Black market rush research bugged, does nothing

[Falmingkitter]

Huge waste of intel. Not once has this worked at all.

[Fringehunter7719]

It should reduce the remaining time on the named research project by 50% on non-legend, or 25% on legend. I remember there used to be a rash of threads making this complaint because the information is presented unclearly and it describes the effect as "instant" - which means that it instantly reduces the time remaining, rather than the perhaps more intuitive reading that it instantly completes the project.

If you have screenshots we could verify if that's what happened in your case.

If it's not, then you might want to make the usual check of mod conflicts or corrupted game files (right click the game in your steam library - properties - local files - verify integrity of game files).

All that aside it tends to be a fairly poor use of intel anyway, especially on legend.

[Falmingkitter]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

It should reduce the remaining time on the named research project by 50% on non-legend, or 25% on legend. I remember there used to be a rash of threads making this complaint because the information is presented unclearly and it describes the effect as "instant" - which means that it instantly reduces the time remaining, rather than the perhaps more intuitive reading that it instantly completes the project.

If you have screenshots we could verify if that's what happened in your case.

If it's not, then you might want to make the usual check of mod conflicts or corrupted game files (right click the game in your steam library - properties - local files - verify integrity of game files).

All that aside it tends to be a fairly poor use of intel anyway, especially on legend.

Oh so it's just bad game design then. I've never even noticed the duration of research drop from these, but it must be a tiny change

[Fringehunter7719]

I wouldn't say it's bad design, it's just a single line of text that is worded badly, and arguably a cost that is overtuned by some percent margin (that is exacerbated by the lengthier timescale of legend campaigns). It could probably be fixed into a tactically useful but not overpowered option by modding that single line of the description and reducing its price by 20% to 30%. Maybe 30% to 40% on legend.

That is to say, I think the mechanic is fine, but it wasn't tuned (enough) in playtesting. But that's just my opinion.

[Falmingkitter]

Originally posted by Fringehunter7719:

I wouldn't say it's bad design, it's just a single line of text that is worded badly, and arguably a cost that is overtuned by some percent margin (that is exacerbated by the lengthier timescale of legend campaigns). It could probably be fixed into a tactically useful but not overpowered option by modding that single line of the description and reducing its price by 20% to 30%. Maybe 30% to 40% on legend.

That is to say, I think the mechanic is fine, but it wasn't tuned (enough) in playtesting. But that's just my opinion.

You spend a lot of intel just to have the timer go down by a few days instead of negating the entire process.

Not to say that the entire game is badly designed, but that part was clearly not thought out

[Fringehunter7719]

I think it costs too much as I said, but that's just a value tuning problem. The fact it reduces the time by 50% (on non-legend) instead of 100% isn't inherently a problem. One of the issues that would arise if you adjusted it to be a 100% reduction instead of a 50% reduction is that the difference between getting randomly offered it at the right time on a key tech like plated armor or mag weapons and not getting offered it would be colossal.

In general random outcomes which have too much variance feel unfair (like guns which do 0-8 damage instead of 3-5, for example), which is why for my taste that side of the tuning, and indeed the rest of the mechanic, are just fine.

Not that I defend the intel cost as it is, that just doesn't feel sufficiently balanced through play testing. Much like the workshop (although not as extreme) it's almost never worth it.

It's a pretty minor issue overall. A pity the tooltip is misleading though, as I think that just tends to sucker people in.