more level 5 upgrades without wasting countless hours in the process.

 

[Red Anders]

Until there is a way to move gear (you know the unique engineer-modified gear) between ships that isn't completely unsupported, meaning that if you have a disconnect or crash whilst the gear is in the shop between ships you lose it and the only response support can give you is 'yeah swapping gear between ships is unsupported so suck it up' storage will be needed.

 

[Cargobane]

Knee meet Jerk This reminds me of the removal of Cap ships as meaningful game content by over reacting to a few farmers. The basic inventory management needed for any sane person still seems to be too dangerous.