Having to work in order to upgrade your ship and feel a real tangible gameplay benefit is very rewarding. The feeling of boosting after engineering drives or making a ridiculously long range jump is extremely fun and rewarding, especially considering the absolute slog I had to go through to engineer them.
The actual process of getting materials to engineer anything however is mind numbing busy work. The most enjoyable experience I’ve had getting engineering mats was at the crashed cobra data farming, and that’s cause I could actually farm it in open and I had a friend so we were sort of feeling on edge while farming because there was a ganker present who ran away when I showed up in a combat ship.
So I have two suggestions. First and easiest one to implement just allow us to buy materials for cash. Credit grinding is more fun and there are a lot of different ways to do it.
Second suggestion, create farm sites that don’t have to be relogged into constantly, and that are fun to gather mats at. Perhaps make them in enclosed environments like a cave or abandoned mining tunnels or something to prevent ship based ganking and add AI skimmer patrols. Open players would have a unique place to have SRV or ground based PvP at, and solo players could always just go to solo.
Third suggestion would be to add some sort of story based mission chain to each engineer, and as a reward they will rank up maximally grade out a module per completed mission. Engineers were and still are a perfect vessel to deliver some fun handmade content, and I still feel like this is the best way to approach them. However, this approach obviously would require a lot of dev resources.
How do you guys think they should improve the process of engineering?
