Odyssey is just around the corner. And coming with it are more engineers. And more engineering materials.
We've currently got around 120 materials to manage for our ship upgrades and synthesis (3 types, around 8 classes of each type, and 5 tiers). Plus who knows exactly how many more are to be added in Odyssey. We could very well end up having to manage 200 or more different "currencies".
Why do we need this many?
Most of the materials you gather are simply traded up or down to get the materials you actually need from a Material Trader. So most people would just go for the higher tier stuff and trade down, at least that's what I do.
I'd like to propose a new system that would reduce the overall number of engineering materials, and redistribute the remaining ones across the existing recipes and blueprints.
- Reduce the tiers of materials from 5 to 3. We've slashed around 40% of all the stuff we have to collect
- When collecting one of these new 3 tier items, they are worth a number of their class's currency.
eg: Crystals. We could have Low quality Focus Crystals, Focus Crystals, and Exquisite Focus Crystals. Picking up each tier could provide you with 1, 10 or 25 "Crystals".
The materials required for synthesis and engineering could be redistributed to use these new grouped materials.
Under this idea we'd have around 24 currencies instead of the 120ish we have now. Material trader would still be relevant for trading across item classes, but you'd be able to cut out all of the up and down trading that happens now.
