How engineering broke Elite Dangerous...

[Music] so let's talk about engineering oh come on I promise it will be interesting and it's very important yes I know that a lot of people just check out as soon as this topic comes up but please stick with me I think that engineering is probably the most important and beneficial system that elite has ever received it's a potential force for incredible good but with it has also come some unexpected consequences my aim with this video they say blob thing mega rant whatever you want to call it is to examine the system and present a few arguments why it must change and over maybe even some solutions to a few of these issues because right now you can have game breaking over powered ships weapons and whatnot else through which the game itself becomes less challenging unfair less stable and obviously more grindy while I believe with the careful thinking and planning it is possible to strike a sweet spot we must look deep within to see how we got here so let's start from the beginning what is engineering well that question may seem simple but harder to answer than you think see in game there's not much information as is and that honestly would be the first place that we could put in some improvement but anyways my question is is it an upgrade system or a side grade system now after contacting developers I got somewhat certain answer that the main thing is upgrade alike system while the experimentals are kind of sideways yeah this is going swimmingly already I know but bear with me generally engineering is an upgrade system to which you can further customize your ships to quite the unique degree now in order to examine where it goes wrong we also must take a crash course in its development history oh boy so at first it was introduced on the second update for horizons season pass yes it's still called that it's a season pass engineering was the other half or the actual gameplay for planetary landings and a primary motivator for it through different tasks you were rewarded these new things called materials which shut first were capped at 300 or was it 500 or was it thousand well in case the point was that for materials it was all one big pot not a separate storage that we have for every material today so that was designed to limit the amount of rolls you could do at one time that can be good forcing you not to over farm things and take a break to go and spend all the materials you got on engineering once you're full as well as not allowing the player to do too many rolls at one time oh and speaking of design and originally intended gameplay back in the day in order to get a higher tier upgrade you had to have a commodity item in your cargo hold as well safe to say that was quickly removed as it was really clearly annoying for a lot of us and further limited the ability to do more upgrades but generally everyone just hated it as it was annoying and if that already doesn't sound pretty annoying the first version of engineering if some of you remember they'd look like a slot machine a gambling slot machine where also other weapons that each got a random brawl so that basically means that every slider bar was not affected by others yeah this took me about five minutes to code I mean really how hard is this because of this you were not guaranteed to get a better roll or at least balance wise equal but different outcome this made every ship ever so slightly different but that also meant that you would have a chance to waste your time by providing objectively worse results so basically the system was designed to waste your time but potentially nullifying any work you had put in gathering materials however this after about two years of countless complaints was changed or more proper every role is better than the last system that made it more rewarding err and predictable both the players and developers yet to introduce changes you can't just remove everyone's engineer modules wiping them even if you compensate them in some form or another no you also can't just nerf the value proportionally to fit the new system that would mean the people would stick with the old modules and we have to have old modules of course so no no no no not this one oh and of course you can't just force players to just have their modules converted to the new system that would hurt some Care Bear PvP players feelings so if you can't wipe if you can't clench up well the only way is to let it all go and go this is where developers were too afraid to just put their foot down and say for the betterment and fairness of the game even though many of you we know have spent incredible amount of time in the system we'll have to give up your upgrades so we all can get a better game overall it is a sacrifice we must all make and I'll talk about that at the end as well but why not offer a compensation to players according to their roles they have done to get rid of the old system was that too inflammatory and you don't want to burst hemorrhoid well thanks that we got a little bit more of a power creep of a feature this is where le developers should have learned from warframe developers and their willingness to remake a system but I digress now is there a point to this why not just get rid of the system if you say it's so bad to answer that let's first look at them why is engineering such a good thing and why people choose to use it [Music] yes their upgrades to further improve your ships but there is not just one single upgrade for modules allowing you the choice of improving aspects of your ship while getting a little downside somewhere else like increasing the speed of your ship but in process of that having your ship put out more heat amount of upgrades and side grades especially with experimental effects open the never-before-seen flood of unique builds and insane customization now I frankly love this idea and it truly makes what a wonderful end game content it wasn't just the rewards but the way you would be given these upgrades as well through encouraging players to go out and do multiple different types of game place was also wonderful okay I see you're kind of confused there so maybe I should explain with an example there Bob say you want improve ships jump right well for that you need an engineer that can do it so first you need to learn where the engineers located and to do that usually you have some sort of a task given to you say travel 500 light-years simple right okay once that's done the engineer will request you to do another job say deliver 10 units of tea for them because you know he's a brexit man I mean British okay you did that too now you have already done two tasks but different ones first you travelled and explored probably along the way and having done that shown that you know how to navigate next since you have shown that you can navigate you will go to a specific place and then trade then return this is very organic game design that I don't see much in a lead but with engineers it was nice to see anyway you unlock the energy and now you want to get that upgrade well to get that done you need three materials as the upgrade asks one raw one manufactured and one end coded this too is basically game designer asking you to do few different things for the upgrade first they're all material this is usually found on planet surfaces as you drive along so you need to just do some ester be driving for this one second the manufactured this one you can get from blowing up ships or finding it in signal sources so usually call but is the thing that is asked here and third the encoder you usually get this from scanning things basically looking at something a non-combat exploratory style gameplay so it usually devolves into just looking at ships from afar so it's not very good still no matter how you slice it the fact is that you were offered an upgrade if you proved that you have done a little bit of everything it's a common game design tactic which makes game play very organic and can lead to some great things like player being introduced to gameplay that they end up loving and all that because there was a good incentive to try it out in the first place that has an idea sounds great but we're not here because everything is great far from it I would say that everything is horribly unpolished and malformed sometimes barely designed or tested okay I miss you know game design Wow smart Grotto Wow but why do we need to make sure that the system's become balanced towards power creep see thanks doc grades things get more powerful and where there is power there's the lack of it as well a good example is just to compare an average Joe who say has one or two upgrades at 50% done and he encounters a player who has maxed out everything how big is the chance that that average Joe will actually be able to escape with his life not to mention fight back or how big is going to be the power gap between the two opposing traders who try to play Power Plus okay sorry nobody plays power play let's say background simulation yes bgs say two players compete by supporting their favorite faction how big is going to be the power difference between those two or how big could it ever get now that is what you need to keep in mind to make the game these are the things questions and more that you need to keep in mind when designing a PvP environment for non RPG game now if you could segment and match players with equally powered players yes that'd be a lesson an issue but they'll eat is an open-world sandbox and we must not only make sure that the PvE environments NPCs and more are properly adjusted but also the tools that the players use on each other like it or not my solo playing elitist this game is an MMO devs themselves branded as such wait it's an RPG remember that engineering also widens the gap between the players who play with horizons and those without so making sure that the PvP or co-op gameplay is not horribly skewed towards one thing you'll make sure that the game is rewarding interesting and fair of course with power creep there's also a massive disservice that is done to challenging gameplay you see with all the power and customization it's so easy to drive the gameplay into a stale and boring meta corner where there's just only one strategy that's so much more effective than anything else it'd be stupid to pick anything else further once everyone yeah I am su flaunted your hypercritical claims left and right but you've yet to present how is engineering broken oh you want examples well strap on in my friends it's pegging time first there are upgrades in the system that are literally a waste of your time and materials one good example here is a system focused power distributed upgrade this one's a counterpart in exact numbers as the engine or weapon focused once but unlike them we don't have tools on our ships that benefit from this the same way the other two do for weapons you do need that extra regeneration and capacity to make just pupils happen for engines you can either more frequently boost or use the leftover pips for other parts of your ship but for systems there is no module that would drain it on triggers so much nor does the system energy benefit from more capacity or regeneration beyond of what the Pips offer also if you need regeneration and capacity alone then why sacrifice engines and weapons when you can pick the general regeneration and gen all capacity upgrades for all three instead this upgrade seems to be placed in the game just to fit that checkbox for developers without examining if you actually would need it and it's not alone there are others the so-called templated upgrades that are just tossed in to mark a checkbox but is it the worst thing in the world of course not yet it plainly shows that there hasn't been care given enough to make sure that it at least make sense and as we move on further you'll see where that can lead anyways let's move on to another example in many cases it be the flow control experimental well a sigh great as developers claim a side grade two watts sigh grade implies a compensative loss somewhere for the benefit you gain but I don't think the developers know what they themselves are talking about here or at least the PR people okay let's say the PR people who gave me this answer are wrong experimentals actually our upgrades well some upgrades are better than other upgrades to a point where they are almost objectively better and that's my point there are plethora of choices that have not been paired with their alternatives to make sure neither is overpowering on the others in the system without so much as a fourth on yeah what's this it's an upgrade is it ope no I don't think so but I'd like some feedback on each other and put it in I don't care about the green balance or not X don't make me another microtransaction yes most of these copy pasted ones are inferior in fact but still positive so not many call them out but then why have them are you telling me that you place them in here just as a trap for stupid people to waste player's time and effort while masquerading as a positive but okay let's keep on going Halloween now if you're talking about copy pasted and template the design did you know that with a few exceptions Engineering is a percentile based system now this can be done just as well as fixed value systems and as well equally horribly twisted in the wrong way as we shall learn in a moment but for garetty of modules the stat increase is not so much as curated and set with an exact expectation but rather given a blanket round that percent our number and forgotten about of course even when the result is Shelby puts borderline special needs and so as an example I present the case of heat sinks versus other utilities so there is this really useful upgrade for mo that utility self it most importantly gives 50% a more capacity but even before we stepped into the rink of balancing the game has piled driven or phases in the mod by not telling you that it does not increase all the ammo it increases the additional ammo that is not already loaded in the proverbial gun well in total heat sinks have three charges one loaded and two extra and thanks to this upgrade it gets one extra making it for total the game misleads you making you think that you get more but in reality instead of that 50% you got thirty three percent total increase meant now on the other hand chaff has one charge loaded and ten extra so thanks to this upgrade you get total of sixteen charges and that gives you forty-five percent improvement instead of fifty oh and even better yet the point defense it has 12 shots in a magazine and additionally carries 10,000 extra ammo and so thanks to this upgrade you get fifteen thousand twelve bullets which of course leads us to forty nine point nine percent improvement first you clearly see how heat sinks though the most useful of the bunch gets what I call template copy pasted because developers wanted to make it easy on themselves they just copy the same upgrade for all utilities disregarding whether it made sense or not and whether or not it represented things correctly or not as well and second you can clearly see that this template was driven by heat sinks and sure give us that one extra charge it's nice but then utilities that don't really matter get absurd buffs that they don't themselves really need fly the point offense so now tell me when was the last time any any of you ever ran out of point defense ammo ever without the upgrade do you really need it or could have you perhaps use something else to fight oh I don't know pecans maybe basically what the game designers did here was take the strongest thing and balance according to it and never even bother to look if the upgrade that is given to others like it or in the same class even need it all make any sense we are returning to the same old Aaron just thought that what depend for check mark principle and of course he things also get the 50% reload increase meant well others only have 10% because who cares right others are not all P so we can buff them to high heaven oh but way the lack of competency is called question not only for game designers but also QA testers thanks to this upgrade you see every time you die you spawn in the station with your ship and get all the ammo resupplies except for explosive weapons now I still don't understand why this decision was made it's very stupid as we often forget did manually resupply them and we leave or swap weapons but anyways utilities like point defense and chaff with this upgrade added also get resupplied properly yet heatsinks only get the standard to charges back I know this is a nitpick but it has been in the game since the start they clearly tested and coded that you would get back that 15,000 point defense bullets but not the three extra charges for heatsink remember these developers have not gone back to reexamine the system at all even when making engineering 2.0 because how else this bug would be still from 2016 existing no one cares move on okay well you want to see the best example of the proof that this system is percentile based and no one cares to double-check their own work look no further than your own ship's hull more precisely lightweight bulkheads if you apply heavy duty upgrade onto them you may conveniently also see something missing from the list of changed values you see the negative effect is gone yes just like that it's gone well normally inspecting this upgrade for bonkers you will see the negative mass increase now why would that be why would developers choose to remove the negative effect for your basic Hall yet leave it in for the other types even but the game's logic makes zero sense as you attempt to harden your Hall and beefed it up with more armor as you put more on it's obviously it gets heavier yet here you don't answer to this is the aforementioned percentile based improvements see lightweight bulkheads unlike other bulkheads have the mass of zero now if you take a zero multiply anything you want the result is still a zero see the issue with all these percentages and not fake stats is that the bigger the value the bigger than increase proportionally but in elite a game where you can have both super small ships and super large ones occupying the same space these multipliers get out of hand super quick and caused ever larger gaps between the weakest and the strongest but as it happens the biggest case of the brokenness actually is caused by a rare case of fixed value system so I present you the case of shield boosters so how could this go wrong as an example let's take a heavy-duty upgrade and an a graded booster so for anyone with a working brain this is the simple calculations at default it has 20% boost and it ends up with 73.9 so the improvement is three hundred and seventy percent wait what and better yet if we take an e rated booster that has only mere 4% boost and apply the same upgrade it goes to fifty point seven percent which is a case of just think about that for a moment now in comparison if you take hull armor that bulkheads or Hall reinforcements will go about 100 percent improvement so the total hull bit based of upgrades won't be doubling your HP but with shields the things that prevented me from targeting your internal modules and damaging them Plus are regenerative on top can go from almost three thousand to ten thousand points effectively more than tripling this regenerative super protective health this is a matter of right has been a long-standing issue with elite and the primary cause of many unfair it is here I present you the case where someone did not know how to do double multiplication despite probably having a higher education in programming now I don't want to rag on British education but diam now I could talk all day about this particular upgrade and how it causes le to be very stale and boring to fight in but the way she'll boosters work to is a case of oversight so in general shield boosters represent the very worst of fixed and percentile based stat upgrades this is where the unchecked and careless design can lead and this is where I urge you my dear viewer to be smart and ask for change and developers to have enough balls to change things ok let's say we get the booster changes will that change things maybe but as long as we have engineering breathing down our necks we won't get our case in point feeling beams many shiver even thinking about the subgrade so to put it bluntly here's what one small and I repeat small beam laser with this upgrade can do now I challenge you to tell me how that that's right there is balanced fair and you really really need it oh and once you're done with that take a look at the miscellaneous upgrades this is the case of the workdays almost done here this will do the rest no one cares anyways it feels like everything that is not a weapon core module shields or hull are like that eighth child in the family just there by the accident or just because you thought that number eight is lucky and you just had to have it rather than actually going out and making it interesting and unique instead just wrap everything up in one bundle and shove it out kind of careless in a pathetic if you ask me again and I guess more than anything the message here is that engineering is a half a system with copy pasted and minimally altered values oh but let's say you're a new player to the game and don't even know what pips mean let alone engineering all that you know is that there are upgrades and you need them well isn't it nice that engineering has literally no information about itself in the game or rather very very little and even then it's questionable case in point wide-angle scanners its description reads as following your like family and family gets the best improves the angle at which the scanner works but increases mass and scanning time you won't find any better in the bubble and its effect okay so where's the weight penalty what maybe back in the day it had dad but clearly the Scriptures have not been updated since that and you expect players to trust you oh but then they got experimentals like oh let's pick um say screening shell modified firing and targeting mechanism decreases reload times and increasing effectiveness against missions well did you get that do you understand what it does oh good oh wait experimentals are the biggest pain showers of this lack of exploration that engineering has for example did you know that screening shell doubles the pellet count when you shoot that the load is important information probably expect your players to know what the hell they're doing in the game if you never tell them anything what game design school teaches you to not tell your players anything and expect that to be a good thing this also applies to weapons to have the info is missing most of the time but I digress you know I did ask you my dear viewers a little while back what's the worst part about engineering and frankly answers were not surprising its material grinding now here's the thing my friends you need to understand two things before we move on number one material grinding is designed to be grindy to make you play the boring loops for a long time that's how a designer's managers producers think you can make good gameplay that's never changed since day one and number two T reels will never be exchangeable for credits or commodities period so about number one engineering is the intended endgame loop and has been built to take a lot of time and like you I despise it as for number two it seems a lot of you have this weird misconception that materials are like things real things that just because it has a name you understand it actually is that thing like say iron you think that this is an actual item in game or something so that means you also expect it to have functions or features like iron but it's not I suppose I should explain it better let's say Elite is like a carnival Fair you look around and walk around and think okay I'll go play some BB gun shooting thingamajig right once you've done it the owner gives you the ticket labelled ayran then you ask for that's far and the owner tells you that with enough tokens like these you can go and exchange them for a prize in the engineering tent does that mean that this token is made of ayran or has any value or is designed to be sold for money obviously not materials are just like credits in elite they are a form of currency and clearly not to invalidate one game play grinding loop with another they will clearly never have exchange rate this is that weird thinking I noticed among few who suggest buying materials with credits basically without thinking you're implying here hey devs I want to use a completely unrelated gameplay to earn tokens that are designed for some other gameplay like going to a cave Mining rocks and getting the best flower bouquet out of it instead of rocks so no you will never buy materials with credits deal with it however people complain about material gathering calling it a grind where a lot of people just simply outright refuse to use that just because of the absurdity of grinding that you are asked to do just to get one module fully kitted and they're not wrong it doesn't help that the gameplay that was originally intended for gathering these materials is still absurd farce like for example to get an F is the increased jump range update probably the most popular upgrade original intended gameplay for it is to do a few different gameplays like driving on a planet's surface and doing some combat but most importantly you need to do something that includes FS DS and so and so forth so what you need to do is sit in space somewhere and wait until NPCs are jumping to another system Wow gosh gameplay such potato no seriously I'm not joking this is the original intended gameplay and rewards are purely random based so no skill no predictability just constant by slowly so you can unlock a better tier upgrade where is the value in such a gameplay in a normal game to get the biggest sword you don't need to go to the starter village and kill boars on hours on end but in elite that's exactly what you do and the same thing can also be said about most of material gathering and its gameplay everything is rng based which smells a poor haphazard thrown together gameplay no skill just luck oh yeah sure elite is not a game with gambling glue boxes in what not else but it sure feels like I'm constantly rolling your dice without the loss of money only time so really your jumbling your time nameks everyone knows you go to gobs hope or crash gems and Cobra to collect materials mmm yes that's what the smart folks do but that's not what developers seemingly had intended those are outliers of that engineering gameplay anomalies if your world that never were particularly intended so the material rewards in missions still random and really was originally intended as the second attempt to alleviate the need to grind if you're curious the first attempt was to increase the material pick up from one to three yes back in the day when you still had commodities for roles required you will be picking up materials one per chunk rather than like three now data logs should tell you how misguided the design was as for material exchangers again this is developers trying to sidestep the actual issue rather than dealing with it head-on a children's bandage on a land mines victim what developers are basically saying with this move was oh yeah if you found a way to grind unless there are higher tier materials and find it more interesting well you could grind art and then heavy penalties exchange them for desired things aren't be good this is exciting it praised our genius yeah it's always about not being willing to put your foot down and putting in effort and making sure that the gameplay is fun and interesting instead let's make a cheap fix so that they stop whining for a few weeks with all these issues and all this what looks like massive incompetence the designers the director of the game hell even QA staff don't seem to have cared to actually grind out the whole engineering like we have to like they force us to do instead just using their dev cheats ignoring majority of the game that they have created every time developers go on their little streams and talk about the engineering they seem so disconnected from the game and the gameplay it's shocking and I'm saying this because no one who would actually have to play this like we have to would let this go on for long not to mention that the fleet carriers first iteration basically show how out of touch the developer team is it is time to change and it has to be done in a big way out way that is not sidestepping the issues we don't need another useless item like first-rate launcher to deal with these massive shields we don't need a material trader to appease some Care Bears who sing your praises about being courageous when talking about grinding we need an actual change a complete rework of the system and you know what I do have a few ideas where we can get started every day when I come bearing some amazing things but here's a little bit to get us started now let's start with the simplest things of course and easy to understand that even game director could comprehend number one put all the stats changes and information on-screen about the upgrades and experimentals just gave the player in four so that we don't have this greeting us every time we go grinding your game that truly is No reason not to give the players old in for possible know if there is a reason I offer my counter-argument oh my you're at it how about you check if the description actually matches what the upgrade does and also that you don't look like a complete incompetent fool the number two if you want to still be lazy and garner positive press just increase the drop price for materials all round that's it just change materials from tree per pick up to six or twelve boom positive press done but let's say you want to put an effort and go a little bit more drastic on the changes okay now we're talking number three how much you get rid of engineer leveling now this was put into game because basically you were able to immediately roll grade fives but since you don't need to do that it feels like a remnant of the past it really doesn't add any grindy gameplay nor gameplay benefits to the player so instead just simplify unlocking engineers to make the system a bit more appealing that said number four to further simplify engineering allow people to engineer everything anywhere get rid of the pinned upgrades and instead introduced a timer if you really need some sort of penalty for not engineering at the engineers own base like as if you're transferring the module to him and telling him what to do with it and then he transfers back to finish thing this again is nothing but a time waster and if you really want that how about a good old-fashioned time war number five like say you're even more courageous remove tier four and five upgrades why well simple reduce the power creep that exists in the game if you don't want to balance it this is a lot simpler than going module by module and making sure that everything is balanced so just remove the top end of the power creep features its drastic I know but as you will learn I am ready to make sacrifices number six to further reduce the randomness and increased predictability and fairness remove rolling just set exact amount of materials that are required four hundred percent fifty percent or whatever other and upgrade enough with our AG stuff make it fair but okay let's say you're like me and actually want to put in proper effort in your work and do your damn best you are willing to make sacrifices to produce the better future for all well these are the more drastic changes I would recommend taking number seven complete overhaul and redesign of upgrades first remove everyone's upgrades yes this will cause every care on PvP PvE and what not else to scream like someone's burning their testicles but in order to remake something you must destroy of course you have to compensate everyone for the free upgrade tokens and what intell's for they're all they have done in their lifetimes I mean this is being recorded in codecs after all so there's not even a need for calculations or anything but once you make it in you examine and calculate make sure every upgrade makes sense and has its purpose if you're scared that this won't work I present you warframe they remade several parts of their game even several times and people recognize the effort after examining it and even grow to love it and realize that it was all for the better warframe and countless other games have shown that this has been done and can be done so I implore you to here number eight alternatively remove engineering completely sure this will invalidate the time that the people have spent because of this system but in the form it is right now it's trash and make silly dangerous in the old worst game than it was before it of course I do prefer the number seven method but if you don't want to go through all of that well this is kinda better nothing is better than what we have right now and that is for the sake of games fun elements it'd be more fair error gameplay and I'm willing to give up my engineering modules and time off just to have a better future we through the complete removal as I suggest here or the previous one which I again prefer more so there you go and I asked onto you are you ready or even interested to make a similar sacrifice or are you just okay with the status quo in the end there's really not much left to say the point I'm making is that engineering that only uses haphazardly thrown together buffs that make some things pointless while others outrageously powerful there is missing information in general the system Portland breaks the game and I do wish engineering was remade with interesting and fun more importantly fair but varied features see I love the customization and many of you probably do too but as is the astounding ineptitude and even basic reasoning is abandoned for current engineering the power creep has settled in and we all live in a very monotone status quo I really wish there would be a change for this and you my dear viewer could help that happen so I asked all go out and talk about this let developers know that you want the change and change for a better game share my video if you like but I encourage to go and let your voice in opinion be heard on forums as unfortunately developers don't acknowledge read it as a valid place still we can send a message and it has to be allowed one believe it or not but beating the dead horse does attract attention so take your favorite sticks and twigs show me your best swing uh-oh you're still here um well thanks for watching it's been a massive undertaking truly this is the second such massive video that I've done it's never easy but the help through patreon supporters and stream supporters and what else is incredible so if you too want to join I really would appreciate it links down below oh and of course some merch lling says well there so check those out um what else ah oh if you want to watch some of other videos I mean they are probably floating around somewhere but I do do streaming too so YouTube and twitch check those out oh but if you want to discuss things further join the discord um so yeah nearing hundred thousand subscribers slowly but still steadily so the dream is kind of coming true right I guess I need to go and rest

Channel: TheYamiks

Views: 224,715

Keywords: engineering, dangerous, developers, horizons season pass, upgrade, upgrades, analysis, video essay, essay, rant, tirade, engineer, engineers, critique, stats, overpowered, broken, underpowered, inbalanced, balance, gamebreaking, experimentals, elite dangerous engineering, elite dangerous horrible engineering, How engineering broke Elite Dangerous, elite dangerous broken engineering, elite dangerous engineering 2020, elite dangerous broken, elite dangerous balance, elite dangerous video essay

Id: JsnBg0Utf5k

Length: 40min 48sec (2448 seconds)

Published: Wed May 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/jessecrothwaith]

I agree with a good bit of the video (all 40 minutes of it). but I think the solutions is to replace grind with skill. Early in the game you learn skills like how to fly, how to dock, how not to hover over the wrong landing pad. But late game the skills become grinds. There have been glimmers of hope but what really needs to happen is there needs to be a high level skill that gets you lots of materials. Something like wining an SRV race, crossing a designed combat zone, smuggleing something in a high security system, something that make you feal like you deserved to win something.

[u/mithos09]

Frontier has removed the video from the post on the official forums, stating it's "offensive/objectionable content".

[u/[deleted]]

Engineering is ok as a concept but it is a major fucking grind and is not fun. A game should be fun, engineering isn't. The problem is though when such a feature is added to a game everyone has to do it or else you're left behind.

[u/ArmySquirrel]

My favorite engineering feature trap right now is around Hull Reinforcement Modules. Take a 5D Hull Reinforcement Module that you put into your Class 5 slot and decided you want something lighter, hypothetically, maybe because you have some minimum jump range or you just feel like your ship is a little sluggish, whatever, so you make it Lightweight. Well, congratulations, you've fallen for the Engineer's trap card. Now take a 4D Hull Reinforcement Module, put it in your Class 5 slot, and make it Heavy Duty. This 4D Heavy Duty HRM is superior to a 5D Lightweight HRM in all ways, including mass, and can use a smaller optional slot.

And let's be real, why does the Lightweight HRM give you a hull boost? Nothing else in HRMs gives a hull boost, they give flat numbers. It just seems so arbitrary like the devs felt they had to change it because they were scared of what lightweight might do to... small... ships? But as you can see, if weight is an issue, just using a smaller slot has become flatly superior.

[u/CMDRZapedzki]

Meh. Yamiks played the game to death, got bored with it, and now just makes fairly monotone videos whining about being bored with the game. Haven't enjoyed his stuff since it just degenerated into whininess. This was no different.

[u/Noodlespanker]

Who is your target here? New players? Engineering, which isn't really all that bad, now sounds like some sort of hell. Fdev? You think Fdev is going to sit through 40 minutes of rambling and ranting about engineering? Is it really just to vent your hate at the game in general? Why are you still playing and making videos about it then? Engineering is not even close to that hard of a grind.

I can't say I'm a fan of the negativity and hate about everything. You sound like someone who sits on game forums all day instead of playing the game. You're oblivious to the game being improved and cite things like Jameson Crash and material traders site as mistakes when they obviously made the game better and engineering much more accessible with the right knowledge. That's gameplay! Look at Exegious, Obsidian, D2EA. They voice their complaints but they don't just trash everything about the game and they don't slam the developers with personal attacks.

At the end of your 40 minute video I notice you have some suggestions.

Showing more accurate information about engineering. 100% agree. Absolutely best idea 10/10.

The rest lol what even. Removing the G4 and G5 grades of engineering retroactively across the game? That's more nonsensical and out of touch with the game than anything I've seen Fdev do. And then you mock them saying they "don't have the balls to do it". Well, I'm actually glad they aren't programming the game with their balls.

You make some valid points but you need to calm down and frame them in a way that isn't rambling. You're a funny guy and I generally in the past have enjoyed the videos, but there are steps to formulate an argument for something if you want to see it changed. I'm not saying Fdev doesn't deserve a few jabs here and there but straw-manning them as slack jawed idiots does not help your cause.

[u/eikenberry]

Engineering could use a few tweaks but is critical to the game and really needs to be greatly expanded. One of Elite's biggest weaknesses is the limited ship selection and engineering makes up for that by allowing the few ships there are to be heavily customizable. I would have stopped playing years ago if they hadn't introduced engineering, in fact I did and started back up once they had added it (and fixed it).

[u/Fus_Roh_Potato]

If they ever wanted to dive back in and make something fair of it, they could always create a ticket system.

For every G5 you have that they have to change or remove, you get a ticket to reapply a G5 mod to anything you want, anywhere you are, maybe even while floating in deep space.

I have a few rework ideas as well. Imagine mods that are more simplified and balanced, but you could install multiple mods on a single item. Once installed, you could later adjust the mod in station. For example:

You buy G5 overcharged and G3 efficient. These two mods become the same charge mod, where overcharged is 'right', and efficient is 'left'. Overcharged increases DPS, but reduces DPE, effectively increasing alpha potential at the cost of sustainability. Efficiency modding then does the opposite. If you purchase these mods, you could later, in station, slide the setting anywhere between G5 OC and G3 Eff for that weapon.

It has the potential to be balanced and fair, but it'd need numbers that look something like this:

• G5 overcharged: 150% damage, 180% energy draw. Increments 10% damage, 16% energy.
• G3 efficient: 85% damage, 70% energy. Increments 5 and 10.

It's not just balanced and fair, but also allows a player to experiment and tweak later on to try out different play styles or to fight against certain builds. It also has the potential to save a ton of storage space because you don't need to store efficient weapons and overcharged weapons.

Then, the other idea is to be able to put multiple of these 'combined' mods on a single item, presuming the mods are all very simple and balanced, this should be viable.

For example, a cannon might be fitted with 3 mods: Barrel length, durability, and caliber. Barrel length allows you to either lengthen or shorten the barrel. In one direction, it increases projectile velocity and reduces jitter, but increases heat and decreases fire rate. A shorter barrel does the opposite. Durability is an easy one, trade weight for integrity. Caliber changes the projectile size and charge, and is sort of the kinetic version of an overcharged/efficient weapon. Larger caliber increases damage, but increases heat, energy draw, and decreases ammo pool substantially.

[u/Seria_Mau_G]

I hope they'll be bold enough one day. I'm not counting on it, but I still hope.