StarCenturion

I agree with the OP, and I have several additional comments about the Archon Shards that I think would make the entire system smoother and more fun for everybody, and to the point someone made, streamline the system to behave more like many other "modification" systems in the game. 1. Compromise on eliminating the removal cost - reduce it, and make it available to be paid via every type of Helminth resource. That way, a player can redistribute/update 1 frame fully once per day by using all 5 resource categories. It still provides a bit of a limit, but not nearly as painful and grindy. You're not going to be swapping shards around like you would simply change a loadout, but you're not going to be wincing if you realize you made a mistake or want to shift gears on an entire frame's build at once (IE: Upgrading from Regular to Prime Warframe, for example...) 2. Balance out the still relatively unfair Tau-Forged system with an exchange system. Even with the change that you get more odds of a Tau-Forged each time you don't get one from an Archon Hunt, the system is still painfully RNG on something that already takes a long time to accumulate. Some players have two or three key Warframes that they play and that's it. Others want to kit out everything. Offer a thing where you can exchange any 2 Archon Shards for 1 of another color. 4 regular Archon Shards for a Tau-Forged of your choice. 2 Tau-Forged for 1 Tau-Forged of another color. These options will let players auto-balance the shards towards what works for them, without eliminating the need to save them up/work on getting them because you're exchanging more shards than you're getting in the end. If you play every Archon Hunt and buy from Chipper, you can get 1 Tau-Forged of the type you want every 2 weeks, even if you have horrible RNG. If I have no interest in what Azure or Amber provide me, and I happen to get "lucky" and get several Tau-Forged of those, I should be able to push them towards Tau-Forged Crimsons if that's what I'm going for. See suggestion #5 for mitigating the desire to make every Archon Shard a Crimson Shard. 3. Make the Archon Shards tradable. DE wants to make money - and we players want the important stuff in the game to be tradable. One of THE best features of Warframe, hands down, is that there's an open-market economy where items which are extremely powerful and valuable to a player can be sold or exchanged with friends. It's what makes it a solid FTP game because you can earn your way to things that others simply want to pay for. No item should be an exception to this mechanic except quest systems which teach you elements of how to play the game. 4. Have one of each shard available for purchase from Chipper every week. We all have real lives and schedules, the fact that we can't buy the shard type we want on the week we happen to check in with Chipper is strange and unnecessary. You also want to incentivize playing the Kahl missions now that you've updated them to be less grindy and more fun. This does both things - players always have the opportunity to focus on getting some of the shard type they want, and there's a higher potential value in playing the Kahl missions if they happen to like them. 5. This is my most minor suggestion - in addition to reducing the costs of fully removing a shard, allow the option to change what a shard does within its color without having to remove it. This way you can set up an appropriate "color theme" for a Warframe, and possibly start treating the shard setup/"loadout" of that frame in a similar way. For example, you put a bunch of Azure shards into a frame thinking you needed increased Health to improve your survival, but found out that you need to mix in a bit of health regeneration or armor to smooth that out. All of those enhancements are already Azure shards - so it shouldn't require removing the shard and putting it back on just to change what it does within-type. (Edit: Removed previous #5 entry about balancing the value of the different colors in light of the merge options and newfound ways of using each type in combination with each other. Nice job on that, btw!)