I wonder if that's why all the engineers I know are roleplayers Perhaps they're just trying to balance out the amount of randomness in their lives
But yeah, in magic worlds it kind of makes sense (iirc there's an enchanter in Torchlight who sticks random enhancements on items) on the principle that maybe magic is unstable/random in nature, but for high tech it makes very little sense at all...
I think it was a very poor decision on Frontier's part. Unless you actually play the game you don't get a sense of quite how rare some of these requirements are. Even when given the information what type of system, what type of status the system is in, what type of signal sources to jump out on etc it can take hours, potentially days to gather requirements for one particular upgrade, only to get a bad roll of the dice. It's like slapping the players in the face.
I think when they made the system they didn't intend for people to gear their whole play style to obtain maxed grade 5 roles to create uber ships, but PVPers did exactly that and thus ended up with way superior ships to fight with (or grief with). Go to a community goal (week long mission for good cash reward for those who don't own the game, which attracts players like moths to a flame and you'll be constantly harassed by CG griefers who just kill regular players for sport. Sure I guess it's part of the game but it does become irritating when it's very common place. Fortunately I have a good enough ship to defend myself and flee, but not to fight back against someone who has invested weeks and months developing their fighting orientated ship. This made many players who want to play with others, but do not want any PVP action to form large Private Groups, the main one of which is called Mobius - it's facebook page alone has 5000 members, I suspect in game it's above 10,000.
The game has full open mode, private group (like mobius or for making groups with friends you know), and solo mode where you'll only encouter NPCs. The issue is you can do CG in private or solo mode which allows you to contribute to these missions without encountering other players. This can lead to various exploits. The game has a background simulation which can be exploited because all these universes use the same background simulation.
It's quite involved, but it works something like this:
System level - Various NPC groups vying for control - These will be linked with a major power (Federation, Empire, Alliance for Independent) and doing missions for them will gain you reputation with them and potentially with the major power they're aligned with.
Regional level (Powerplay) - You can pledge yourself to a particular character, each of which is aligned to a major power.
"Bubble" level - Where all human activity happens, which is the size of a pea on a dinner plate compared to the size of the galaxy to explore. Now we have major power areas of dominance. Levelling up with these (and bizarrely you can do all at the same time) gives you access to faction specific ships and some off-limit system that are permit locked to regular players (bragging rights mainly). Now player groups tend to use good systems as "home systems" and will set up shop there, align themselves with a particular faction in the system and build up it's influence in the system by doing missions for said faction. The faction then favours the members of this group and gives more lucrative missions worth more money...anyone can do this. But then my player group can come to your system in private group mode and actively do missions against your faction to take them out of power in the system, or alien artifact bomb your main star port to take it out of commission). We can affect the faction you get good missions from without ever fighting your group or your group ever being able to stop us (short of trying to do missions for your faction to try and keep up the faction's percentage influence within the system). However system stats (I believe) are updated weekly so you might not even be aware we've tried to down rate your faction till a week after we started our sabotage campaign.
Last edited by cptwhite_uk; 11-09-2017 at 03:39 PM.
Yes, my brother is a welly wearer!
Measure as best you can, calculate the results very carefully, and then multiply the result by three as a safety margin to allow for worst case of what nature can throw at you
It's the same as the rest of us, except most engineers can allow 20% or 50% for things like component ageing, but soil doesn't play as nicely as electrons or metal structure.
Just in case anyone hasn't seen it yet:
Had a quick play over the weekend, logged in and found I was in my combat ship and just a few hops from the combat CG. Seemed rude not to have a go
A few panics of not being able to remember where some buttons were mapped, worst one was trying to retract weapons so I could low wake out of the sound thrashing I was getting in a conflict zone. Some big repair bills, but no insurance jobs and overall quite good fun so either I was lucky or they rebalanced things back a bit since my last play. I was only in a low CZ when I used to play in the high ones before the engineers update, but I can live with the idea that a high CZ is for people who are winged up with others.
I should see if asteroid fields are fun again, that was where I really used to enjoy combat.
Do I have you on my friend's list Unix? (Cmdr Matt White) let me know if you fancy meeting up one night for some CZ action. I'm busy tonight but free Tues / Wed evening.
Last edited by cptwhite_uk; 18-09-2017 at 09:11 AM.
So, what prep are people doing for the Thargoids, if any?!
I've dumped my Corvette in Merope ready to have a pop at em, and my 2nd account has arrived at Colonia, best of both scenarios I'm thinking :-)
Think I'm just going to go with a reasonable fast fighter, maybe my FDL and see what happens (death presumably)
None whatsoever.
I figure it will be like the rest of Elite, where you see absolutely none of it unless you spend your time scouring the forums and YouTube and happen to be in the right system at the right time.
The Thargoids will arrive, invade and, in less time than it takes me to get to the relevant systems, the über hardcore community will have found all their secrets, grinded for new materials, built new weapons and rendered the whole species extinct, claiming several hundred-million Cr rewards and everything will be empty.
Sometimes it does feel like that, know what you mean. I really hope it's not gonna be a puzzle fest for the likes of Canon.
They should implement them into Powerplay (as a side you cannot back, only fight against) and have they influence start to spread across regions of space, hopefully if things got too critical humanity would band together to provide a competent defence. Maybe something like that could work?
There are currently 3 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 3 guests)