|
NoneMoreNegative posted:tbh, there's still meant to be, what, another 4 years of 'seasons' of content? I think Frontier wanted the very best mods to be a 'long time off' thing to work towards, not taking into account everything must be near-instant gratification these days. Maybe the engineers modding should have come a couple seasons down the road? From a design perspective, though, the 2.1 release is a shitshow. Let's look at the list of things that have an immediate effect on players from a PvE standpoint: + NPC AI improved - NPC ships get free Engineers upgrades, hilariously broken on release, on top of the myriad way the AI already cheats (infinite power, not all systems damage actually affects NPCs, much faster shield recharges, instant-teleport to instance) - NPC ships have no rarity or scarcity applied to Engineer upgrades. On release, every NPC ship is pimped out, causing even slow NPC ships to be capable of outrunning very fast player ships. -- NPC ranking system broken, causing players of all combat ranks to disproportionately see top-ranked NPC ships + Mission UI updated to be better - Missions still a crapshoot, with some missions broken. If you want to run a specific kind of mission or look for missions to a specific destination your odds aren't very good. + Donation missions give slightly more reputation - Donation missions cost 10-500x as much + Progress ranking up with local factions is more clear - Ranking up local factions mostly pointless except as a 'gently caress you' tax; many missions still locked behind reputation which is tedious to grind up and factions sometimes have no missions available (or missions require higher rep to take). - Mission payouts better than before, still bad with limited exceptions. "Safer" combat missions (kill X pirates in Y system) have disappeared almost entirely. "Assassination"-type missions offer embarrassingly bad payouts for how difficult they frequently are to solo, especially in the 2.1 world of better NPC AI - 500k credits for a 3v1 or 4v1 fight is insulting, and these missions frequently are against non-wanted targets, meaning that you can't even attrition the enemy down with hit and run attacks because system forces will show up within a couple minutes and force a retreat against an ever-increasing number of system authority ships. Also hit and run attacks are pointless, as the secondary escort ships will replenish themselves if you fail to destroy the target before it warps out/you're forced to back off. - Resetting the mission board gets progressively more tedious and difficult to do. The obvious common sense approach to taking missions would be to take multiple missions going to the same destination, but this is made as difficult as possible to lengthen the grind and prevent players from enjoying the game. +Engineers is released, enabling players to tweak and customize their ships with incremental upgrades beyond what can be done by simply A-ranking everything - Engineer mods are given free to NPCs, meaning that players' relative power is down without undertaking significant time and grinding to return to parity. -- Engineer mods vary between obvious picks with zero downside (Increased FSD range) and cripplingly useless with no upside (System-focused Distributor). The most recent change to ENG/SYS recharge doesn't make system distributors meaningful, but it does theoretically make engine-focused distributors technically have a use again. Many choices clearly only exist to give "options" to spend materials on, even if no person in their right mind would ever bother (NPCs clearly don't). --- Engineer mod effects are random and cannot be tweaked incrementally. Upgrading from a decent to good rank 4 to a rank 5 can give you a roll that is worse in every meaningful way. Plan around rolling multiple times if you want a meaningful upgrade. ---- Materials used to generate mods are generated randomly. Some materials/commodities are exclusively available via mission rewards (requiring you to hop around between stations/refresh the boards repeatedly until a mission you can take offering it as a reward appears) , others as random drops from different types of ships. Good luck farming the rare materials from authority ships. ----- Certain materials require a wake scanner, meaning sit outside a station watching people jump out and rolling the dice until you get enough of the specific type of wake scan that you need. Other materials require regular scans, meaning just target the ship and point at them. Other materials require you to scan surface data points, while certain materials are obtained by scanning data points in Unidentified Signal Sources. ------ There is a huge variety of materials and limited storage space. It is up to the player to remember which materials are actually useful/desirable/already possessed in quantity. It is up to the player to figure out that certain materials have absolutely zero use whatsoever and serve no purpose except to take up limited storage space. It's a gigantic mess that doesn't even pretend to make sense. The Engineer wants 2 units of arsenic to make this upgrade? Sure, let me just go to this extration/refinery station and buy a couple tons. What do you mean, you can't just _buy_ chemicals in the future? Want to buy a ton of iron? Sorry, you've got to mine it, one fist-sized chunk at a time. We'll sell you 100 tons of platinum or palladium, but iron? In my shop?  The worst part is that Frontier could have capitalized on the release of Engineers as a way to remove excess credits from the game; people with billions of credits and nothing to spend it on would certainly have dumped tons of cash to avoid the grind and roll modifications. Once you've got your fleet of purpose-built Anacondas, there's nothing else to spend money on, so why not sell Polonium at 500k a pop? Then, within a couple of weeks, the prices could be tweaked down to actual sensible levels and players would have the option of exchanging money for goods and services. Tabletops posted:I need some outdaded firmware or something to upgrade my FSD again. I tried raiding 2 bases so far but didn't find them there. None of the FSD upgrades take firmware. Dirty Drive Tuning takes Specialized Legacy Firmware (which is NOT available from surface scanning bases, and only available from scanning data points in unidentified signal sources - look for degraded emissions). The Rank 4/5 upgrades take different firmware, which _is_ available from scanning surface bases, although reports are sketchy and certain firmware may only appear from large (+++) bases, high-security bases, or possibly only (+++) high security bases. Edit: It's even worse than I originally thought. There are a total of 132 different materials, many of which can only be acquired in specific circumstances. Of these 132 total, 22 materials have absolutely zero use whatsoever. One-sixth of the materials exist for no other reason than to take up inventory space. Olesh fucked around with this message at 19:18 on Jun 23, 2016 |
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 19:07
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 05:05 |
|
|
Not that I necessarily disagree with a lot of this but you have to admit a lot of this is also subjective as hell.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 19:22
|
|
|
Maybe I'm dumb but I don't see why they had to lock what amounts to fleshed out weapon variants (that were once in the game until... well,  ) behind yet another grindwall.It's like powerplay all over again. Yes you can get cool bonuses! But only if you keep killing 50 ships every day for us for the foreseeable future. Other conditions may apply. At least engineer upgrades don't decay once you get them I guess? Still, let us just purchase semi-random statted special effects stuff for cash and then make the engineer grind an optional part to get some great ones with guaranteed effects and more positive stats, like getting an artifact in Diablo or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 19:47
|
|
|
I don't think it's fair to compare engineers to power play mainly because you can get poo poo for engineers just by playing the game. That said there's some QoL things that would go a long way to making engineers better: - pare down components, there's like 50 billion things to keep track of and they all have similar names - let me view blueprints remotely - increase drop rates on some of the rarer stuff - better cargo scoop -- poo poo make a tractor beam an engineer upgrade - ITEM STORAGE - have limpets be persistent or like ammo instead of poo poo that you store in your cargo hold Engineers is a fun concept that has some botched execution. Power play is fundamentally broken.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 19:56
|
|
|
I'd add reconsidering the inclusion of commodities as recipe ingredients. Maybe item storage would also solve this, but it's really tedious being constantly harrassed by super pirates because you're lugging around rare mission reward-only bits that you can't afford to ditch.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 20:26
|
|
|
 FYI ammunition is unlimited in the game right now
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
timn posted:I'd add reconsidering the inclusion of commodities as recipe ingredients. Maybe item storage would also solve this, but it's really tedious being constantly harrassed by super pirates because you're lugging around rare mission reward-only bits that you can't afford to ditch. Yeah that too.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 20:28
|
|
|
Are any particular types of missions more profitable (be it in credits, rep or faction influence) than others or should I more or less just take whatever I see? I've been loving around in DF home space trying to take whatever missions for them but the pickings are sort of slim at times.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 20:44
|
|
|
Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Not that I necessarily disagree with a lot of this but you have to admit a lot of this is also subjective as hell. I'm giving opinions on why I think a particular design is lovely - of course it's going to be subjective. The problem that I take issue with is that RNG and obfuscation of mechanics are being used to substitute for actual good design decisions. If I want to go gather materials for a recipe, not only am I dependent upon the RNG for actually finding materials, but the quality of the end-result is also entirely dependent upon a die roll. The time involved, start to finish, in collecting all of the materials involved to take a couple of rolls at a recipe is absurd. If the core gameplay mechanics were not so satisfyingly solid, it would be interminable. As it is, I'll spend some time driving around collecting materials in the buggy after I do a base assault since I'm already there. Making a trip to a planet to pick up a couple Ytrrium took three hours to collect two Yttrium. I was on a planet that dropped it (so I wasn't wasting time searching for the right planet), I wasn't wasting time on other POIs that only drop common materials. Sure, I could have gotten luckier and found a dozen in twenty minutes, but there's no way for me to control that, nor can I control how frequently I find metallic meteorites vs other outcrops. Certainly, I beeline them and go for them when they show up on the scanner, but sometime there just aren't any in my path. On the obfuscation front, why do the various firmwares show up from surface assault missions, except for one? Why is there no real way to determine what materials are available on a planet except by either going there and collecting until you've gotten seven different items (excepting the very common ones that appear everywhere), or by finding a listing? Why can you only pin a single blueprint in-game per Engineer? It only took a couple of days for all of the blueprints to be posted on the internet; why do I have to reference sites out of game in order to do basic poo poo? Solid, well-designed mechanics have no need for obfuscation. If your game relies on the mechanics being obfuscated and doesn't work when the mechanics are explained/revealed, the mechanics were lovely in the first place.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 20:44
|
|
|
Aethernet posted:High security bases are the ones with three plus signs next to their name, or occasionally just labelled 'high security'. They'll have around 5-6 data terminals, all of which need to be scanned within a time limit to get data. I recommend attacking with your ship first to kill any defending vessels and to lure out Goliaths, which are an arse to kill in your SRV. yeah I did one on a base with 3 pluses. it was a bitch. there were seemingly 20 or 30 of those flyer guys chasing my SRV at one point and I think some of them had seeking rockets. I blew up my SRV. Then tried to kill the flyer units with my ship but i wasnt able to hit them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 21:42
|
|
|
quote:Grind I think they still expect players to just wander around doing whatever and happen upon the stuff required to make $upgrades rather than actively search them out. Without the (excellent) community-made sites and spreadsheets it would be essentially impossible to get any of the rare stuff unless you are exceptionally lucky. Although maybe I am lucky as it didn't take me more than a couple of hours to find all the stuff required for a lvl3 FSD range upgrade when I looked for them. L5 stuff I can see being a huge grind, however. Not sure I'll ever aim for any of those unless rare materials get a lot easier to find. I've found it fun again since 2.1 but I'm not a space billionaire, and the materials searching has given me a reason to do mining, scan everything I happen to pass by, and visit more USSes and bases. Edit: Not to say that I don't think it's grindy, but I've avoided that whenever possible by just doing what has looked fun 
legooolas fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Jun 23, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 21:43
|
|
|
Speaking of bases, what does one actually do at them if they don't have a mission? For that matter, what are ground PoIs for? Finally, am I right in thinking that we have three separate inventories: ship cargo for commodities, stuff for synthesis, and stuff for engineering? Are the latter two infinite and shared ship to ship? Ciaphas fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jun 23, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 22:26
|
|
|
Nostalgia4Infinity posted:I don't think it's fair to compare engineers to power play mainly because you can get poo poo for engineers just by playing the game. You can view blueprints remotely! One per engineer. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 22:41
|
|
|
On another note entirely I tried some random murder yesterday using an FSD interdictor and while that was fun, scooping up the detritus made me want to punch something Is there a nice easy trick to scooping up cargo from exploded ships besides "fit a collector limpet" or "cry"
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 22:49
|
|
|
Ciaphas posted:On another note entirely I tried some random murder yesterday using an FSD interdictor and while that was fun, scooping up the detritus made me want to punch something There's also "try not to cry" and "cry a lot"
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 22:51
|
|
|
Ciaphas posted:Speaking of bases, what does one actually do at them if they don't have a mission? 1. Scan the data points for engineer data 2. Scan the core data point, if one exists, for money (they emit a beam of green light into the sky)
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 22:56
|
|
|
You know I think one little thing that would be (fairly) low impact and improve the game a lot would be shoving more off the out-of-game info into the game and dress it up a little bit. To me, elite's strongest offering is a sense of immersion... Kinda. Well hidden loading screens in FTL, little details like the traffic control, the super clean and immersive UI... Just stop making me tab out or look away every couple minutes to find out info that should be available in the game. I'll give them they at least did this with the updates to outfitting.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 23:45
|
|
|
BMan posted:1. Scan the data points for engineer data Guess I'll have to try it again, I didn't see these at the bases I found. (Or did I find the wrong kind of bases? I only flew to ones that were on the system map, are there bases that are PoIs where you actually do this?)
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 23:45
|
|
|
And speaking of immersion stuff, anyone here try VoiceAttack? Might be convenient for me to be able to yell "chaff" instead of remembering what the loving hotas bind for it is, since in VR land I don't have a quick way to look at the reference sheet (yet). So much the better if it can do repetitive but complicated poo poo like requesting docking permission.
|
|
#
?
Jun 23, 2016 23:46
|
|
|
Ciaphas posted:And speaking of immersion stuff, anyone here try VoiceAttack? Might be convenient for me to be able to yell "chaff" instead of remembering what the loving hotas bind for it is, since in VR land I don't have a quick way to look at the reference sheet (yet). So much the better if it can do repetitive but complicated poo poo like requesting docking permission. I use Voice Attack, and yes, you can script it to do basically anything you want, including docking requests. The trial version lets you make like 20 commands, so no harm in trying it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 03:29
|
|
|
Shine posted:I use Voice Attack, and yes, you can script it to do basically anything you want, including docking requests. The trial version lets you make like 20 commands, so no harm in trying it. That actually sounds really awesome. I'll have to give it another go using this.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 05:17
|
|
|
Olesh posted:There are a total of 132 different materials, many of which can only be acquired in specific circumstances. Of these 132 total, 22 materials have absolutely zero use whatsoever. One-sixth of the materials exist for no other reason than to take up inventory space. Oh for gently caress's sake. I remember seeing a note in the beta updates that players were complaining about needing so many different materials for various recipes. Frontier went and unified things a little, reducing the variety of materials you'd need to collect - but failed to take the now-unnecessary materials out of the game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 09:54
|
|
|
Decided I didn't care too much for the Imperial Eagle after flying an Asp for a while. I miss the Asp's versatility. So I get a slightly bigger ship: the Courier. I'm not a spaceman that knows proper hard point placement or any of that spacemath, but this looks and feels like a Mercedes Benz compared to the Econoline Van the Asp is and the 2-door Honda Civic feel of the Imperial Eagle. And the default paint job is pretty as gently caress and I can't imagine using my black-Friday paint on this thing. What a sweet ride!
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 14:24
|
|
|
Drake_263 posted:Oh for gently caress's sake. I remember seeing a note in the beta updates that players were complaining about needing so many different materials for various recipes. Frontier went and unified things a little, reducing the variety of materials you'd need to collect - but failed to take the now-unnecessary materials out of the game. This game is made by unintelligent people.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 14:33
|
|
|
To get the increased mission rewards after pal-ing it up with some folks - that's..faction based (like the Wyrd People's Party) right? How far do factions spread? Basically if I want the bigger numbers do I need to pick a single station as home base for a while or can I have a little more freedom to roam.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 14:40
|
|
|
Drake_263 posted:Oh for gently caress's sake. I remember seeing a note in the beta updates that players were complaining about needing so many different materials for various recipes. Frontier went and unified things a little, reducing the variety of materials you'd need to collect - but failed to take the now-unnecessary materials out of the game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 14:45
|
|
|
The worst part of the useless materials is that a few of them are common things to get from scanning data points at high security outposts. That was really discouraging to me when I was scrounging up modifed embedded firmware, getting a lot of literally useless stuff from all that work.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:01
|
|
|
I haven't played for long, but having almost crashed into a sun several times last night I think I finally understand that gif.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:01
|
|
|
Is there a bug report for these superfluous items? They're like worse than vendor trash because you can't even sell them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:10
|
|
|
teh_Broseph posted:To get the increased mission rewards after pal-ing it up with some folks - that's..faction based (like the Wyrd People's Party) right? How far do factions spread? Basically if I want the bigger numbers do I need to pick a single station as home base for a while or can I have a little more freedom to roam. It's rare for a faction to control more than a couple of stations, although they can sometimes be present in a few systems. It doesn't take that long to build up your rank with a faction, though - which is good, because you'll probably need to do it with a few.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:11
|
|
|
chaosapiant posted:Decided I didn't care too much for the Imperial Eagle after flying an Asp for a while. I miss the Asp's versatility. So I get a slightly bigger ship: the Courier. I'm not a spaceman that knows proper hard point placement or any of that spacemath, but this looks and feels like a Mercedes Benz compared to the Econoline Van the Asp is and the 2-door Honda Civic feel of the Imperial Eagle. And the default paint job is pretty as gently caress and I can't imagine using my black-Friday paint on this thing. What a sweet ride! Yeah, I'm working toward the iCourier in the Imperial Eagle. The I-eagle feels like a C-Class Benz or a 1-Series BMW. Bare bones, but competent. I was thinking about getting an Asp since I'll likely go exploring again at some point. The Asp can mine or trade or run missions. I could grind for the iCourier in it. I want to give mining a try over the weekend.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:18
|
|
|
Shine posted:This game is made by unintelligent people. FDev voted for the Brexit.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 15:35
|
|
|
If I'm cheap and just want to explore out to some nebulas and stuff dumping 10mil into a diamondback explorer would do more than enough, correct? Save a lot of overhead vs an Asp. Ship looks like poo poo though.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 16:36
|
|
|
Blind Rasputin posted:Ship looks like poo poo though. Oh no you didn't
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 16:49
|
|
|
Blind Rasputin posted:If I'm cheap and just want to explore out to some nebulas and stuff dumping 10mil into a diamondback explorer would do more than enough, correct? Save a lot of overhead vs an Asp. Do you want/can land on planets? Combining all the poo poo you need for exploring on the DBX can be hard. Fuel Scoop, the two scanners, a shield and some cargo. If you don't want to land, you can just barely fit everything you need. If you do want to drive around in your SRV, either the shield or the cargo has to go.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
Most of the cost is the drive anyway. The DBX and AspE both use the same drive, and the Asp can fit a bigger "more bang for your buck" scoop. Short of it, the Asp isn't that much more expensive than the Diamondback once you factor in the fittings.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:11
|
|
|
Changes to engineers incoming:quote:
And by incoming I mean end of July
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:24
|
|
|
Someone on the frontier forums found an Unknown Probe (never been found before in game). Of course it was in the hold of a python in a threat 4 convoy. https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php/227901-UAs-Barnacles-amp-More-Thread-6-The-Canonn/page653?p=4148572&viewfull=1#post4148572
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:39
|
|
|
As far as the overall design goes, I feel like Elite needs player-owned structures or something to give everything a greater purpose. I know people on the Fdev forums flip out about not turning this into Eve Online, but really, just a couple things like player-owned structures and maaaaaybe player group sov would make Elite a bazillion times better than Eve as a spaceship MMO.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 30, 2024 05:05 |
|
|
Finster Dexter posted:As far as the overall design goes, I feel like Elite needs player-owned structures or something to give everything a greater purpose. I know people on the Fdev forums flip out about not turning this into Eve Online, but really, just a couple things like player-owned structures and maaaaaybe player group sov would make Elite a bazillion times better than Eve as a spaceship MMO. One of the lead designers apparently likes the idea, but it wouldn't happen for years based on their current design path. But then again Frontier is one of those weird companies that will do whatever it wants just because. VR support was something suggested and added practically overnight and now Elite is known for having one of the best VR experiences in gaming.
|
|
#
?
Jun 24, 2016 17:48
|
|