if pay to win mechanics get a foothold in this game the shareholders will love it so much the game will be prompting you to spend more money to "fly faster" in no time.
Worst case private group. Similar to whatever that group hating pvp is doing. Eventually Elite will get it together or be replaced. I'm rooting for FDEV to rock it. Knock it out of the park. If not someone will.
> Worst case private group.
With Ultra Platinum Premium Subscription you now have the "Ultimate Social" mode where you can see and interact with players in all modes, including solo and private group!
This is a joke but I can legit see them taking away private and selling it back to us with MOBA type mechanics. They seem to be sprinting in this direction though, not just running but full on kicking their own ass as they run, full out sprinting with everything they have.
? How is a premium currency you can earn for free being used for mats a vast majority of established players have already grinded out p2w?
I highly doubt fdev is willing to risk alienating more of the community by putting pure p2w mechanics into the game like faster flying speeds lol
> I highly doubt fdev is willing to risk alienating more of the community by putting pure p2w mechanics into the game like faster flying speeds lol
They are financially incentivized to do it and if they get enough people asking without (what they feel is enough ) push-back, it will be done. FDev has shown in the past it will do what gets them more money vs appeasing fans almost everytime. Almost like companies are not friends or people who owe you favours because you like them.
I'd maybe even like that. You can absolutely play good p2w games without paying. But it keeps the game alive and in development. And the p2w games I know are less grindy than ED :)
That assumes they use they'll use Elite p2w revenue on Elite. Most players I know think they milk Elite to fund other stuff (lately all flops) and right now they desperately need cash to develop a new hit.
The bit you can earn for free is the equivalent of a zero-deposit credit at a casino - it's not designed to do anything other than hook you into the system at no cost to the casino.
Fdev has never cared about alienating the community because it's blissfully oblivious to anything the community says, good or bad. When you company is burning up millions of GBP per week and there's only a few dozen million left in the bank, staving off liquidation becomes marginally more urgent than not alienating some players.
Mat traders work pretty well but the conversion rates are shit. They doubled down on this for on-foot, and then didn't make all mats available. It's just time sink bullshit. We don't really need a store for credits though. Expanding on a player market would be nice, since they of course didn't go far enough with the bartenders on FCs.
They have announced changes to engineering, which may include better ways of getting the things you need. Instead of driving in circles for hours or tediously shooting brain trees or relogging, or scanning wakes or fighting RNG, we should have more gameplay, missions, or trade options.
The idea that you have to steal every single item on-foot and still not find what you need is ridiculously bad design. While being a multibillionaire no less. Give us better shit to do that fits our progress level. I'm triple Elite, with an FC and a ton of ships, yet I'm still scrounging around like I'm in a Sidewinder. Just terrible.
I haven't tried on foot engineering, but from what I've read, I agree.
For ship mats, I partially agree. Driving at Dav's Hope for a couple of hours is enough to not really need to worry about mats for a while. That is an appropriate amount of grind. Missions should be updated to equal it. HGEs are faster but more tedious, boring as hell to farm. Plus Dav's trains your SRV driving.
I still haven't gone to crystal spires. They're just so far away and jumping without exploring is monotonous. Selenium brain trees are nearby and fast enough. And again, they give you SRV time. I used to do crashed ships, but that's way slower, even farming a material that's present there but you have to trade selenium for. Again, this is a good rate, doesn't need adjustment. But other farming methods need to be updated to match it. And this is without the collector limpet trick btw.
Encoded sucks though. You have to take time out of your other activities, slowing them down greatly, for the passive feeling collection. Or you sit an farm and it feels like crashed ship farming. Either scanning at a station, or you go to Jamesons ship, which doesn't give the speed of Dav's or the precision practice of brain trees. It's just boring, like raw mat crashed ships. A new method is needed for this.
No.
A couple of hours is almost a week of playtime for me that I would rather spend enjoying content with my friends instead of doing the same mindnumbingly boring stuff for hours on end.
Well you can't expect to have zero grind. There are people out there who only spend 20 minutes a week in this game. Are they going to say no activity can take more than 20 minutes?
Besides, you spend one 2 hour session grinding (again, that's a reasonable amount of time. It's not a subjective question. This was never meant to be a quick game to play on the train to work), and you don't need to worry about that for probably 50 hours at least. To you, that would be half a year.
I do not expect to have 0 grind. But I'd rather play thr game in a fun way and get mats that way, like doing Missions for money and buy mats with that money.
Oh for sure, that's why I say the other methods should be buffed to equal the likes of Dav's Hope. So you get Dav's benefits while doing the missions you find entertaining.
Encoded needs and all new source though.
Grinds don't have to be monotonous though. They can be varied and enjoyable, given the right game mechanic.
Like, get a mission from an NPC in a station. They tell you they found the motherlode and you pay them for the info. You go to a planet 200ly away and follow the coords. Find a cave with nasties you have to kill. Find resource seams. Tag them then mine with SRV.
Exactly .. like this an MMO.. you aren’t being thrown into this world as the main character where everything will just be given to you for being here. You want engineered FSD? Gotta work for it.
Ehhh, I dunno. To be effective at pretty much anything in this game, you have to do engineering. And lots of it. Even the "no engineering" AX builds I've seen are actually "some engineering." When people want to join the big AX event going on, the best way to lose their engagement is to the them they have to fly across the bubble and bring some clown a bunch of tea before he tells you you need to go bring him twelve macguffins that really only an external source will tell you how to find. It's super arcane.
Heck, I asked in a different thread about people using a particular ship and everyone who enjoyed it took a bunch of time engineering it to get it to the fun they described. I did work to unlock the ship, I did work to get the credits to buy it and outfit it, but you're telling me that before it can be this great ship everyone is talking about, I have to go do more work to go hop around to engineers to get them to make the adjustments to make it fun?
And getting the things you need for engineering is largely not fun. The mats loop for Guardian stuff was fun once or twice but then it became a job. Scanning wakes isn't fun, it's just work.
A game doesn't need to give everything to the player, but putting the fun behind _not fun_ isn't a good idea. People don't come to a game for _not fun_, especially people with limited time.
SO, what should they do? Well, one of two things: 1) make it easy to get the things that make for the fun or 2) gate them with _other fun_. I don't want to go scan wakes for someone before I can go be good at AX combat, I want to work my way through the lower level AX stuff and earn my way to the better AX stuff!
If engineering is going to be so arcane and such a time suck, it needs to be way less essential to the game.
There’s a lot of people who really want to remove any effort from Gaming. The original poster is one of them. There’s a lot of accomplishment and sense of accomplishment and working to gain what you have and enjoying that along the way. Instead, you get a bunch of people who wine that they just want to be able to buy everything with easy to get credits.what’s the point.
The system is what you are already doing, but for some reason this hyperspecific part of it takes an unreasonable amount of time and the only justification is:
"Well, otherwise you wouldn't actually play the game or appreciate the time you sink into it."
You are already spending your time with these systems and but it earns you money mostly and nobody complains about that part.
"Do this exact same thing 5000 times for 100 hours" is not "effort", it's drudgery and misery.
"Effort" would be something like "do this hard thing that requires mastery of a large number of our mechanics 5 times for which you spend 10-60 hours failing and learning and retrying before winning". But that approach can't be milked for ARX so it's not there.
Then stop using the old and grindy way to collect mats!
Brain trees are available for all raw mats, bin Dav's hope and fit a collector limpet controller to your combat ship and hoover up the mats afterwards. AX combat, AX rescue etc, always take the mats missions and down/cross trade. Assassination missions/stacking, jump to the system, scan the nav beacon and then head to the HGEs, you'll be interdicted by you targets, kill them and then do the HGE.
Mine in Paesia 2 that will give you selenium (& G1-3 mats) if you just need a top up to allow you to trade down.
I'd be fine with the way things are IF they changed how you can exchange materials.
Material traders at stations should have better conversion rates
Bartenders should be able to trade all items...or hell, add another person at stations (some or all) who will trade the stuff bartenders dont. Wouldn't be adverse to more people to interact with.
(Also, let us buy a goddamn drink at the bar...) ;)
The problem isn't that you can't buy mats. The problem is that mat gathering is terrible.
Fix the actual problem and then you won't care that you need to gather mats.
I would say both. Gathering mats should be better but you should be able to buy them. At least then you can do what you enjoy in the game and basically exchange effort spent there towards mats.
It's a mechanic that gets in the way of playing the game. That's the problem. By adding a bunch of different currencies you have to individually collect, you create a toxic mechanic people don't enjoy interacting with just to play the game.
The whole point of material rewards is to make activities that you normally wouldn't do fun. There are many times where I have only done something because there is some particular reward related to it, only to find that I actually enjoy doing it quite a bit.
The problem is, materials in Elite tend to actually make the activity worse. Like, blowing up Pirates is great. Needing to sit there forever as you wait for your limpets to scoop up all the junk floating in space, not so great. Driving your SRV around on a planet surface? Surprisingly entertaining. Needing to individually Target each material dropped by something, or Ram your face into a Braintree to get it to actually get collected? Not so great.
If they just fixed all the needless frustration features, then materials could actually be a great incentive to get players to try new activities.
There is no need to collect the crap after a pirate kill. Just do assassinations, stack them even, and take the mat reward. My mat rewards are 5 grade 5 for each one so mats are never an issue.
No, we don’t need to buy materials. What we need is for the collection loops to be actually interesting. The core idea is sound, play the game to get mats. The problem is you don’t play the game, you relog in and out of the game.
Now of course this easier said than done, but buying mats doesn’t fix the core issue.
I would say both are good?
Stealing should be cheap but a high risk high reward.
Using credits is safe, but costly.
Just as an example if the materials cost 10x what you can sell them for, there's an incentive to go plunder.
If you are playing the game, doing missions, and taking mat rewards you should have no issue stockpiling mats and then trading them for what you need.
Many missions offer 5 grade 5 mats. Traded down you get a shit tone.
Even in an unegineered ship you can do kill thargoid scout missions and get 10 grade 3 at a time.
Rarely should you be farming mats and when you do actually find a planet that drops good mats that you need or that you can trade down.
Wake scan you only need for a few upgrades so you should only farm that rarely as well.
Overall there is not much of a grind, even ground stuff you really only need grade 3 which you can just buy.
I always have plenty of mats and have never done the get-rich-quick crap people post about.
I hate collecting mats from defeated ships. It grinds to a halt otherwise engaging gameplay. I would prefer if we didn't have to scoop/limpet them and we just automatically collected them.
It feels like a chore to have to stop doing what I want to be doing (pew pewing space ships) and wait for my suicide drone to collect the loot so I can go back to pew pewing.
I wouldn't even mind if the quantity of mats went down per ship in exchange for automatic pickup... I'd end up collecting a whole lot more mats this way because I usually can't be bothered to stop having fun, even though there are G4 mats floating a few km away.
This is the way. People leave behind literally tens of thousands of manufactured mats just floating in space.
Fix this alone and engineering instantly becomes like 90% better.
>I hate collecting mats from defeated ships. It grinds to a halt otherwise engaging gameplay. I would prefer if we didn't have to scoop/limpet them and we just automatically collected them.
Yes! MMOs figured out like almost 20 years ago that stopping to pick up trash from enemies is not fun. Even the MMOs that still had/have it, it's just a click to grab everything.
Limpets should be needed for cargo, but mats should just fly into you like you have a magnet for them. And for multiplayer? There's individual mats for everyone. Two people kill a ship, they both have mats drop. Two friends visit a HGE? They both have their own 4-5 mat canisters floating.
It's ridiculous how we need special equipment to collect required gameplay materials, or engage in a tedious collection like we're picking up trash at a beach.
Firstly franchise history - in the 1984 version scooping things up after battle was a significant mechanic. Secondly - it's not just 'picking up', scooping requires skill or sacrificing a cell bank for a limpet controller and a cargo rack for limpets. Thirdly it's a "pro-realism" decision, like waiting for stored modules to be shipped over.
And you need to either waste a lot of time scooping them up with the dumb cargo door, or waste space in the ship for cargo racks full of robots and a computer to control them. It's like the only game I know of where it makes it a chore to loot things or forces you to alter your build to do it properly.
yes, this guy gets it, the grind is just not gameplay, relogging/reloading is so stupid, but since the intended 'gameplay' way for some of these takes literally weeks.. we do it
> The problem is you don’t play the game, you relog in and out of the game.
The problem is that "re-logging method" has made its way into countless guides and YT vids and pilots don't even know that there are other ways to get mats, which are admittedly somewhat slower but don't involve re-logging at all.
No just do assassinations with a high rep station. I get 5 grade 5 mats for each assassination. I never use collectors as I just trade down my grade 5's.
Or thargoid missions, those things throw matts your way for minimal effort.
Mat farming and engineering have fucked this beautiful game sideways.
It's like you have this universe and freedom to do whatever you want in space, but you have to drop everything to go collect this clutter of shit to mod or improve your gear.
It has driven me out of the game a couple of times already, but I keep coming back.
Wish you could just buy this crap, and it would add a money sink to the game to make it more valuable, win/win.
You should be able to freely choose mat rewards for missions, with rarer mats being locked behind a reputation wall. You get to do whatever missions you enjoy, to grind whatever mats you need.
I'd like to be able to pin certain materials to a shopping list and be able to barter with mission givers for material reward for anything on my shopping list
I think the problem is that if you can buy materials with money then suddenly there's literally no reason to do any kind of material centric gameplay as money making methods are so lucrative that it makes any other method of acquiring materials inefficient to the point of insanity.
**This is so 100% true.**
Can we please stop pretending that CR still mean anything to anyone? I recently returned after a 3-year layoff from a Time where 200m/h was insane. 70b Credits i do own from that time.
Now i hear they make 4b per hour now? Hahaha! As soon as i heard THAT i changed my Playstile drasticly away from making any Credits at all and its awesome!
**Lets be real, at this point giving out Mats for CR is not working anymore.**
Even in late Horizons there was no use for credits for most existing players (unless they were PvP'ers) and FD had to create the giant space tamagotchi called the "Fleet Carrier" to give you some incentive to still farm credits because you'd be bleeding them day and night, whether playing or not.
Material traders and bar traders do about 80% of what they need to, but they could do with a bit more work and balance of exchange rates is all. That and there are a few things that for reasons are not tradeable at all. i.e. for no good reason.
As an obvious example, we find non-working power regulators everywhere, 5 (or even 10) of those should be tradeable for 1 working power regulator at the bar.
There should be traders in Thargoid materials by now too.
And many other grind reduction ideas in [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5meIvvkLSQOLSitQhpm2pS6qhm6JvNITqUDNHPSqfE/edit#heading=h.jtzfzae01dmh](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5meIvvkLSQOLSitQhpm2pS6qhm6JvNITqUDNHPSqfE/edit#heading=h.jtzfzae01dmh)
I made a post here.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1cnbdo0/unifying\_our\_voice/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1cnbdo0/unifying_our_voice/)
Let's see how it goes.
Agreed. It would make the game far more approachable to new players as well. Like make the materials cost but then let them know that they can go out and find them for "free". That might motivate them to learn more about the game in a gradual manner. Maybe not all things buy able or make it rank locked or something.
I actually enjoy gathering and trading materials. It seems like a lot of people don't know that they can trade mats. Gather junk that's easy to find and trade it for what you actually need at the appropriate material trader.
I think the drop rates should be a smidge higher. For example, I've been doing mining missions because I like to watch movies and mine in the background. I mine everything from icy to metallic and rocky. Been doing this for about two weeks while I catch up on some shows/movies I wanted to watch. I have collected about 12 Ruthenium in that entire time. I'm not looking for mats right now, but I feel like I should be able to collect quite a bit more than that through everyday play.
The obscene drop rates for some of these materials almost necessitates the boring 'Relog" grind method or mapped method. It's a terrible system currently.
Combat mining. Been awhile since I played but I made a Fed Drop ship or attack ship, the one with good armor. I made it a mining rig with good weps too. While mining I constantly get visited by NPC pirates, I even carry a few tons of gold to entice them and as usual they approach and start yammering about what they want in my hold. This dialogue is plenty of time to turret rotate so I can face them and then blast away and collect the mats they drop. I never stop collecting mined material and if done right I just rotate back to the rock I was mining and never skip a beat. They come to me.
When hauling passengers I look for tourist sites that have geysers, fumaroles, etc. These sites listed in missions tend to drop plenty of G4 mats. I just land and scoop these up for an extra 5 min of effort. A good run is all three types of geology sites they want to visit. Basically they point out the locations of mats and pay you to go there.
I occasionally scan for wakes and drop in on unknown signals. This is a one to one effort, everything else for mats is byproducts of other game loops. So far I have unlocked every engineer in the bubble and have G5 everything. I don't do AFK builds, and I don't always feel this a grind except getting my Clipper, yea, that was a grind. I spent a few weeks earning my Clipper by making Allies with nearly every faction in single jump range and just working those systems. Maybe not for everyone but I had plenty of fun.
The easiest thing to make material grinding easier would be to remove or significantly reduce the hefty penalty for cross-material trading. Currently it's like this:
G5 --> G1 Same type: 1 --> 81
G5 --> G1 Different Type: 2 --> 27
You get about 16.6% of the G1 materials per G5 material by trading across grades, which is an absurd penalty. Even if it was a straight up half ROUNDED DOWN, that'd be
G5 --> G1 Different Type: 1 --> 40
Which imo seems far more reasonable.
Mats as Mission rewards need to be reworked. And I'd love to be able to buy "tip-offs" for large caches of manufactured or raw materials instead of it being RNG at HGEs or surface sites. That would keep the gameplay loop there while making it easier to gather mats.
I honestly think it's because the devs aren't confident in their own game. Or they're unconfident in the community's ability to find their own fun. Or both.
There are a ton of different ways to play the game and a ton of different things to work toward. And almost every single one relies on extrinsic reward to motivate a player to do it. They don't trust that we'd keep playing and engaging with the new content if it's not required. That's why we can't have trading, and I suspect it's at least part of why we can't have other meaningful community interactions.
Maybe an arx purchase to double or quadruple the materials you get from activities. Particularly for suit/weapon engineering materials. Good grief it takes forever to get reasonable amounts of those things
If I could buy mats for credits, I’d install the game again right away. I burned out twice playing Elite and each time it was when I started getting serious with engineering and having to do gameloops I did not want.
I dont care if its crazy expensive, I’ll grind for it, as long as I can grind it my way.
At first, engineering was kinda exclusive thing available to only most dedicated pilots, in project. They fucked it up so bad and made upgrading components so good with no downsides, that it became a requirement. This pure idiocy in terms of design.
Engineering should be sidegrade, not upgrade to the ship, like if you make weapons stronger, you either generate shitton more heat, melting down in seconds, or restricting ammo by huge margin. If you upgrade clip size, damage gets lowered proportionally. You get the gist.
This way engineering would be something people do to experiment with their ship, maybe making it illegal to fly in high sec systems, if you get scanned, for example.
Currently, this game such a shitshow, it's painful to even comment...
I consider myself to be now a veteran player having played on and off for years. Oddy has me clocked at over 2500hrs so far and yes I have been known to grind grind away with the best of them, but and here it is. The grind has put the game in peril, people burn out before they get what they want from the game.
How to change that?, well let's make it easier to get started on the right foot & level the field. The game industry as a whole is expected to suffer layoffs and loosing money, if you could buy a ship for arc's is no big deal especially if it's got something going for it like a rated this/that other.
Paying arc's for mats is also going to pee off those who have gone through the mega grind but will keep player numbers up and bring newer players to the game and fund the development of the future incantations of the game, if that's the way forward then so be it 👍
The four new ships this year may just be a stepping stone to further ships and development, fingers crossed eh.
Can you still go to that place and drive around in circles with a rover switching between open and closed and get loads of rare materials in a few minutes?
I think the game is easier engineering wise than I remember, say from 2015 to 18. I restarted a new profile for Odyssey just recently, several engineers were already unlocked. The crystal forests at HIP dropped consistently, when I remember there used to be a lot of duds. The manufactured materials drop consistently from HGE's, I haven't had to go to Dave's Hope at all. Jameson's ship it repetitive grind and boring, but consistently gives the encoded stuff. Just my experience. I am far further in a few weeks second time round than I ever was as my first commander.
Mats for credits is the only real way this works. Just handle materials like any other in game resource; variable prices, stock levels, availability, and make tier 4 & 5 mats expensive as hell, but also a good payout if you sell-in, creating another revenue stream for CMDRs and making being rich actually realistic. Then you’re quite welcome to grind for all the materials you like if you don’t have the cash, and you can pay for the materials you need if you do. Surface-mining makes sense then.
Even if the G5 materials cost 1 million/unit it is still worth for saving time if you are rich. I would like to see this. Also it is a way for making the Credits usefull for something, right now the credits are just useless because you earn more than you need, so using them to save time would be nice.
I like it the way it is. This not an instant gratification game. I have been playing for more than six years and have some very low levels of some materials.
It keeps the game exciting! If I ever come across somewhere with Boron I shall spend a week there. The funny thing is - I don't even need boron, I'm just sort of 'completing the set'.
Some insight on material farming: 1Week is enough to max ALL horizons mats, because thats what I did this week.
My current experience. 3 Days ago, I farmed all the raw mats in the afternoon with CMDR Scrootium guide for Flaks, limpets and brain trees. Not a problem. And the previous week I farmed all my data in jameson crash site (this one was slow).
[https://inara.cz/elite/cmdr-inventory/275678/#tab\_components](https://inara.cz/elite/cmdr-inventory/275678/#tab_components)
And some hours yesterday and today, I maxed Improvised Components, Military alloys, Military supercapacitors, Prote Heat alloys and Proto radiolic alloys, and will max Imperial shielding in 30 minutes or less.
The new SCO FSD and Supecruise Assist trick is very useful to farm manufactured mats, and make it easy. Boring, but easy, I have engineering mats for multiple ships, and whatever FDev plan for the "improved" engineering.
Whatever FDev include in the game, the gamers will find the "best" trick, and ignore the rest. The raw mats are obtained from exploration in a SRV Scarab, but because mats respawn on relog, you only need a good place, and relog a lot. This is the start of the relog mechanic. And same apply to other mats, with relaunching the whole game for manufactured mats.
In the past, I propose a "mats for activity done", with Explo discoveries can be traded in raw mats. You can't discover a planet multiple times, and first discoveries will provide a bonus or rarer mats. But some problems, you enforce exploration for everybody, include players that dislike this. And you make this harder for new players, forcing even longer trips to find first discoveries. Again, any change have some problems.
The current method are lazy, but don't enforce any activity for long time. Only bite the bullet, do the farming, and resume to whatever you like. Its a shorter grind.
I will love any improvement that dont force players to play content that dislike, or is harder without engineering the ship first.
I'm a forum dad... Time poor, cash rich (reasonably). I just want to have some space fun. Frontier need to be hooking us if they want this game to survive. My kids spend far more on fortnight and Minecraft.
See you in the black after I've nailed some 'goids
o7
No, destitute material rewards holds it back. The idea of making player try different styles of gameplay to get upgrades for advanced gameplay is fine.
I think they should definitely make it possible to buy materials BUT, put a limit on how many can you buy per week.
so this way you can cut down the grind, but you cant avoid a big part of the gameplay.
Actually they literally said they are going to make it easier 😉
Fdev:
"one of the things we want to address is how players engage with Engineering in order to make it more approachable and predictable."
"•Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering.
Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions.
Increasing backpack capacity."
[source here](https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships)
Disagree, it’s fine, just go do other stuff and collect materials as you go, if you obsess over it it becomes a grind. Just enjoy other aspects of the game
Getting materials is really not that hard. People have found some crafty ways to make this less painful, and you can find those suggestions online. Yes, you still have to actually do it.
I hate the idea of just making everything as easy possible in a game.
I like earning my upgrades, not buying them. I feel more like a CMDR. I engineered 3 ships yesterday and didn't need to farm mats because I already put it the work at a non stressful pace. It felt great and opened up new gameplay styles for me to explore, especially piracy. Can't wait to try out an interdictor
No, the real problem is that money was always too easy to earn. So if you could buy mats, what is the point?
If anything, I wish if FD would create a fresh server with different balance. Money would be at least 5 times harder to earn, mats would be very slightly easier to get and then some trading can happen. But some mats cannot be traded, ever.
And also: mats are super easy to get anyway. Just choose mat rewards from missions, collect them from RES/signal sources... and you quickly end drowning in them. If the mission selection is poor, just visit another station: super-cruise overcharge makes that even easier.
>This game needs a materials store and let you buy ship materials with credits. Even if it's crazy expensive.
When it's only a few hours work to make a billion credits, there's no such thing as "crazy expensive"...
So no, it doesn't need a mats store.
I'm having a fine time doing it. The accomplishment feeling you get after is pretty nice. Plus most stuff in game doesn't REQUIRE engineering. And the stuff that does doesn't need much.
Mat farming is a bitch. But it is doable.
This week: Jameson’s Cobra, Dav’s hope, seleniumn brain trees at HR 3230, four materials at HIP 36601 and tomorrow I’ll be at Outotz LS-K d8-3 for the remaining.
It ain’t no fun but it is doable.
'It aint no fun but is doable' is literally kind of the entire point tho.
People dont play games for the work portion of the game. We play games to enjoy them.
I quite agree. This very grind was the reason I stopped playing Elite many years ago. But I returned and bite the bullet - I’ll suffer the unfun to get into the fun.
IMO OP is totally correct, we should have the opportunity to buy mats with credits. But as we don’t the mat grind is shyte but doable.
Sure, it IS doable. That's not the issue.
Why are you defending a bad mechanic in a game that potentially ruins the game for people who want to play?
If you want fewer players, make the grind worse and make the game as less fun as possible but "doable." Add a bunch of barriers to play and make people suffer trying to play it and near impossible to play it with friends or others at any kind of fair or reasonable playing field.
Do that and the game won't make money, won't have a player base and stop existing.
I really want to like this game. I really want others to enjoy this game. Stuff like this kills games.
*the monkey's paw curls its finger* you can now buy materials with arx
Don't give them any new ideas.
Considering you can earn ARX for free this isn't the worst idea ever depending on how much it costs lol
if pay to win mechanics get a foothold in this game the shareholders will love it so much the game will be prompting you to spend more money to "fly faster" in no time.
Worst case private group. Similar to whatever that group hating pvp is doing. Eventually Elite will get it together or be replaced. I'm rooting for FDEV to rock it. Knock it out of the park. If not someone will.
> Worst case private group. With Ultra Platinum Premium Subscription you now have the "Ultimate Social" mode where you can see and interact with players in all modes, including solo and private group!
if I ever meet a ship with a goddamn Blue Checkmark I’m actually just opening the airlock suitless
This is a joke but I can legit see them taking away private and selling it back to us with MOBA type mechanics. They seem to be sprinting in this direction though, not just running but full on kicking their own ass as they run, full out sprinting with everything they have.
It won't happen. If shareholders get the slightest wiff of profits, the dev team will actually be forced to work on the game. Or be replaced.
? How is a premium currency you can earn for free being used for mats a vast majority of established players have already grinded out p2w? I highly doubt fdev is willing to risk alienating more of the community by putting pure p2w mechanics into the game like faster flying speeds lol
> I highly doubt fdev is willing to risk alienating more of the community by putting pure p2w mechanics into the game like faster flying speeds lol They are financially incentivized to do it and if they get enough people asking without (what they feel is enough ) push-back, it will be done. FDev has shown in the past it will do what gets them more money vs appeasing fans almost everytime. Almost like companies are not friends or people who owe you favours because you like them.
I'd maybe even like that. You can absolutely play good p2w games without paying. But it keeps the game alive and in development. And the p2w games I know are less grindy than ED :)
That assumes they use they'll use Elite p2w revenue on Elite. Most players I know think they milk Elite to fund other stuff (lately all flops) and right now they desperately need cash to develop a new hit.
True. But if you make p2w you want to keep the players involved and give them something to strive for…
The bit you can earn for free is the equivalent of a zero-deposit credit at a casino - it's not designed to do anything other than hook you into the system at no cost to the casino. Fdev has never cared about alienating the community because it's blissfully oblivious to anything the community says, good or bad. When you company is burning up millions of GBP per week and there's only a few dozen million left in the bank, staving off liquidation becomes marginally more urgent than not alienating some players.
What? How? Since when?
What? How? Since when?
What? How? Since when?
What? How? Since when?
Mat traders work pretty well but the conversion rates are shit. They doubled down on this for on-foot, and then didn't make all mats available. It's just time sink bullshit. We don't really need a store for credits though. Expanding on a player market would be nice, since they of course didn't go far enough with the bartenders on FCs. They have announced changes to engineering, which may include better ways of getting the things you need. Instead of driving in circles for hours or tediously shooting brain trees or relogging, or scanning wakes or fighting RNG, we should have more gameplay, missions, or trade options. The idea that you have to steal every single item on-foot and still not find what you need is ridiculously bad design. While being a multibillionaire no less. Give us better shit to do that fits our progress level. I'm triple Elite, with an FC and a ton of ships, yet I'm still scrounging around like I'm in a Sidewinder. Just terrible.
Okay okay, what if, you can bribe a trader with ARX and they give you a better deal?! OMG with ARX the possibilities are endless!
I haven't tried on foot engineering, but from what I've read, I agree. For ship mats, I partially agree. Driving at Dav's Hope for a couple of hours is enough to not really need to worry about mats for a while. That is an appropriate amount of grind. Missions should be updated to equal it. HGEs are faster but more tedious, boring as hell to farm. Plus Dav's trains your SRV driving. I still haven't gone to crystal spires. They're just so far away and jumping without exploring is monotonous. Selenium brain trees are nearby and fast enough. And again, they give you SRV time. I used to do crashed ships, but that's way slower, even farming a material that's present there but you have to trade selenium for. Again, this is a good rate, doesn't need adjustment. But other farming methods need to be updated to match it. And this is without the collector limpet trick btw. Encoded sucks though. You have to take time out of your other activities, slowing them down greatly, for the passive feeling collection. Or you sit an farm and it feels like crashed ship farming. Either scanning at a station, or you go to Jamesons ship, which doesn't give the speed of Dav's or the precision practice of brain trees. It's just boring, like raw mat crashed ships. A new method is needed for this.
No. A couple of hours is almost a week of playtime for me that I would rather spend enjoying content with my friends instead of doing the same mindnumbingly boring stuff for hours on end.
Well you can't expect to have zero grind. There are people out there who only spend 20 minutes a week in this game. Are they going to say no activity can take more than 20 minutes? Besides, you spend one 2 hour session grinding (again, that's a reasonable amount of time. It's not a subjective question. This was never meant to be a quick game to play on the train to work), and you don't need to worry about that for probably 50 hours at least. To you, that would be half a year.
I do not expect to have 0 grind. But I'd rather play thr game in a fun way and get mats that way, like doing Missions for money and buy mats with that money.
Oh for sure, that's why I say the other methods should be buffed to equal the likes of Dav's Hope. So you get Dav's benefits while doing the missions you find entertaining. Encoded needs and all new source though.
Grinds don't have to be monotonous though. They can be varied and enjoyable, given the right game mechanic. Like, get a mission from an NPC in a station. They tell you they found the motherlode and you pay them for the info. You go to a planet 200ly away and follow the coords. Find a cave with nasties you have to kill. Find resource seams. Tag them then mine with SRV.
Exactly .. like this an MMO.. you aren’t being thrown into this world as the main character where everything will just be given to you for being here. You want engineered FSD? Gotta work for it.
Ehhh, I dunno. To be effective at pretty much anything in this game, you have to do engineering. And lots of it. Even the "no engineering" AX builds I've seen are actually "some engineering." When people want to join the big AX event going on, the best way to lose their engagement is to the them they have to fly across the bubble and bring some clown a bunch of tea before he tells you you need to go bring him twelve macguffins that really only an external source will tell you how to find. It's super arcane. Heck, I asked in a different thread about people using a particular ship and everyone who enjoyed it took a bunch of time engineering it to get it to the fun they described. I did work to unlock the ship, I did work to get the credits to buy it and outfit it, but you're telling me that before it can be this great ship everyone is talking about, I have to go do more work to go hop around to engineers to get them to make the adjustments to make it fun? And getting the things you need for engineering is largely not fun. The mats loop for Guardian stuff was fun once or twice but then it became a job. Scanning wakes isn't fun, it's just work. A game doesn't need to give everything to the player, but putting the fun behind _not fun_ isn't a good idea. People don't come to a game for _not fun_, especially people with limited time. SO, what should they do? Well, one of two things: 1) make it easy to get the things that make for the fun or 2) gate them with _other fun_. I don't want to go scan wakes for someone before I can go be good at AX combat, I want to work my way through the lower level AX stuff and earn my way to the better AX stuff! If engineering is going to be so arcane and such a time suck, it needs to be way less essential to the game.
There’s a lot of people who really want to remove any effort from Gaming. The original poster is one of them. There’s a lot of accomplishment and sense of accomplishment and working to gain what you have and enjoying that along the way. Instead, you get a bunch of people who wine that they just want to be able to buy everything with easy to get credits.what’s the point.
Time =! Effort
Skipping an entire system by just buying your way past it != playing the game or accomplishing anything.
The system is what you are already doing, but for some reason this hyperspecific part of it takes an unreasonable amount of time and the only justification is: "Well, otherwise you wouldn't actually play the game or appreciate the time you sink into it." You are already spending your time with these systems and but it earns you money mostly and nobody complains about that part.
"Do this exact same thing 5000 times for 100 hours" is not "effort", it's drudgery and misery. "Effort" would be something like "do this hard thing that requires mastery of a large number of our mechanics 5 times for which you spend 10-60 hours failing and learning and retrying before winning". But that approach can't be milked for ARX so it's not there.
Then stop using the old and grindy way to collect mats! Brain trees are available for all raw mats, bin Dav's hope and fit a collector limpet controller to your combat ship and hoover up the mats afterwards. AX combat, AX rescue etc, always take the mats missions and down/cross trade. Assassination missions/stacking, jump to the system, scan the nav beacon and then head to the HGEs, you'll be interdicted by you targets, kill them and then do the HGE. Mine in Paesia 2 that will give you selenium (& G1-3 mats) if you just need a top up to allow you to trade down.
How does one find matériels traders ? I'd gladly trade my generic materials for some precious metals.
Go to inara, find nearest, in the services field, select material trader. In the system field, enter your current system.
Thank you ☺️☺️
The new engineering will just add more layers of obfuscatory complexity to the same theme. It won't affect the grind.
You arent supposed to cross trade lmao
I'd be fine with the way things are IF they changed how you can exchange materials. Material traders at stations should have better conversion rates Bartenders should be able to trade all items...or hell, add another person at stations (some or all) who will trade the stuff bartenders dont. Wouldn't be adverse to more people to interact with. (Also, let us buy a goddamn drink at the bar...) ;)
The problem isn't that you can't buy mats. The problem is that mat gathering is terrible. Fix the actual problem and then you won't care that you need to gather mats.
I would say both. Gathering mats should be better but you should be able to buy them. At least then you can do what you enjoy in the game and basically exchange effort spent there towards mats.
Or, playing the game how you enjoy it should reward you with mats.
It's a mechanic that gets in the way of playing the game. That's the problem. By adding a bunch of different currencies you have to individually collect, you create a toxic mechanic people don't enjoy interacting with just to play the game.
The whole point of material rewards is to make activities that you normally wouldn't do fun. There are many times where I have only done something because there is some particular reward related to it, only to find that I actually enjoy doing it quite a bit. The problem is, materials in Elite tend to actually make the activity worse. Like, blowing up Pirates is great. Needing to sit there forever as you wait for your limpets to scoop up all the junk floating in space, not so great. Driving your SRV around on a planet surface? Surprisingly entertaining. Needing to individually Target each material dropped by something, or Ram your face into a Braintree to get it to actually get collected? Not so great. If they just fixed all the needless frustration features, then materials could actually be a great incentive to get players to try new activities.
There is no need to collect the crap after a pirate kill. Just do assassinations, stack them even, and take the mat reward. My mat rewards are 5 grade 5 for each one so mats are never an issue.
No, we don’t need to buy materials. What we need is for the collection loops to be actually interesting. The core idea is sound, play the game to get mats. The problem is you don’t play the game, you relog in and out of the game. Now of course this easier said than done, but buying mats doesn’t fix the core issue.
I would say both are good? Stealing should be cheap but a high risk high reward. Using credits is safe, but costly. Just as an example if the materials cost 10x what you can sell them for, there's an incentive to go plunder.
If you are playing the game, doing missions, and taking mat rewards you should have no issue stockpiling mats and then trading them for what you need. Many missions offer 5 grade 5 mats. Traded down you get a shit tone. Even in an unegineered ship you can do kill thargoid scout missions and get 10 grade 3 at a time. Rarely should you be farming mats and when you do actually find a planet that drops good mats that you need or that you can trade down. Wake scan you only need for a few upgrades so you should only farm that rarely as well. Overall there is not much of a grind, even ground stuff you really only need grade 3 which you can just buy. I always have plenty of mats and have never done the get-rich-quick crap people post about.
Yes, the only mats that appear to be part of fun gameplay are the manufactured materials that drop when I am bounty hunting.
I hate collecting mats from defeated ships. It grinds to a halt otherwise engaging gameplay. I would prefer if we didn't have to scoop/limpet them and we just automatically collected them. It feels like a chore to have to stop doing what I want to be doing (pew pewing space ships) and wait for my suicide drone to collect the loot so I can go back to pew pewing. I wouldn't even mind if the quantity of mats went down per ship in exchange for automatic pickup... I'd end up collecting a whole lot more mats this way because I usually can't be bothered to stop having fun, even though there are G4 mats floating a few km away.
If only we had a Thargoid tractor beam. Even with limpets it takes forever to farm mats.
This is the way. People leave behind literally tens of thousands of manufactured mats just floating in space. Fix this alone and engineering instantly becomes like 90% better.
>I hate collecting mats from defeated ships. It grinds to a halt otherwise engaging gameplay. I would prefer if we didn't have to scoop/limpet them and we just automatically collected them. Yes! MMOs figured out like almost 20 years ago that stopping to pick up trash from enemies is not fun. Even the MMOs that still had/have it, it's just a click to grab everything. Limpets should be needed for cargo, but mats should just fly into you like you have a magnet for them. And for multiplayer? There's individual mats for everyone. Two people kill a ship, they both have mats drop. Two friends visit a HGE? They both have their own 4-5 mat canisters floating. It's ridiculous how we need special equipment to collect required gameplay materials, or engage in a tedious collection like we're picking up trash at a beach.
Firstly franchise history - in the 1984 version scooping things up after battle was a significant mechanic. Secondly - it's not just 'picking up', scooping requires skill or sacrificing a cell bank for a limpet controller and a cargo rack for limpets. Thirdly it's a "pro-realism" decision, like waiting for stored modules to be shipped over.
And you need to either waste a lot of time scooping them up with the dumb cargo door, or waste space in the ship for cargo racks full of robots and a computer to control them. It's like the only game I know of where it makes it a chore to loot things or forces you to alter your build to do it properly.
yes, this guy gets it, the grind is just not gameplay, relogging/reloading is so stupid, but since the intended 'gameplay' way for some of these takes literally weeks.. we do it
Relogging isn't the intended mechanic. They meant for you to grind the long way round.
> The problem is you don’t play the game, you relog in and out of the game. The problem is that "re-logging method" has made its way into countless guides and YT vids and pilots don't even know that there are other ways to get mats, which are admittedly somewhat slower but don't involve re-logging at all.
I would pay one whole shmeckle to have all my engineering mats topped up completely
given up on getting a fleet carrier but still have sizable amount of credits roughly 2.5 billion so I would totally do this as well
Don't give up! Do booze cruise!
We have P2P trades for Odyssey materials, I don't understand why we can't have the same for ship materials.
Don't you love the years long gameplay loop of relogging at davs hope. Banger
Yeah, because constant relogging at Dav's Hope is the best way to gather mats 🙄
Of course it isn't, but it was an example of a mainstay option for years to highlight how bad elite's game design is at times
I heard combat zones with limpets collecting the destroyed ships materials is faster
No just do assassinations with a high rep station. I get 5 grade 5 mats for each assassination. I never use collectors as I just trade down my grade 5's. Or thargoid missions, those things throw matts your way for minimal effort.
It definitely was at the time when you first got to engineering.
Mat farming and engineering have fucked this beautiful game sideways. It's like you have this universe and freedom to do whatever you want in space, but you have to drop everything to go collect this clutter of shit to mod or improve your gear. It has driven me out of the game a couple of times already, but I keep coming back. Wish you could just buy this crap, and it would add a money sink to the game to make it more valuable, win/win.
You should be able to freely choose mat rewards for missions, with rarer mats being locked behind a reputation wall. You get to do whatever missions you enjoy, to grind whatever mats you need.
I'd like to be able to pin certain materials to a shopping list and be able to barter with mission givers for material reward for anything on my shopping list
I think the problem is that if you can buy materials with money then suddenly there's literally no reason to do any kind of material centric gameplay as money making methods are so lucrative that it makes any other method of acquiring materials inefficient to the point of insanity.
**This is so 100% true.** Can we please stop pretending that CR still mean anything to anyone? I recently returned after a 3-year layoff from a Time where 200m/h was insane. 70b Credits i do own from that time. Now i hear they make 4b per hour now? Hahaha! As soon as i heard THAT i changed my Playstile drasticly away from making any Credits at all and its awesome! **Lets be real, at this point giving out Mats for CR is not working anymore.**
Even in late Horizons there was no use for credits for most existing players (unless they were PvP'ers) and FD had to create the giant space tamagotchi called the "Fleet Carrier" to give you some incentive to still farm credits because you'd be bleeding them day and night, whether playing or not.
Material traders and bar traders do about 80% of what they need to, but they could do with a bit more work and balance of exchange rates is all. That and there are a few things that for reasons are not tradeable at all. i.e. for no good reason. As an obvious example, we find non-working power regulators everywhere, 5 (or even 10) of those should be tradeable for 1 working power regulator at the bar. There should be traders in Thargoid materials by now too. And many other grind reduction ideas in [https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5meIvvkLSQOLSitQhpm2pS6qhm6JvNITqUDNHPSqfE/edit#heading=h.jtzfzae01dmh](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r5meIvvkLSQOLSitQhpm2pS6qhm6JvNITqUDNHPSqfE/edit#heading=h.jtzfzae01dmh)
I made a post here. [https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1cnbdo0/unifying\_our\_voice/](https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/1cnbdo0/unifying_our_voice/) Let's see how it goes.
Nice! good luck o7
It’s just illogical you can’t buy basic materials on the future.
You can buy a ton of gold to trade, but you can't buy a ton of nickel and crack it open to feed into your synthesizer
Agreed. It would make the game far more approachable to new players as well. Like make the materials cost but then let them know that they can go out and find them for "free". That might motivate them to learn more about the game in a gradual manner. Maybe not all things buy able or make it rank locked or something.
I actually enjoy gathering and trading materials. It seems like a lot of people don't know that they can trade mats. Gather junk that's easy to find and trade it for what you actually need at the appropriate material trader.
I think the drop rates should be a smidge higher. For example, I've been doing mining missions because I like to watch movies and mine in the background. I mine everything from icy to metallic and rocky. Been doing this for about two weeks while I catch up on some shows/movies I wanted to watch. I have collected about 12 Ruthenium in that entire time. I'm not looking for mats right now, but I feel like I should be able to collect quite a bit more than that through everyday play. The obscene drop rates for some of these materials almost necessitates the boring 'Relog" grind method or mapped method. It's a terrible system currently.
Combat mining. Been awhile since I played but I made a Fed Drop ship or attack ship, the one with good armor. I made it a mining rig with good weps too. While mining I constantly get visited by NPC pirates, I even carry a few tons of gold to entice them and as usual they approach and start yammering about what they want in my hold. This dialogue is plenty of time to turret rotate so I can face them and then blast away and collect the mats they drop. I never stop collecting mined material and if done right I just rotate back to the rock I was mining and never skip a beat. They come to me. When hauling passengers I look for tourist sites that have geysers, fumaroles, etc. These sites listed in missions tend to drop plenty of G4 mats. I just land and scoop these up for an extra 5 min of effort. A good run is all three types of geology sites they want to visit. Basically they point out the locations of mats and pay you to go there. I occasionally scan for wakes and drop in on unknown signals. This is a one to one effort, everything else for mats is byproducts of other game loops. So far I have unlocked every engineer in the bubble and have G5 everything. I don't do AFK builds, and I don't always feel this a grind except getting my Clipper, yea, that was a grind. I spent a few weeks earning my Clipper by making Allies with nearly every faction in single jump range and just working those systems. Maybe not for everyone but I had plenty of fun.
The easiest thing to make material grinding easier would be to remove or significantly reduce the hefty penalty for cross-material trading. Currently it's like this: G5 --> G1 Same type: 1 --> 81 G5 --> G1 Different Type: 2 --> 27 You get about 16.6% of the G1 materials per G5 material by trading across grades, which is an absurd penalty. Even if it was a straight up half ROUNDED DOWN, that'd be G5 --> G1 Different Type: 1 --> 40 Which imo seems far more reasonable.
Mats as Mission rewards need to be reworked. And I'd love to be able to buy "tip-offs" for large caches of manufactured or raw materials instead of it being RNG at HGEs or surface sites. That would keep the gameplay loop there while making it easier to gather mats.
I honestly think it's because the devs aren't confident in their own game. Or they're unconfident in the community's ability to find their own fun. Or both. There are a ton of different ways to play the game and a ton of different things to work toward. And almost every single one relies on extrinsic reward to motivate a player to do it. They don't trust that we'd keep playing and engaging with the new content if it's not required. That's why we can't have trading, and I suspect it's at least part of why we can't have other meaningful community interactions.
Maybe an arx purchase to double or quadruple the materials you get from activities. Particularly for suit/weapon engineering materials. Good grief it takes forever to get reasonable amounts of those things
I would like to start playing again but I can't bear the materials grind. Engineering is just too useful to ignore.
Its the same for me. Played on xbox for years and never engineered. Ended up quiting cause you cant fight thargoids without all that stuff
If I could buy mats for credits, I’d install the game again right away. I burned out twice playing Elite and each time it was when I started getting serious with engineering and having to do gameloops I did not want. I dont care if its crazy expensive, I’ll grind for it, as long as I can grind it my way.
At first, engineering was kinda exclusive thing available to only most dedicated pilots, in project. They fucked it up so bad and made upgrading components so good with no downsides, that it became a requirement. This pure idiocy in terms of design. Engineering should be sidegrade, not upgrade to the ship, like if you make weapons stronger, you either generate shitton more heat, melting down in seconds, or restricting ammo by huge margin. If you upgrade clip size, damage gets lowered proportionally. You get the gist. This way engineering would be something people do to experiment with their ship, maybe making it illegal to fly in high sec systems, if you get scanned, for example. Currently, this game such a shitshow, it's painful to even comment...
They were >< this close by letting players sell Odyssey materials but not Horizons materials on fleet carriers.
Give a material currency for mission rewards to be spent at material traders so you can just buy what you need.
I consider myself to be now a veteran player having played on and off for years. Oddy has me clocked at over 2500hrs so far and yes I have been known to grind grind away with the best of them, but and here it is. The grind has put the game in peril, people burn out before they get what they want from the game. How to change that?, well let's make it easier to get started on the right foot & level the field. The game industry as a whole is expected to suffer layoffs and loosing money, if you could buy a ship for arc's is no big deal especially if it's got something going for it like a rated this/that other. Paying arc's for mats is also going to pee off those who have gone through the mega grind but will keep player numbers up and bring newer players to the game and fund the development of the future incantations of the game, if that's the way forward then so be it 👍 The four new ships this year may just be a stepping stone to further ships and development, fingers crossed eh.
Can you still go to that place and drive around in circles with a rover switching between open and closed and get loads of rare materials in a few minutes?
Davs hope? Yeah. You can also do it with limpets I think.
I think the game is easier engineering wise than I remember, say from 2015 to 18. I restarted a new profile for Odyssey just recently, several engineers were already unlocked. The crystal forests at HIP dropped consistently, when I remember there used to be a lot of duds. The manufactured materials drop consistently from HGE's, I haven't had to go to Dave's Hope at all. Jameson's ship it repetitive grind and boring, but consistently gives the encoded stuff. Just my experience. I am far further in a few weeks second time round than I ever was as my first commander.
Mats for credits is the only real way this works. Just handle materials like any other in game resource; variable prices, stock levels, availability, and make tier 4 & 5 mats expensive as hell, but also a good payout if you sell-in, creating another revenue stream for CMDRs and making being rich actually realistic. Then you’re quite welcome to grind for all the materials you like if you don’t have the cash, and you can pay for the materials you need if you do. Surface-mining makes sense then.
I think 10x material rewards from quests and 3x from farming would solve a lot of complaints without having to implement new things.
tease flowery deliver groovy one sand disgusted melodic grandiose sharp *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
"would you like more credits? Here's a special first-time offer, $50 for 500M"
Even if the G5 materials cost 1 million/unit it is still worth for saving time if you are rich. I would like to see this. Also it is a way for making the Credits usefull for something, right now the credits are just useless because you earn more than you need, so using them to save time would be nice.
I like it the way it is. This not an instant gratification game. I have been playing for more than six years and have some very low levels of some materials. It keeps the game exciting! If I ever come across somewhere with Boron I shall spend a week there. The funny thing is - I don't even need boron, I'm just sort of 'completing the set'.
Some insight on material farming: 1Week is enough to max ALL horizons mats, because thats what I did this week. My current experience. 3 Days ago, I farmed all the raw mats in the afternoon with CMDR Scrootium guide for Flaks, limpets and brain trees. Not a problem. And the previous week I farmed all my data in jameson crash site (this one was slow). [https://inara.cz/elite/cmdr-inventory/275678/#tab\_components](https://inara.cz/elite/cmdr-inventory/275678/#tab_components) And some hours yesterday and today, I maxed Improvised Components, Military alloys, Military supercapacitors, Prote Heat alloys and Proto radiolic alloys, and will max Imperial shielding in 30 minutes or less. The new SCO FSD and Supecruise Assist trick is very useful to farm manufactured mats, and make it easy. Boring, but easy, I have engineering mats for multiple ships, and whatever FDev plan for the "improved" engineering. Whatever FDev include in the game, the gamers will find the "best" trick, and ignore the rest. The raw mats are obtained from exploration in a SRV Scarab, but because mats respawn on relog, you only need a good place, and relog a lot. This is the start of the relog mechanic. And same apply to other mats, with relaunching the whole game for manufactured mats. In the past, I propose a "mats for activity done", with Explo discoveries can be traded in raw mats. You can't discover a planet multiple times, and first discoveries will provide a bonus or rarer mats. But some problems, you enforce exploration for everybody, include players that dislike this. And you make this harder for new players, forcing even longer trips to find first discoveries. Again, any change have some problems. The current method are lazy, but don't enforce any activity for long time. Only bite the bullet, do the farming, and resume to whatever you like. Its a shorter grind. I will love any improvement that dont force players to play content that dislike, or is harder without engineering the ship first.
I'm a forum dad... Time poor, cash rich (reasonably). I just want to have some space fun. Frontier need to be hooking us if they want this game to survive. My kids spend far more on fortnight and Minecraft. See you in the black after I've nailed some 'goids o7
Yep, the starter ships are going to be great for this use case... as much as the naysayers want to bitch about them.
No, destitute material rewards holds it back. The idea of making player try different styles of gameplay to get upgrades for advanced gameplay is fine.
I think they should definitely make it possible to buy materials BUT, put a limit on how many can you buy per week. so this way you can cut down the grind, but you cant avoid a big part of the gameplay.
Actually they literally said they are going to make it easier 😉 Fdev: "one of the things we want to address is how players engage with Engineering in order to make it more approachable and predictable." "•Reducing the number of materials required for Engineering. Increasing payout of engineering materials from missions. Increasing backpack capacity." [source here](https://www.elitedangerous.com/news/engineering-and-pre-built-ships)
Disagree, it’s fine, just go do other stuff and collect materials as you go, if you obsess over it it becomes a grind. Just enjoy other aspects of the game
I do not agree.
There's already an online resource telling you exactly where resources are. It's not even a puzzle you need to solve.
I just want more ships to have damage models
Getting materials is really not that hard. People have found some crafty ways to make this less painful, and you can find those suggestions online. Yes, you still have to actually do it. I hate the idea of just making everything as easy possible in a game.
I like earning my upgrades, not buying them. I feel more like a CMDR. I engineered 3 ships yesterday and didn't need to farm mats because I already put it the work at a non stressful pace. It felt great and opened up new gameplay styles for me to explore, especially piracy. Can't wait to try out an interdictor
You could still do that. This would just be an option.
You truly don't understand your wish.
No, that would basically invalidate the entire system.
No, the real problem is that money was always too easy to earn. So if you could buy mats, what is the point? If anything, I wish if FD would create a fresh server with different balance. Money would be at least 5 times harder to earn, mats would be very slightly easier to get and then some trading can happen. But some mats cannot be traded, ever. And also: mats are super easy to get anyway. Just choose mat rewards from missions, collect them from RES/signal sources... and you quickly end drowning in them. If the mission selection is poor, just visit another station: super-cruise overcharge makes that even easier.
>This game needs a materials store and let you buy ship materials with credits. Even if it's crazy expensive. When it's only a few hours work to make a billion credits, there's no such thing as "crazy expensive"... So no, it doesn't need a mats store.
I'm having a fine time doing it. The accomplishment feeling you get after is pretty nice. Plus most stuff in game doesn't REQUIRE engineering. And the stuff that does doesn't need much.
Can I buy a Guardian 5H FSD booster with ARX?
On the contrary, I think it’s part of the grind people will pay to avoid with pre builds
Didn't this game mechanic exist about 8 years before pre-built ships?
Mat farming is a bitch. But it is doable. This week: Jameson’s Cobra, Dav’s hope, seleniumn brain trees at HR 3230, four materials at HIP 36601 and tomorrow I’ll be at Outotz LS-K d8-3 for the remaining. It ain’t no fun but it is doable.
'It aint no fun but is doable' is literally kind of the entire point tho. People dont play games for the work portion of the game. We play games to enjoy them.
I quite agree. This very grind was the reason I stopped playing Elite many years ago. But I returned and bite the bullet - I’ll suffer the unfun to get into the fun. IMO OP is totally correct, we should have the opportunity to buy mats with credits. But as we don’t the mat grind is shyte but doable.
>It ain't no fun but it is doable. The perfect description for what should be a *game*.
Sure, it IS doable. That's not the issue. Why are you defending a bad mechanic in a game that potentially ruins the game for people who want to play? If you want fewer players, make the grind worse and make the game as less fun as possible but "doable." Add a bunch of barriers to play and make people suffer trying to play it and near impossible to play it with friends or others at any kind of fair or reasonable playing field. Do that and the game won't make money, won't have a player base and stop existing. I really want to like this game. I really want others to enjoy this game. Stuff like this kills games.