What do you think of "cheesing" in ED?

[DjVortex]

There's no denying it: There's a huge amount of "grinding" that one needs to do in ED in order to get anything (eg. credits or materials for engineering). However, given how complex the game is, there are also several ways to so-called "cheese" the game and get such resources significantly faster and easier than "normal", in a way that was probably not originally intended by the developers or which, in a sense, breaks immersion and willing suspension of disbelief because it abuses some out-of-game-universe technicalities and implementation details (even if not outright bugs).

Some examples of "cheesing" would be (I'm leaving the details intentionally vague in case you are a purist who wants to play the game "legitimately" and not take any shortcuts, although I do understand that just mentioning these can make it too tempting not to look them up and start using them):

• The so-called "Robigo Runs" to get credits much faster than via "normal play". (Although one could argue that this is so borderline as to perhaps not even count as "cheesing" per se.)
• Filling up at Jameson's crash site a lot faster than you could normally (which involves out-of-game shenanigans that break immersion.)
• The respawning HGE trick (which does so even more prominently.)
• Raising in Imperial ranks super-fast at Ngalinn (although this, too, might be considered borderline because it doesn't really involve out-of-game-universe shenanigans, just perhaps abusing some kind of developer oversight.)

And I'm sure there are many more.

I suppose there could be two different attitudes towards using those to gain stuff much faster than "normal":

1. It ruins immersion! Many if not most of these were not intended, and break normal gameplay by allowing the player to take unintended shortcuts if you know about them, while those who don't know about them have to gain all those resources and ranks the "normal", slow, but intended way. A purist plays the game as intended, not by abusing oversights and loopholes to take shortcuts!
2. Well, if the devs thought it's illegitimate, they would patch those. However, all those are more or less directly considered legitimate forms of gameplay by the devs, so they are completely ok. It's not like they are the only ways to gain stuff fast, even if limiting yourself to completely "legitimate" gameplay (such as exobiology). In fact, sometimes it's nice to not have to grind so much. It's more fun to spend your time doing something else, like fighting thargs, than grinding for materials. A few forms of "cheesing" the game are a good compromise between excessive grinding and fun gameplay, without completely removing the gathering part.

 

[Factabulous]

There's no denying it: There's a huge amount of "grinding" that one needs to do in ED in order to get anything

lol

 

[Screemonster]

The short version?

I don't think cheesing should be a thing, because I don't think the material requirements should make it feel necessary.

It's kinda like undertaking on the motorway. Ideally according to the highway code, I shouldn't undertake. But last time I was on the M6, there was some guy going 65 in the third lane out of four while the nearside two lanes were completely empty, and I didn't feel like pulling all the way over to the offside lane with all the people going 80 to get past him.

If military supercapacitors and core dynamics composites and the like were available as mission rewards so I could gather them up over time just by doing the things I want to do in the game I'd probably never loop an HGE again.

 

[Felix DiCestria]

I'm not a fan of relogging for eg. Jameson's or HGEs. (A system that spawns HGEs near constantly doesn't require any such exploit).
Credits have become so easy it's almost impossible not to earn millions in a session.
I tend to avoid the 'popular systems' so places like Robigo never played a role in my game.

 

[DjVortex]

I don't think cheesing should be a thing, because I don't think the material requirements should make it feel necessary.

Maybe it would be cool if there was a more fun way of gaining materials in the game (rather than an easier way), but the game being as it currently is, the question remains: "Cheesing" (that shortcuts grinding): good, bad, or meh?

 

[GroG79]

Do not confuse grinding with cheesing.

Cheesing is for example logging out at a titan so you do not have to negate the caustic space and the travel time to get out of the caustic clouds

 

[oblivionmanman 2476]

if its do able do it if you wish,why not,on a cg for rare goods i took my fc to one of the supply systems a went back and forth to the supply station loading my fc,as you know if youre cargo is empty on return to station it will respawn,takes time but works,no harm done to anyone.

 

[DjVortex]

Do not confuse grinding with cheesing.

While I intended to include all types of cheesing in my question (not just a way to shortcut grinding), I think that anything that abuses a flaw in game design or developer oversight to shortcut grinding could be considered "cheesing" (if it's something that isn't really part of the "normal" game loop.)

 

[oblivionmanman 2476]

i am seeing youre point now never heard of cheesing before,but yes point taken ill stand corrected lol.

 

[GroG79]

How is running Robigo missions Cheesing?

Grinding and Cheesing are different things. You may use a Cheese as part of a Grind.

 

[GroG79]

if its do able do it if you wish,why not,on a cg for rare goods i took my fc to one of the supply systems a went back and forth to the supply station loading my fc,as you know if youre cargo is empty on return to station it will respawn,takes time but works,no harm done to anyone

That is just grinding..
No shame in doing that. Especially for a rare Cargo Cg

 

[Rainbro]

That's a big question. I've seen a lot of blame tossed around on this regarding people not playing the "right" way, but it's all ultimately a product of the game's design. When numerous players decide, time and time again, that the best path forward is to repeatedly relog at a crash site, that's not some spontaneous mass moral failing. A lot of this game's mechanics are unfortunately just pretty barebones and placeholdery, and then Engineering comes along and chucks several hundred materials at random on top of it without much conscious design. Engineering is really the chief offender, nowadays.

In an ideal world, Frontier would fix the underlying problems so that the intended route is fun. You know, so that when people compare it to relogging for half an hour, they don't judge relogging to be the lesser evil! If the gameplay is fun and engaging, it's not a grind, it's natural. But that's not going to happen at this point, it would require fundamental changes.

So, yeah, just do what you find fun. If you enjoy rolling for that random chance that the right USS will pop up, or the right mission reward will randomly appear, go for it. Myself, I would have preferred a more targeted approach - if I need X, it would be nice to know that I can go do Y and I will get it, without waiting for the RNG to favour me. Even better if the quantities make sense for how they're used, too. But usually, the only methods that act like that are the unintended ones. I know I can go to Jameson for data. It wouldn't take much for something to be more fun than it, and yet the competition is "wait at a mission board or in supercruise, and hope I get lucky".

And to pre-empt the usual accusations of wanting "instant gratification" or whatever, no. I would like the game mechanics to be fleshed out and not reliant on RNG as a timesink. I served my time with Engineering v1.0, I was there in the Polonium and Yttrium mines. Current Engineering is better, but still has the same underlying flaws.

Actually, military ranking is probably a more succint example. Why do people want to skip military ranking? Do they not find the military ranking system of "literally the exact same missions, but now with different flavour text" a fun mechanic? Maybe if it were an actual fleshed-out and designed system, it would be something that people just do for the fun of it and then get a cool ship as a reward at the end - rather than it being a pain they have to get over and done with so they can get onto the fun bit.

 

[Riverside]

However a player chooses to approach the game there will be ways in which others choose that they consider superior, be that objectively or morally.

Play your own way, let them play theirs.

 

[Brrokk]

Do not confuse grinding with cheesing.

Cheesing is for example logging out at a titan so you do not have to negate the caustic space and the travel time to get out of the caustic clouds

Avoiding things like that is a point of honour to me.

Last night at the titan I was left heavily damaged with both caustic sink launchers inoperative. I could have got clear by relogging, but I preferred to run out through the caustic cloud, taking damage, seeing the canopy crack, silent running to overheat, and eventually got home with 5% hull. I did it this way because it was more fun; and having fun is my reason for playing Elite.

 

[Doctor Dread]

... there are also several ways to so-called "cheese" the game and get such resources significantly faster and easier than "normal", in a way that was probably not originally intended by the developers or which, in a sense, breaks immersion and willing suspension of disbelief because it abuses some out-of-game-universe technicalities and implementation details (even if not outright bugs)...

One of the basic traits of human intelligence is our ability to observe patterns around us, the ways the things are happening, moving and developing, and us trying to find the easiest, fastest, most productive solution for our needs. That's what makes us humans.

I will not give up this basic trait. I will explore every legal, existing-in-game alternative that will shorten / alleviate the processes here that are a bore for me.
Whether the devs meant it to be used this way or not, or if it's their omission when writing a code is not my concern.
Theirs is to write the game, mine is to play it and find easier solutions in it.

 

[aRJay]

I have just been doing some HGEs using one of my fastest ships, the first issue is finding them all in the FSS before I have to leave for the one with the shortest timer, the second issue is trying to remember/work out which ones aren’t worth visiting as I am maxed out until my next visit to the mat traders.
With all that plus trying to manage a SCO drive why do something as dull and boring as cheesing?

 

[Fnord Velkor]

I think people often miss the fact that the devs built-in those resource wells (Dav's Hope for example has been reworked by FDEV many times and even relocated on the planet for Odysey) - obtaining encoded mats from data points was totally reworked to allow relogging (previously each location needed a week to reset).

They blocked relogging of HGEs so they could do that for everything else if they didn't want people to "drink from the well" so to speak.

(Yes I know that people can cheat HGEs but that is obviously going against the provided mechanics of other resource wells.)

 

[Morbad]

Ideally, if it doesn't make sense in an in-game context, it shouldn't be possible. If certain things are impossible to prohibit or police are also context defying, the game should be altered to give them context. Of course, Frontier misses the mark in both of these areas and the game is worse off for the logical contraditions required to get the most out of it.

Many of the shortcuts cited were so context defying and, when they first showed up, unbalanced to the point that I thought they had to have been fairly serious bugs. Of course, when I filed my bug reports and posted examples, rarely was anything meaningful done...signaling Frontier's tacit acceptance of these things as a legitimate part of the game. The resulting gameplay may not have been intended and may not be desirable from Frontier's perspective, but they've apparently decided the effort to prevent them, or the content to replace them, wasn't worthwhile.

Personally, I don't like handicapping myself, but some of the scenarios commonly used are so ridiculous from my perspective that I can't bring myself to abuse them. The 'resource wells' for example...my CMDR has been to Dav's Hope exactly twice in 9k hours, both in Open, once to see what was there, once to shoot at people (and I didn't realize I was back at Dav's Hope until after the fact). The idea that there would be anything left after the first person found it, or that it would ever be restocked, is absurd and I try to ignore the existence of these places as much as is practical. The whole persistent open-world that is also a theme park style MMO is lazy, inherently contradictory, and makes verisimilitude near impossible to maintain. It should also be profoundly unnecessary in a setting of such scale.

 

[Codger]

It is what it is. After all these years I'm perfectly happy with how things work. I always enjoy my time in the game.

 

[DjVortex]

How is running Robigo missions Cheesing?

What is happening in both Robigo and Ngalinn, as I understand it, is this:

The game creates missions at space ports at random. For example missions like "transport thing X from here to another randomly chosen space port in another randomly chosen system nearby". The maximum distance of that other system is limited. So far so good. However, what happens if in one particular system there's only one another inhabited system within that limit, and that system only has one space port? What happens is that suddenly you have something like 30 missions of the same type, all to the exact same target.

Normally if you take 20 missions at once (which is the maximum allowed), it will take some significant amount of time to do them all because you'll usually be going to 10+ target space ports in 10+ different systems. However, in this case doing the 20 missions becomes super-fast because all of them go to the same target. It literally allows you to make missions like 10-20 times faster than normal. For example in the case of Ngalinn it allows you to rank up enormously faster than normal. It's relatively clear that this wasn't really originally intended by the developers and is just an oversight (which then later they never bothered even trying to fix, probably because they didn't think of it as completely game-breaking.)

It's precisely this "abusing of a developer oversight" that makes it "cheesing" because it allows, unintentionally, to accelerate grinding by an order of magnitude. (But as mentioned in my original post, I grant that it can be considered very borderline cheesing because it happens fully within the confines and rules of the in-game universe and its intended mechanics. It's merely the mission creation that has a slight oversight that allows this. Heck, one could even come up with a perfectly valid in-universe lore explanation for these few oddities, if one really wanted to role-play it. It's not like it doesn't happen in real life after all: In other words, continuous cargo (or other) transport between the same two facilities. However, since this wasn't quite clearly intended and purposeful to begin with, just an oversight, it becomes a bit of a "cheese" mechanic.)