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Hey folks - I finally worked up to building a deep mining drill and have been testing it out on a deposit found near the ice/rock wall in the Avalanche: expedition prospect. Curious what others' thoughts are who have tested this out.

I was a bit underwhelmed at the rate of return, especially after grinding solo for 2-3 days just to get to a T4 build. I think it would only be valuable on a longer prospect in all honesty. Cool mechanic for sure, but not really worth my time as a solo player. I assume I will be able to use it on the exotic vein later in this prospect. Hopefully, I can run it side by side with a biofuel extractor to see how different they are.

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about 2 years ago - /u/thedeanhall - Direct link

Originally posted by drumstix42

Their sense of balance makes you think they don't play test anything at all.

The purpose of these and the rate that they return were heavily discussed in the experimental version of this update and the only outcome it led to was a decreased amount of components it takes to craft them.

Not that they can't or won't tweak them in the future, but currently they're laughably slow for how short most of the missions are.

(double post)

about 2 years ago - /u/thedeanhall - Direct link

Originally posted by aaspider

Sorry to hear you are disheartened sometimes but in this instance I think you misunderstood. The OP was referring to the drill being slow, not the team.

You’re totally right, I got that wrong and will include an edit at the top indicating I was wrong

about 2 years ago - /u/thedeanhall - Direct link

Originally posted by thedeanhall

I have learned (at great pain) that you cannot balance a game by yo'yo'ing it. You make very cautious changes.

We are very aware of the balance issues and in many cases we might agree with the existence of a problem. But a short term focus is not always the best; sometimes the better solution for balance issues is to take out or change a mechanic entirely.

That also doesn't mean that we don't balance it in the meantime, but that does mean we have to design the changes, develop them, and test them.

I know it can be very frustraiting - but remember games are made by people! Things take time. I certainly wholeheartedly disagree that:

  • things are not playtested
  • the team is laughably slow

We even put together a team (myself included) who worked through the holidays.

I totally agree we have a lot more balance work to do - but I absolutely disagree that the team isn't committed and working extremely hard to fix bugs, add content, and make the game the best it can be. It's also really disheartening to a team when people extrapolate their frustraition out as "devs are lazy" - it's become a common behavior from gamers that really needs to stop.

(tripple post!)

about 2 years ago - /u/thedeanhall - Direct link

Originally posted by drumstix42

Note that I was not talking about the team being slow, I was specifically talking about the deep mine drillers. They they mine very slowly. I edited my comment to reflect this.

I appreciate your response. I'm looking forward to a lot of the changes that are coming out on the newest experimental branch this week.

I will say however that it's been a bummer that it's taken as long as it has to address things like seeing in a cave. The torch slot will be a big help. But up to now players have been resorting to using Low shadow settings. Things like this that are such core gameplay components of the game, and are where my frustration towards play testing manifests.

Absolutely sorry about that - Reddit is being very bizzare for me right now and creating multiple posts when I edited it. I've tried to edit it acknowledging that I completely got 50% of my post entirely wrong.

Really sorry about that! Loving all the discussion and good ideas here though.