Grind this Farm that, why do y’all do that to yourselves?

[Warning! – Incoming wall of text! (But well worth a read)]

Every time I hit this reddit there's someone asking about "where to farm X", or complaining about the "grind for Y" – and I'm always left wondering, WHY? Why turn a game you seemingly love into a job you hate? The most common themes of grind/farming threads are grinding for rank, or farming materials or credits for engineering / carrier, I'm going to review both.

Grinding for rank is simply pointless in Elite, every single rank locked ship has a better counterpart in the civilian market. Conda = Corvette > Cutter in combat. Sure the Cutter can carry more than the other two of the original big three, but the T9 has been upgraded with an additional 256t puts it on a par with a cutter, so there's nothing you NEED a vette or cutter for that cannot be done in another ship. Clipper, as cool as it is, and my favourite ship by a long shot, is outclassed in combat by a fer de lance and a python, and the python can carry more cargo AND land on a medium pad offering it more potential uses. The alliance ships broadly approximate the three ugly sisters / fed med set (FAS/FDS/FGS) and don't require rank.

In my opinion, not having access to rank locked ships doesn't impede you, if anything flying rank locked ships might be the real impediment as for nearly every task, there is a better suited civilian ship out there, so why sicken yourself to the game headbutting whatever the current meta-grind is to get something that lowers your perormance? Go play the game, do the things therein that you enjoy, but do them smartly, bounty hunting in fed/imp space so your bounty vouchers get you reputation gains and thus rank progress with the superpower. Run missions for superpower aligned factions, cash in your exploration data at stations controlled by a faction affiliated with your chosen superpower, sell your mining goods at a similar station etc. In time rank-up promotion missions will appear, and boom you've got a pip on your sleeve, do a couple and you've got access to a new ship, but be advised that there is no rank that gets you an OP AF godship.

Similar to the rank grind for ships, one of the most common grind/farm themes that keeps coming up is making money for a carrier, to start off, you do not need a carrier. There is only one thing a carrier allows you to do that cannot be done without one, and that is to make some of the use long jumps at the top or bottom of the galaxy, above or below the galactic plane, where stars are few and far between. So the carrier does allow you to get to some places you erstwhile might not be able to make it to, but these are uninhabited systems at the arx end of nowhere. So you don't NEED it. And as for the credits to buy one?

At the risk of getting heckled with OK Boomer, I'm going to point out that credits have never been so easy gotten in game as they are now, a couple of nights ago I did a couple of hours bounty hunting, twenty one million credits later I went to bed, and I was having fun. Another time I slapped luxury passenger cabin on a dolphin, and first class one on a clipper, and went out playing chauffer on sightseeing missions, 20m-30m cr/hr just for zooming about. One evening, and a case of beer later I'd netted ~100m. So we're talking 50-250hrs to obtain the ultimate biggest asset in an open ended mmo? Never played Eve, but I'm pretty sure a titan would take at least an order of magnitude longer to get, so what's the rush? Besides, you don't fly a carrier, it's basically a space station that you can send to places.

Materials farming is another issue, mats are used for engineering ship upgrades and crafting things like premium ammo / jumponium from. You can play the game without either, indeed for about a quarter of it's life it had neither, but they do drastically enhance your abilities, so I won't say you don't need them, even though, save for a few use cases like competitive PvP you really don't need them. But for the acquisition of them, why headbut the grindwall so hard? it's pretty effective to hoover up all and every material you encounter in the wild, and trade what you don't want for that which you do want, albeit at derisatory exchange rates. (I often want to throw mat brokers out of air locks when I see the exchange rates for going from one column to another and up a few grades) I don't know how much better or worse bartenders are for oddy mats?

Materials are something that you need to ask yourself, do I need that upgrade/sysnthesis enough to force myself to become what is tantamount to a factory worker, slaving away for hours to get a stash of unobtanium, and do I need it so urgently that I can't just wait until I pick up some naturally or some other stuff that I can trade for it? If you absolutely must have the top tier premium ammo and upgrades to compete in top tier PvP, you chose that niche and you'll have to put the work in like a boxer does push ups. On the other hand, look at the bragging rights, if you're armed with a few legacy god rolls, a few maxxed out G5 mods, and rocking boggo ammo vs a player who is using the gucci 3 grade 5 mats per reload shizzle,would be like going up from regular to hardened to Veteran in Call of Duty campaign, tougher challenge, pushes your skills, bigger sense of reward. However, if you want materials to make new weapons to try something different for bounty hunting or to make a better exploration ship, or whatever PvE objective you are pursuing let me ask you this, do you really need it yesterday? Can you wait a week or two? Could you not have more fun on the journey towards your objective?

Most of the fun in Elite is actually working towards the "end game content" getting the bigger ships, more powerfully modded modules/weapons etc doesn't make the game more fun or satisfying, it might make it easier, but easy != fun. easy is if anything anti-fun and often produces a violent explosion of venom when players find a game too easy and get bored of it, so why would you turn the game into a job you don't so much enjoy as endure, just to acquire the very things that put the game from regular or hardened down to "recruit and cheating with aimbots" and make it too easy to be fun?

A little bit of a lot of different activities in game mixes up gameplay, saves you getting bored of monotonous mashing metas for a singular objective, these objectives can be obtained, albeit more slowly, through a varied playstyle. Way back at the beginning I mentioned one session I played space tour bus driver, what I didn't mention was I looked for missions going to cryo volcanoes / fumeroles etc so that after I'd gotten to the tourist mission giver's destination, I could land, take out the SRV, go farm materials for a bit. Nor did I mention that when I was doing the bounty hunting, I had collector limpets in my third fire group to grab materials from the ships I killed, as well as their bounties. Nor did I mention packing a wake scanner on a massacre civilians mission and deliberately letting my quarry each get one or two jumps, thank you very much for the distorted hyperspace wake echoes y'all…

That's how I avoid grinding, I'd love to hear how you cope with grinding, and why you force yourself to do it?