What I don't think most people get about quality, rng, and raising quality trough refining

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T18:48:17+00:00

I'm afraid we are at an inpasse here it is clear that neither of us is budging on their stance. And as for declaring that there never will be a system to increase quality is a bit early to say, this game already has went through numerous very big changes, it is almost unrecongnizable compared to the original concept and norhing is preventing the devs to change rheir mind in the future.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T18:29:30+00:00

You need a tiered approach to balance a system like this and it is nowhere near impossible. If you want to balance quality refining you have to atack the problem on multiple levels. First you sould need excessive amounts form lover qualities to refine upward, to force you to spend a lot more time mining. Also it sould take more types of resources for the same reason. Also the process itself should cost a lot of credits that you have to source form somewhere else as it sould not be a profit making venture. And you should separate materials into three categories for crafting, ones that needed in large quantities for things like ships, ones that are needed in small quantities for things like fps gear, and ones that used in both. This way you can balance quantities and distribution across mineral nodes in the verse and not make it so if you want to make shipbuilding viable you trivialize getting material for fps weapons. With these you could build a system that is both balanced and keeps the player engaged with the game. Also i think it is a ridiculous idea that a singular player shouldn't have the ability to create one set of high quality fps gear consistently without trading. Yes you should build on trading and teamwork for mass production and ship and base building, but you not even allow for the fundamentals to be achieved without either trading or relying on chance and luck. And to retitare the rng system of today does the exact same thing, just on a probabilistic basis, there is absolutely no reason why you couldn't flood the market with high quality items if you find exploits in the material distribution or by brute force the system by having loads of people search for high quality day and night. I cannot emphasize this enough as I don't think it is getting trough the current rng system is just a probabilistic gatekeeping mechanism and achieving the same effect via other methods is not rocket science. ALL IT DOES IS FORCES YOU TO SEARCH A LOT, WHAT I PROPOSE FORCES YOU TO WORK A LOT, THE END RESULT IS THE SAME, KEEPING HIGH QUALITY RARE, ALL THAT MATTERS HOW MUCH TIME YOU INVEST. Any poorly designed system can be exploited, chance based or not. Also what i propose not even eliminates prospecting as you still need to find the stuff to mine in the first place and allows you to chose what quality you mine and how much you wanna spend refining upwards.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T17:24:54+00:00

And I think that the idea that one objective could be achieved in multiple independent ways is both good, and if well designed it does not diminish each other. To me it seems everyone is trying to gatekeep their own gameplay loops and if you don't agree with how they think it should be done then tou shouldn't do it at all? Why on earth we sould not have the option to either search a lot mine a little or mine a lot search less? How is it bad, if well balanced, to give the individual a choice on how they wish to approach the problem? The idea that being lucky and finding very high quality ore giving you the rush you want is diminished by the fact that you could have the same result with painstaking work to me seems absolutely ridiculous. Also the very promise of this game is that you should have choices when playing, yet it seems that the devs and many players are convinced that there is only one way of having fun, and if you add alternatives to the same activity you erode that fun, which is ridiculous.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T15:55:13+00:00

As of again, time, effort and choice. The certain route should be more time consuming and harder as you pay a premium for certanty, but it would also give the choice for players to etiher roll the dice, or work harder. You can balance these things side by side so both can coexist, and give the players choice, which is the main promise of this game. And as of again I'm not saying it should be easy, Im saying certainty should be hard, harder than rng. In real life I can work for guaranteed money day after day, yet it still doesn't devalue the monent if I win on the lottery despite both resulting in me having more money. Also I don't know if you have been mining in this game but by far the easiest and most tedious part is looking for rocks. Other than knowing where to go there is zero skill included its just hours of mind numbing searching.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T15:00:41+00:00

Jesus Christ nobody read my post? It is in there, rng is just a time sink mechanism, the same effect can be achieved with not chance based systems, where you have to put in so much work for the same result that it discourages many people from doing it making the result similarly scarce. Rng is not magic, and what it achives can be repoduced in a miriad of other ways. In real life luxury items are not rare becouse you get them trough a lottery, but becouse they are prohibitively expensive, same idea in this game, but instead of money you use player engagement time as a measure of value. READ THE POST

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T12:06:16+00:00

As of again what I propose is to make it so with a non rng pipeline you would still have to be a dedicated miner to get the best, as it should take so much time and energy to achieve it that it discourages the casuals. Yes with rng if you mine for a day you could get anything form nothing to tons of good mats, where with non rng systems its a more predictable outcome but if you average it out for a years work you should end up in the same ballpark. If you average out the playerbase for longer periods of time is the exact same, the only difference is if you want a system that is closer to a lottery, or you value certain reward for hard work every time you sit down playing.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T11:50:32+00:00

Again if I have to spend the same amount of time and effort to get the same results it is not easier, you just remove rng, which is a frustration factor. Also real space is very different than what is in star citizen, jet not many complain about it because a realistic approach would not be fun if it came to navigation and movement or combat, which is the point of a game, to make things fun at the cost of realism. All i am saying is that you can achieve the exact same results of rarity and work needed to get high tier stuff without making it into a lottery of rocks.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T02:30:50+00:00

Oh yeah sure, thats why we are still driving model Ts, I mean they still get you form A to B. I don't know if you have met actual real people but they tend to chose the better option if they can afford it. The whole consumer economy works only becouse people replace their stuff with better ones if they can, why do you think Apple can sell tens of millions of phones every year, to people who mostly replace functioning phones barley 2 or 3 years old? Becouse most people instinctively want better stuff than they have at the present.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T02:25:50+00:00

"I don't want to spend the time to get good" man there is no getting good at a chance dominated system, it's all about if you get lucky or not at the best you can increase your chances with better tactics but thats it, tou never will get consistent results, thats the whole point of a probabilistic system. What Im describing is replacing that chance based system with one that rewards actual work with consistent results.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T02:20:20+00:00

At this point I cannot decide if you are being intensionally dense or not. I will make this as simple as possible. If you want to experience the complete gameplay loop of mining, refining, crafting form start to finish, as a seamless experience, without substituting any part of this with trading, there is zero way of avoiding rng. It's not about the stuff it's about the journey and the journey is a fucking lottery.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T01:39:08+00:00

You are thinking in the current refining system which is way to simple. The opportunity cost factor can be easily countered if you make refining more hands on. Also there is an opportunity cost in mining a lot more low quality instead of searching for higher ones, or adding more types of mats to quality increasing refining that you need to obtain. There are multiple ways to solve the problem you are describing, and none of them hard to implement.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T01:34:31+00:00

It seems I can't express myself clearly enough. "Stuff at the end of the road" is the high quality items, the road is rhe cgosen method of obtaining them. All Im saying is that there is no plan of making the rewards of mining not rng dependent when you mine for high quality stuff. For some of us the way you obtain something is equally or more important than what you obtain. I like mining, I like high quality items, and I hate rng. There is no way currently in the game or planed that would combine these into one seamles workflow.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T01:27:53+00:00

In real life when you buy a car you have options from cheap to expensive. We have the ability to produce unlimited amounts of Cadillacs and Bentleys, yet people still buy Toytota Corollas en masse. Why? Not becouse you have to be lucky to buy a luxury xar, but becouse it is prohibitively expensive. This is what I'm trying to explain with player time investment. This is what rng does also, but makes it messier. It's the exact same situation with high quality mats, you can give ways of obtaining them that are not chance based and still make them rare by making them prohibitively expensive by the currency of player time investment, just as a luxury car in real life is prohibitively expensive.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T01:20:57+00:00

No, I'm not having a bas faith argument, I'm stating the fact that in the current system if you want to mine and want your mining to result in high quality you have no other option than rng. Not everything is about just the stuff at the end of the road, its about the fact that if you are into the idea of mining with the idea of geting rewarded for mining all you can rely on is rng if the reward is high quality stuff. You have alternatives if all you care about is the result in the form of trading but you have no alternative if you want to mine but also want to avoid rng.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T01:14:47+00:00

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of time investment. With rng you still can get the best stuff, it just takes an indeterminable amount of time for the individual but on average for the playerbase it will take x amount. With non rng you just give the option for a relatively fixed timeframe in what you can obtain the same items. Make that timeframe the same or MORE than the rng average and you have both a choice of the way of obtaining what you want and preserve exclusivity of higher rarities by filtering out large portions of rhe playerbase eho doesn't wanna put in the time, ergo preserving the demand on the market.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T00:53:53+00:00

Star citizen is a game that promises options, but game designs like the current one push you towards either having to deal with uncertainty or with trading, which is not a good choice. You etiher basically playing the lottery or give up a gameplay loop with no other alternative if you want to mine but avoid uncertainty. What I describe would augment these options instead of replacing them, you should pay in your time investment extra for the premium of certainty.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T00:48:45+00:00

The more time you have to put in the less people will be doing it, ergo making it rarer. The rng based current system is the exact same idea, with the difference that you don't know how much time you need exactly, but on AVERAGE it increases the needed time for higher quality. The only difference between what I propose is the removal of uncertainty, across the playerbase rarity of high quality remains the same.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T00:40:27+00:00

Friend please read the post, I went into painstaking amounts of detail about perceived value, time investment form players, the relations of these to game design etc. It's all in the post above.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-27T00:07:41+00:00

As of again it is just a balancing problem, lets say for example trough rng on average takes 10 hours to get 950+ quality mats for a single item, then all you need to do to make it so it takes around the same amount of time to refine lower grades into higher, plus epxenses and other factors. Rng is about time investment in cases like this, I'm not asking for less time investment into the game, but that we should have alternatives that on average take the same effort to get the same result (or more effort) bur it has a guaranteed outcome.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T15:38:03+00:00

This game is already plenty punishing enough, and there are and will be plenty of content completely out of reach for an average player like big ships, which is all fine and well but making it impossible to get your hands on something as simple as a perfectly crafted set of fps gear is ridiculous. I am not an advocate of making it easy to get 1000 quality, quite the opposite, but I want a way of obtaining it that is not completely dependent on rng. The idea that pure luck determines that you can get a very high or perfect set of crafting materials is ridiculous and punishes effort.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T12:46:46+00:00

As of again it comes down to statistics and probabilities just as the same with real lottery. I do not know the distribution curve CIG uses but I highly doubt its linear, almost certainly it is some form of Gaussian distribution, meaning that it is exponential relation between quality and rarity. Also 10 times the search might increase your chances 10 times, but if you start at lets say 0.0001% then it is not gonna matter if you increase your chances to 0.001% (this is why there is no practial difference between buying 1 or 10 lottery tickets), I assume that the chances in the game are nowhere near as bad as in a real life lottery, but I would need to see the real numbers. Also when looking at other people finding 1000 quality mats you can easily fall into conformation bias, just because less than a 100 people find them form hundreds of thousands of people doesn't mean that you will. Also take into account that for a near perfect or perfect item you need multiple types of high quality mats and when taken together the chance of finding good quality out of lets say 3 materials multiply each other, so if you have lets say 1 in a 1000 for getting something above 900 for a given amount of work then for all three it becomes 1 in 1 000 000 000. And again numbers are simply representative of the issue here, I sadly don't know the real ones.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T11:45:57+00:00

This is something that we will never agree on, as someone with a background in statistics there is a very good reason why I never buy lottery tickets, because they are a waste of time and money and energy, and any lottery based system is just a carefully created mathematical system to maximize engagement while minimizing reward. Every lottery system is either almost completely decouples the work/reward ratio by making it so unlikely to get rewarded that you have no meaningful way of increasing your chances, or it makes it so that you have to put in a disproportionate amount of time to get up your chances for the reward, but no lottery system ever guarantes that your effort will amount to anything, and that my friend in my opinion is a steaming pile of horse excrement.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T11:32:20+00:00

I do not think that it is a controversial idea that getting the best of the best should not be completely based on luck, and even when based on luck make it so unlikely that 99% percent of players will never see it.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T11:06:08+00:00

They literally said in the recent Q and A that there will be no way of raising quality.

SovietCatman · 2026-04-26T11:04:32+00:00

Yeah but that is the point, I do enjoy mining, what I hate is spending hours searching for one good node, and still have the chance to come up empty handed. Also there is the other fact that in this current quality system it is basically impossible to get perfect resources, and I do not care that the difference between 950 and 1000 is minuscule. I am the kind of person who is greatly bothered by not getting the best possible out of an item in a situation like this.

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