A suggestion to improve the current relic system.

[Artistical]

Hello.

So, I've given it some thought, and here's a suggestion I think will improve the current relic system.

The current relic system works by having different relic types, each with it's own loot table and drop chance. Some of the relics have drops in common, like Forma blueprints. Since relics also drop from missions as rewards, there are also rarer relics than others, and being spread across four level tiers (Lith, Meso, Neo and Axii), the amount of relics grows to be rather staggering. it comes a point where just sifting through the relic pages is cumbersome, and even more so to keep track of all the things you want to farm.

Therefore, I propose the following system:

A modular relic system with slotted drops. Players get to choose which Common, Uncommon and Rare drops are assigned to a Lith, Meso, Neo or Axii relic template. These choices are based off the drops the player currently has. So, for example, if a player has 3 relics that drop Forma Blueprint as common and 2 that drop it as uncommon, the player can slot Forma Blueprint as an Uncommon drop twice. No duplicate drops are allowed.

This way, players can customize their grinding experience to suit their most urgent needs. It would also reduce the waste of relics in the cases where parties share, since for each relic cracked, what gets consumed is the slot selected for the mission. If the item the player wants, drops, he or she can replace it with another drop from the corresponding rarity and tier.

Now then, what would happen with relic drops? Relic drops would remain the same, but they would be something like blueprints: What you receive when you get a relic drop is the loot drops from that relic for you to slot into the template. Therefore, in the interface we wouldn't see a ton of relics, but, instead, the items they drop and a number that tells us how many chances of each we have, that is, how many times can we slot them.

The relic templates can still be upgraded to radiant in order to increase the chances of something dropping, as per their assigned percentage.

The idea behind this is to make the process of grinding relics more streamlined at user level. Drop chances don't change, but players that need specific items can have a more rewarding relic experience by guaranteeing that at least one of the items they need will drop instead of wasting entire relics in a single roll of the dice for just one item.

This also helps solo farming. Certainly, rad shares help alleviate the situation, but there's also the problem of keeping track of all the relics and their rewards, since the interface, while well designed, is hampered by the current system. If you simply assign loot drops to a relic, all you have to list is the items and their availability to be slotted. This way, players have a cleaner perspective of what they can grind for and what they need.

Vaulted relics can also be slotted, but, of course, they don't drop anymore, so it wouldn't be possible to obtain new drop slots.

Let me know what you think of this 🙂

[Omega-Shadowblade]

Doubt they'll go for it. At that point, there'd be only relics guaranteeing something from the prospective pool. I.e. On prime access release people would purely make relics with the parts for the new stuff. Overall in a business sense, it'd be bad for Prime access, bad for overall player engagement time (people play less if they streamline too much), and bad for widening the market for players in terms of overall prime items floating around the market.

[Himenoinu]

It makes no sense, neither lore-wise, nor mechanics wise.

Shuffling possible items from various relics in what becomes, basically, a new relic... made by player. A new relic. I mean, Mirage looks at the relics and thinks: "hmm, this relic could yield a bronco barrel, and so can this one... now if I chop these two bits of this relic, and superglue them to these bits from that relic, I'll have more bits then can eventually form the bronco barrel I need" While the items themselves don't look like loot crates that could contain a weapon component, I'm imagining them like that, while the void traces provide the energy for prying the locks open.

Mechanics wise, you'd have an even more cluttered relic refinement interface by adding the means to shuffle the potential drops.

Granted, it could make some sense, mechanics-wise... if DE would create some sort of "riven relic" slots that would allow us to drain a relic from one of its drops and pour it into an empty container, destroying the initial relic in the process. It wouldn't be of much use though, seeing how the most coveted drops are still 1/relic and how someone shouldn't be allowed to select a drop that he/she has no current relics for.

Lastly, I'mma also say that you're inconsistent with one of your suggestions:

46 minutes ago, Artistical said:

So, for example, if a player has 3 relics that drop Forma Blueprint as common and 2 that drop it as uncommon, the player can slot Forma Blueprint as an Uncommon drop twice. No duplicate drops are allowed.

How is it you can slot the forma blueprint twice while saying "no duplicate drops are allowed"? 😄

[Artistical]

9 hours ago, Omega-Shadowblade said:

Doubt they'll go for it. At that point, there'd be only relics guaranteeing something from the prospective pool. I.e. On prime access release people would purely make relics with the parts for the new stuff. Overall in a business sense, it'd be bad for Prime access, bad for overall player engagement time (people play less if they streamline too much), and bad for widening the market for players in terms of overall prime items floating around the market.

This is solved by adjusting the rarity by which Prime Access relics drop, or the rarity for the items themselves. In my suggestion, you can't slot duplicates, and you still get only one item per crack. People will do relics with parts for the new stuff anyways, so it wouldn't be much of an issue. Another solution is slotting all Prime Access parts exclusively in the "Rare" department. That way, people can still get what they want from the Uncommon and Common slots while waiting for that Rare.

8 hours ago, Himenoinu said:

It makes no sense, neither lore-wise, nor mechanics wise.

Shuffling possible items from various relics in what becomes, basically, a new relic... made by player. A new relic. I mean, Mirage looks at the relics and thinks: "hmm, this relic could yield a bronco barrel, and so can this one... now if I chop these two bits of this relic, and superglue them to these bits from that relic, I'll have more bits then can eventually form the bronco barrel I need" While the items themselves don't look like loot crates that could contain a weapon component, I'm imagining them like that, while the void traces provide the energy for prying the locks open.

Mechanics wise, you'd have an even more cluttered relic refinement interface by adding the means to shuffle the potential drops.

Granted, it could make some sense, mechanics-wise... if DE would create some sort of "riven relic" slots that would allow us to drain a relic from one of its drops and pour it into an empty container, destroying the initial relic in the process. It wouldn't be of much use though, seeing how the most coveted drops are still 1/relic and how someone shouldn't be allowed to select a drop that he/she has no current relics for.

Lastly, I'mma also say that you're inconsistent with one of your suggestions:

How is it you can slot the forma blueprint twice while saying "no duplicate drops are allowed"? 😄

Well, of course, a new relic made by the player. But the idea is just having that one and get rid of the immense amount of relics each with 6 rewards. It's not a mix and match of relics, it's more like the mod cards: each loot drop is a "card", and then you grab the relic and slot each "card". What you get is loot drop "cards" that you can see in an interface similar to the mods, only here it's chances for a specific item. So, to follow your analogy, what Mirage would do is "Hmmm. C'mere template. Now, let's look at what I have. Oh! I have a chance for Nyx Prime Blueprint and a chance for Dakra Prime Receiver! I think I'll go with the Dakra for this run". Bam. Dakra get slotted on the rare slot. "Aaaand, I think I'm missing a Fang Prime Handle" Bam. Fang P gets slotted on uncommon. "And there's never enough Formas" Bam. Forma gets slotted on Common. Since it's two per tier, Mirage then decides what else she needs. Then, she goes to whatever mission she goes to crack the relic, and if the dice rolled for the rare, she "burns" the slot for the rare, and can choose another rare for the next wave. But if the dice rolled for the uncommon, she can choose to "burn" that slot, choose another uncommon, and still have hope for the rare.

Of course, there would be a "degradation" system in play, now that I think of it. Slotted items cannot be changed unless "burnt", and after two rounds, they get "burnt" automatically. Perhaps three. Or maybe three for common, two for uncommon and once for rare. Wouldn't be too hard to implement, and makes common and uncommon items easier to get (because I'm always suffering for Formas, for instance), while rares remain rares.

Again, mechanics wise, there would be less clutter: just a clean list of all the loot drops you have. That's it. The relic screen then becomes, as I picture it, the relic on the right side of the screen with blank drop slots, and you drag them from the list on your left. And that's it.

And there's no inconsistency. I say you can slot it twice because if you have two Forma blueprints, then you can have one drop, and then, on the next crack, slot another. Because you have two Forma Blueprint drops in store. Once you run out of drops in storage, you can't slot them anymore.

Regarding the "riven relic", well, I think there's something there. Perhaps a client-based riven relic system?

Edited September 6, 2018 by Artistical
Correcting a wrong item name.

[Omega-Shadowblade]

6 minutes ago, Artistical said:

This is solved by adjusting the rarity by which Prime Access relics drop, or the rarity for the items themselves. In my suggestion, you can't slot duplicates, and you still get only one item per crack. People will do relics with parts for the new stuff anyways, so it wouldn't be much of an issue. Another solution is slotting all Prime Access parts exclusively in the "Rare" department. That way, people can still get what they want from the Uncommon and Common slots while waiting for that Rare.

 

With all due respect, both those options seem to be a good way to greatly irritate the community. ESPECIALLY making all the new parts as rares as some of us have nothing else to aim for and aren't interested in marketing parts they don't need.

[Artistical]

10 minutes ago, Omega-Shadowblade said:

With all due respect, both those options seem to be a good way to greatly irritate the community. ESPECIALLY making all the new parts as rares as some of us have nothing else to aim for and aren't interested in marketing parts they don't need.

Yes, you're right. Then again, when I say adjusting rarity, I don't necessarily mean making them less rare... Relics can drop more commonly, so you get more chances to have a rare item drop "card", but the items themselves at crack time can be rare. And ending up with lots of common and uncommons is hardly a problem. While marketing can be tedious, there's pages like warframe.market that make it less painful. There's also the ducats system. At worse, you can sell them for creds as you always do with Oberon parts xD

Edited September 6, 2018 by Artistical
Clarifying and expanding an idea.

[Himenoinu]

3 hours ago, Artistical said:

Well, of course, a new relic made by the player.

To start with, "new relic" is an oxymoron. One cannot... create an object that becomes a relic not in one's own lifetime and certainly not a few minutes after. Now, the whole relic system was also DE's attempt to solve or at least improve the previous system of obtaining prime parts, by spreading the places where fissures were appearing - that's how I see it, at least, as I was not around during the tower runs. So lore-wise, I see no way of squeezing in your idea without feeling tacked on.

On top of that, getting the option to pass on a potential drop is also illogical. What?! You crack open the relic, you pick inside, see the dull blade of a fang prime and with a swift move you pull out the glue gun! "Swoooosh!" relic is as-new and you start crackin' at it again?

And on top of that, if you have individual "drop chance" item drops, then how does it make any sense to take'em and shuffle them inside a player-made slot machine? You already saw the "item" when you got its "drop chance". How and why would you take a Rhino neuroptics and mix it with a forma or two and some random other pieces just to see then what you can get out of it. You put them inside that "relic" with your own two hands and the void relic refinement apparatus.

Now, assuming we're just dropping the lore inconsistency issue (although a game that squeezes in mechanics or systems that ignores the narrative is broken from my point of view), we're left with a major mess loot-table wise. Add all the prime components available at any given time. Now please tell how you think about spreading them across the star chart as potential drops? For example, you have an 11.86% chance of dropping a vaulted Axi S3 in a C rotation on Mithra. Now crack open all the potential axi relics and pour all their content inside the Mithra run. The chance of getting any of the components of the former Axi S3 relic are...?! And from there onward, there's still no certainty of the drops as those components get slotted into another gambling machine. The desire to make a more pretty relic selection screen can potentially lead to a gruesome grind that more often than not will not get a player any closer to the items he or she desires.

I believe that if the relics system is to be looked at (and I don't think it does, save for maybe the way the relics drop - even more so the vaulted ones)... it has to be not patched, but replaced:

• Based on their current rarity, each of the relic's potential drop gets fragmented into a number of pieces. Say 3 for common drops, 10 for uncommon and 25 for rares.
• These blueprints or components chunks get tossed in the reward pools. As there's a ton of the components and blueprints, they'll be cluttering the current farming spots like crazy, so they'll need to be better thought of, especially in the AABC rotation maps. Rotation A - for example - wouldn't have a chance to drop common (and uncommon) blueprint/component parts for all items in any mission. Maybe survivals and salvage missions would drop warframe parts, interceptions defection and  would drop melee, defenses and hive missions would primary weapons components and bp, excavations secondaries and sabotage missions and spy sentinels. Forma pieces could be dropped in all other missions and be treated as common item (because why the hell even have forma in a relic, seeing how it's also available as rare drop from containers, as mission reward and as potential sortie reward?!). Or they could be scattered based on their origin throughout all the missions in a given star chart sector.
• Next, upon reaching the amount of parts needed to assemble a component, one would use the relic refinement station to assemble it. And here's where you can maybe improve the QoL: by fusing together 30 common drops one would be able to refine an uncommon drop (that is, every 3 common drop fragment could be also refined into an uncommon drop fragment) . Same, by fusing 75 common drops, you'd get your rare drop component/blueprint.

This would basically remove the relics altogether and replace'em not with "drop chance" items (which, really now... how much sense do they make?!) but with item shards. You'd get your relic selection screen headache cured (because so much headache from selecting a relic!), lore/narrative will be saved from abuse and the process of getting a desired item would be more... pleasant, even if not much less grindy, with both the division of the missions and the chance to fuse shards into higher grade pieces.

[Artistical]

15 hours ago, Himenoinu said:

To start with, "new relic" is an oxymoron. One cannot... create an object that becomes a relic not in one's own lifetime and certainly not a few minutes after. Now, the whole relic system was also DE's attempt to solve or at least improve the previous system of obtaining prime parts, by spreading the places where fissures were appearing - that's how I see it, at least, as I was not around during the tower runs. So lore-wise, I see no way of squeezing in your idea without feeling tacked on.

On top of that, getting the option to pass on a potential drop is also illogical. What?! You crack open the relic, you pick inside, see the dull blade of a fang prime and with a swift move you pull out the glue gun! "Swoooosh!" relic is as-new and you start crackin' at it again?

And on top of that, if you have individual "drop chance" item drops, then how does it make any sense to take'em and shuffle them inside a player-made slot machine? You already saw the "item" when you got its "drop chance". How and why would you take a Rhino neuroptics and mix it with a forma or two and some random other pieces just to see then what you can get out of it. You put them inside that "relic" with your own two hands and the void relic refinement apparatus.

Now, assuming we're just dropping the lore inconsistency issue (although a game that squeezes in mechanics or systems that ignores the narrative is broken from my point of view), we're left with a major mess loot-table wise. Add all the prime components available at any given time. Now please tell how you think about spreading them across the star chart as potential drops? For example, you have an 11.86% chance of dropping a vaulted Axi S3 in a C rotation on Mithra. Now crack open all the potential axi relics and pour all their content inside the Mithra run. The chance of getting any of the components of the former Axi S3 relic are...?! And from there onward, there's still no certainty of the drops as those components get slotted into another gambling machine. The desire to make a more pretty relic selection screen can potentially lead to a gruesome grind that more often than not will not get a player any closer to the items he or she desires.

I believe that if the relics system is to be looked at (and I don't think it does, save for maybe the way the relics drop - even more so the vaulted ones)... it has to be not patched, but replaced:

• Based on their current rarity, each of the relic's potential drop gets fragmented into a number of pieces. Say 3 for common drops, 10 for uncommon and 25 for rares.
• These blueprints or components chunks get tossed in the reward pools. As there's a ton of the components and blueprints, they'll be cluttering the current farming spots like crazy, so they'll need to be better thought of, especially in the AABC rotation maps. Rotation A - for example - wouldn't have a chance to drop common (and uncommon) blueprint/component parts for all items in any mission. Maybe survivals and salvage missions would drop warframe parts, interceptions defection and  would drop melee, defenses and hive missions would primary weapons components and bp, excavations secondaries and sabotage missions and spy sentinels. Forma pieces could be dropped in all other missions and be treated as common item (because why the hell even have forma in a relic, seeing how it's also available as rare drop from containers, as mission reward and as potential sortie reward?!). Or they could be scattered based on their origin throughout all the missions in a given star chart sector.
• Next, upon reaching the amount of parts needed to assemble a component, one would use the relic refinement station to assemble it. And here's where you can maybe improve the QoL: by fusing together 30 common drops one would be able to refine an uncommon drop (that is, every 3 common drop fragment could be also refined into an uncommon drop fragment) . Same, by fusing 75 common drops, you'd get your rare drop component/blueprint.

This would basically remove the relics altogether and replace'em not with "drop chance" items (which, really now... how much sense do they make?!) but with item shards. You'd get your relic selection screen headache cured (because so much headache from selecting a relic!), lore/narrative will be saved from abuse and the process of getting a desired item would be more... pleasant, even if not much less grindy, with both the division of the missions and the chance to fuse shards into higher grade pieces.

Lore-wise is easy to solve. I mean, you're just laying problems there for the sake of having problems.

It can easily be explained through the fact that every relic is a puzzle box, like a Lemarchand combination, where, taking one of your ideas, adjusting tumblers in this way or that way yields a different reward from the Void. Therefore, what drops, (in the shape of "loot bundles", or if you want, "Void Crypto" or something like that), is tumbler combinations for the relic, which is actually a sort of Orokin 3D printer from the days of yore, which, let's say, weaves items out of the void, and cracking it means breaking the firewall installed in it. Or something like that. Lorewise is very easy to solve.

Now, to answer your question regarding the spread across charts, again, if you think a little, it's very easy. Since what drops is not relics anymore, but Void Cryptos (to use the new name, since you insist so much on the lore), all you have to do is REPLACE the relics dropped for the new Void Cryptos. Void Cryptos are not stored like relics, but instead, opened to reveal the loot drops within (like loot boxes, only they are not purchasable with plat or real money to avoid Battlefront 2-style controversies). Those loot drops (or tumbler combinations for the relic) are what is stored, and you can simply see what you have. Therefore, the loot tables remain pretty much exactly the same, both in drop chance for each item, and in relics.

To clarify then, using your example, if you have an 11.86% chance of dropping an Axii S3 in C rotation on Mithra, then, what you get when you are supposed to receive an Axii S3 relic is no longer a metal sphere. It's a Void Crypto with the exact same rewards that an Axii S3 has. The difference is that, instead of storing a metal sphere, you open the Void Crypto that corresponds to an Axii S3, check what's in it (which is the exact same reward table for an Axii S3), and store the tumbler combinations (or loot drop chance cards) for the relic. Once you do your Void Crypto runs (which would be tantamount to farming relics), you end up with a number of tumbler combinations, each for an item that can be weaved if the cracking is successful. What you do is equip different tumbler combinations in the relic (because it would no longer be lots of relics. Just one per tier.), and you go crack it. Once again, you can only equip 2 commons, 2 uncommons and 2 rares, just like the old system, and they preserve the exact same drop chances. This could result in items getting farmed possibly faster, but it would still remain on the realm of chance, and you would still need the Cryptos that drop the items you want to fully customize a relic.

A way to preserve rarity in order to keep things grindy, would be that, if you customize every slot in a relic, you have to pay more void traces the more varied your relic is. If you slot rewards from 6 different Cryptos into a single relic, it would cost twice the normal rate (or maybe even thrice) to get the relic to radiant. Whenever you get the relic ready for a run, it will fall on a random tumbler combination. Customizing it costs void traces (because you're fiddling with the basic configuration of the Orokin 3D printer/weaver). Getting it to Radiant while customized costs even more traces (in order to sustain the strain in the relic), and there's an increasing chance of the tumblers resetting each wave (becauses the relic/3D printer/weaver overloads and can't mantain the forced configuration. It's a relic, after all). Since you can recustomize the relic between waves, you should also be able to re polish it. This would, of course, depend on increasing the void trace drops a tiny bit, since they would find more use, but not too much.

The shard idea is actually nice, but it wouldn't help much inventory wise. That's how Killing Floor 2 works, and the inventory in that game is a mess. There's also the fact that restricting drops to a specific mission makes the grind even more boring, since you wouldn't even be able to choose which missions you want to do. And you would still need a list of all the possible items to assemble, which is something my system already has, only that in my system you only see what you have, not the huge list of what you can possibly have.

[Himenoinu]

6 hours ago, Artistical said:

There's also the fact that restricting drops to a specific mission makes the grind even more boring, since you wouldn't even be able to choose which missions you want to do. And you would still need a list of all the possible items to assemble, which is something my system already has, only that in my system you only see what you have, not the huge list of what you can possibly have. 

Specific mission types and you wouldn't go in a place where you could get everything possible, but just one type of gear. For example, I wouldn't be running Mithral, Mot and Marduk in hopes of getting a Scindo component shard only to get Mirage, Rhino and other random warframe blueprints in the process. I would go to Yursa, Mithral, Xini or Berehynia for it. Not just one spot, not just one mission type. Of course, it would be nice the missions would be both the endless type, but I think that's the smallest of the issues with that design.

Granted, the amount of blueprints and components would make for a huuuuge list in the void relic refinement interface with the only way of cleaning it up being the same split that we have in the inventory ui being nested inside a rarity one (like the current relic system), But then again, so would yours. As you remove a forma bp from a Void Crypto, that item will no longer be identical to the other 20 you have. taking up another space, another Void Crypto will also lose the rare item tumbler along with the forma, taking a different spot again a.s.o.

Also,

6 hours ago, Artistical said:

2 commons, 2 uncommons and 2 rares, just like the old system,

has to be a much older system that I didn't play through, as the ones we have is a 3-2-1 relic content.

 

6 hours ago, Artistical said:

The difference is that, instead of storing a metal sphere, you open the Void Crypto that corresponds to an Axii S3, check what's in it (which is the exact same reward table for an Axii S3), and store the tumbler combinations (or loot drop chance cards) for the relic.

Now THAT doesn't make sense. Why would I want to take more than one tumbler into another RNG system if I can already see them and remove them from their initial, void crypto, bundle. It's probably the only thing that rubs me the wrong way.

While the idea itself might lead to less grinding for the item itself, that won't change all that much. Given the current situation, you'd still run same void missions for a huge array of relics that don't fit your needs or goals.

Lastly, for your idea, you'd have to rethink the relics contents as there are T1-T4 rares, uncommon and common tumblers and it would be a bit of a cheat for the tenno to throw them in together. Whereas with my suggestion, you'd run the relevant tier mission for the corresponding component/blueprint scrap/shard.