(PC) Empyrean: Economy Feedback Megathread

[nebfab]

Encouraging people to sign up to other people's railjack runs is essential, but intentionally nerfing low-tier railjacks to achieve it isn't the way to do it.

For one, it depends on constant influx of new players. If or when that ceases, even temporarily, for any reason, the whole system stops working. I saw it happening in other games with ship-and-crew mechanics, and the death spiral isn't pretty.

For two, we already have a quite impressive grindwall and a 3-day minimum timegate between being able to join other games and owning a railjack. No point in double-dipping.

For three, this is a game where gravity-defying wuxia moves are simply how you get around a map while slaying a horde of enemies. That's what makes it different from other looters on the market, and the lack of that was the reason why until now everyone used archwings mainly as open zone fast travel mounts, not for combat.  Railjack has a potential to bring the same aesthetics to space combat, but not if cool stuff is locked behind the kind of grindwalls we have now. (This is drifting into general/intrinsics feed back, so I'll stop talking about it here.)

 

 

[MobyTheDuck]

The insane costs to craft everything, RNG rolls, not recovering all the resources by scrapping, low drop rates and drop inconsistency (as in, you cant be certain which enemy drops what and how often) is just artificially inflating the play time and wont lead to player retention and increased play time like you guys wish, but cause player burnout faster and cause the playerbase to drop (which is already happening since last year).

[Yehudiel]

17 hours ago, Lers said:

It really doesn't take much. If you don't over-gear a given area, and actively engage in combat with reasonable skills you are still going to be breached. Hell, I'm only missing a Zetki Bulkhead and I still get breached every now and then in Veil with good shields and maxed Hull Weave. Its a pretty regular thing in lower areas, even on ships with "okay" gear.

There's nothing wrong with that imo. Maybe do better the next time if that happens. People will find a way. People will develop their own styles and this is what i feel should happen. And I have been in so many mission across the veil and maybe i fail 2-3x between being a captain or crew. It's very forgiving as it is already.

17 hours ago, Lers said:

I enjoyed Dark Souls as a challange, and I don't mind if a game hands me my backside. However I don't think you'll find a single person out there that thinks that the serial runs from the bonfire to a fog wall to be anything but a frustration during the learning period of bosses.

On top of that this is not Dark Souls. Its a long term free to play grinding game, relying heavily on positive feedback and power fantasy. Its important to make people feel like they are not wasting their time (too much) with the grind and always comming out with gains worth the time invested. Adding time wasting penalties to a system like this to "put the fear into the players" is a ballsy move to say the least (and basically the reason many people dislike recent decisions made by DE).

It's intertwined but yes, it makes you feel like should kill the boss this time does it not? But yeah,  dark souls is a bad example, maybe hardcore Path of Exile, it's a massive waste of time when you die (more punishing than the proposed railjack death penalty) and just a complete grind to get back to where you're at and there's no cushioning when you deplete your hp unlike here in warframe that has a catastrophic failure timer, yet people still do it and enjoy it. I'm suggesting a mild form of that because i know warframe players won't be able to withstand that frustration. There should be consequences of failing, so not failing will have meaning and doesn't feel like you've just completed a chore.

Edit: The Primary objective why i proposed Penalty on Railjack death is that so

1) Immersion

2) Encourage improvement of skill/coordination

3) remove the "I just won't give much of a f* because ship is immortal anyway" feeling

4) People don't forcibly take their weak ships in high tier missions relying on teammates to archwing-it. 😉

5) Encourage players to be crewmembers more since you risk losing less(just time) as crewmembers

Edited January 14, 2020 by Yehudiel

[Aldain]

Now that it is out on Switch I can finally comment realistically on the economy.

DE what in the world were you smoking with these repair costs for any and all Salvage?!

Titanium is obnoxiously high even on basic MK1s, for some reason I can't find Copernics at all and that is only the tip of the space asteroid sized mess that is the economy.

When you get to your next big patch (27.1.0) I hope you have actual significant changes to the costs or acquisition amounts because this is balls to the wall INSANE.

And if you're even thinking about using that "it would be wrong because of the people who farmed it already" excuse for not changing anything do us all a favor and don't, because it is absolutely wrong. 

[Kefirno]

Dirac is so useless. While it's always good to have regular Endo because you can max and sell rank 10 mods or endlessly dump it into rivens even after you maxed all the essentials (and there are lots of mods), there's no Dirac sink. I have 40k Dirac, all my avionics and grid maxed. I don't even play Railjack that much and I never even bothered with scrapping extra avionics.

I suggest to change unrepaired wreckage scrapping from giving Dirac to Titanium and/or other RJ resources. Not a big change, but I'm pretty sure it would make RJ economy more balanced in general.

I also support suggestion to use Dirac for rerolling equipment stats, but I doubt DE will ever do this.

Edited January 15, 2020 by Kefirno

[JonnesTT]

The "economy" of railjack is... just warframes general "economy" reskinned. You play the easiest to farm mission of the area (in railjack just all of the vail ._.) on repeat until you have all of what you want instead of looking at what you want to finish first and deciding: Well, that mission always rewards 2 titanium caches, let's run this mission because titanium is literally the only thing I've been farming since I have the last prime time-gate finished -.-

My idea would be to change the vail missions into specific missions i.e. raid/steel/hijack/defend/[input any existing mission type] a carrier for 4 caches of a !specified! Resource or 5 wreckage (ideally with some indication on what wreckage you'd be getting, you could time gate it to be a different manufacturerer every 30 min, or type every 10-20 min f.e.) or a relatively big bunch of mods and in turn reduce drop chances of normal enemies.

And then I'd generally wish for the resources to be united in one system, maybe drop railjack resources from exilus + a slim chance for normal enemies to drop them on any specific planet or just drop the reskinnining of resources entirely and use an actual resource economy instead of throwing resources at players and saying "you wanna farm? EVERYTHING OR NOTHING" A resource economy might actually be we players the bulk of our resources as mission rewards in a way that gives us choice, so we feel like we're in charge of our resources. (Maybe you guys might wanna take another look at choice in relation to endgame ^^)

Another thing that has been bothering me is the gear econimy, I like the idea of getting a small bonus that (due to the nature of random chance) start at big increases and run towards lower ones with time but the steep resource cost (again ~35k titanium to make my railjack usable o.o 30k for dropped guns + 4k for the dojo reactor, but yea, I'm surely gonna use the 6k ones that come with 30-60% less fire rate) makes me farm for so long, that I'm already at 59% 56,4% fire rate turrets of the exact version I was hoping to get (Zetki Apoc, I also have a Vidar one at 59,3% stashed because I wanna test status builds :D). A live service game I'm usually using as example for well exicuted economy mechanics, Guild Wars 2 does loot differently (but gw2 is... not like many other live service games) their market makes it incredibly easy to get the exotic gear (from a stat comparison 5% dps and 10% overall stats lower than the ascended i.e. consistently the highest stat gear) so, what I'd do is make the dojo gear apear up to 30% weaker than most of the dropped gear so fewer people feel forced to use dropped gear (despite dojo gear being quite usable) and again, lower the drop rates of dropped gear (I hope you see what I understand as near endgame ^^ everything useful but the new things a player gets just a lil bit better)

Another thing that bugs me about the economy is the wreckage limit, currently having 30 wreckage slots is just bonkers, I have 19 slots that are always filled with some high rng gear that I can't build yet (Iiiit's titanium), so I want to just farm titanium to get my gear done but at the same time I get about 3 new turrets every mission, so I have to run back to my dojo after 3-4 missions and check all rng stats and delete the stuff I don't want which reminds me of how little progress I made towards actually driving my ship that I waited 4 days to finish.
Oh, and for what do I exchange the bad gear for? For Diorite... no wait that was the essentially useless crap stone from another game, nevertheless I have all slots and the most important/useful avionics maxed already and I'm not even using my own jack yet ._. Maybe they are the only "balanced" farm in railjack XD but at the same time, end game farms should always lead somewhere, and right now there's absolutely no reason for me to ever look at endo reskin ever again. Maybe allow us to reroll gear with crapstone? I mean, the bps we get seem to be just crapstone cores so if we allow rerolling gear AND lower the dropchances for gear itself the progression might feel a little less skewed towards doing everything before ever using your own ship.

Also, wtf is avionics? Really? You're doing account wide progression right with serretion and family but then you throw mods at our head that we need to REFARM when we want a better version? The Zetki Bulkhead makes all other Bulkheads completely irrelevant THAT'S NOT HOW YOU DO GEAR, AND YOU FLIP FLOPPIN' DIRT HOPPIN' KNOW THAT... Just make all versions about endgame marge (i.e. 10-5%) as good as each other and have small trade offs like a 1 Avi-cap and 10% weaker stats in full or go the amalgam route, Zetki bulkhead gives most health (estimate... like 20% additive), lavan 10% dmg, valor (ah dunno, otherwhise irrelevant gear manufacturer) 10% move speed or something D:<
Btw It's a bad sign if someone who's spent 40+ hours playing and a few hours analyzing your gear system can't remember the floofin' manufacturers.

TLDR: Railjack, a endgame gamemode uses a progression system as if it was it's own game... that had no endgame...

Man, DE has something about endgame gamemodes don't you guys? Maybe get an expert on game economies onto the boat (I suppose even the main game resource economy needs a big rework and maybe the loot economy needs a look, just sayin' ._. Well, you can always make a big I mean REALLY BIG let's build this and that event over like a year or so to practically wipe our MOUNTAINSUPON MOUNTAINS OF RESOURCES)

General rule for live service endgame (Bro, after Forbes no more denin') would be to use a gaussian normal distribution to visualize power increases i.e. very early a bit but enough to feel it we're enjoying the spectacle, midgame WOW I'M GETTING STRONKER and end game, ye, those 5% look like a goal. Or you could just say "evergreen midgame" and balance for the content rushers...

[MajMishap]

A little late but I think the comparative costs of MKIII dojo gear -vs- everything else is out of whack.  The sigma MKIII gear is trivial to build, not sure why folks are complaining about resources since it takes only 3 runs on easy earth missions ( no boosters ) to gather stuff to build.  Yes it is a bit boring and no I won't do it any more once getting proper gear but folks who can't be bothered to bust any red rocks are nuts -- even the purchase for credits weapons took more effort to farm not to mention effort to get a decent arch-gun.   I suppose there is a catch-22 if you don't have enough gear to solo ANY nodes but in that case your problem is not railjack it is your archwing and base warframe.

MKI and MKII by comparison require more effort since they use crafting materials which are comparatively harder to farm.  In the time it takes to get a couple pieces of MKI I can have a whole ship of MKIII,   The MKI and MKII gear lost all relevance as soon as the 9 day research times expired.  The initial progression was kind of fun but no longer exists at all.  At least the MKI should be much cheaper, perhaps using starchart materials.

Like others I also wish there was something to spend dirac on.  It was a nice goal to earn enough to upgrade grid but has lost relevance once that is done.

Not sure if it is economy but Sentinent part drops are a toxic abort-fest.  To be viable other than solo I think it should be a single-objective mission since it is so rare to find a squad that finishes it anyhow.  I would say it should have hidden drops but that has two issues:  1) No drop still == abort.  2) 30-40 minutes to reveal -- nothing would be horrible.

[LSG501]

Bit late but finally got round to doing some railjack... still not exactly fun imo but figured best 'get some of it out of the way' while I have some boosters.

Honestly titanium rewards versus usage in upgrades is severely out of whack.  I've basically spent 2 days doing the missions I can access (and some where I got taxi'd) and I've literally got 12k titanium and that's mostly because I have a booster.  If the return is low even with a booster, then the drop rates are too low imo.

Feel the rewards need to be doubled (or higher) as standard, with a resource booster the drops didn't feel too bad (if you ignore titanium) but without they feel too low for the time we're wasting in missions. 

At least in the earlier missions I'm finding getting dirac in reasonable quantity harder than it should be

[_Blackeye_]

After playing RJ since the release I think I can confidently say that the amount of resources you need to repair wreckage is overkill...

I went straight for the MKIII parts. So far I've been able to repair 2... TWO!!!!!

The biggest issues in my opinion are first of all asterite and then titanium.

The problem for example with asterite is that on average you get what? 30 asterite / mission? 1440/30=48 That means you need to run 48 missions to repair 1 MKIII part that's not zetki cause that's the only house that has nothing to do with asterite. Knowing that everyone wants at least 1 vidar gun and reactor on his RJ...

To solve this I see multiple options:

• divide the asterite costs by at least 2
• increase the drop rate or amount you get (again)
• spread the need of certain resources over the different types of components instead of the different houses

I think a combination of these would be the most optimal plan.

 

That being said. As changes to the components, resources, .... keep happening it would be nice to have some kind of compensation. For example having a weekend where you can trade components back for 100% of the resources instead of 80%. Having invested lots of time to find and farm components only to have them changed (not always for the better) is kind of demotivating.

[Aldain]

Costs for any and all MK1s are obtusely high, there's no reason to even bother trying to build them because of the insane costs, This extends to the MK1s in the clan research.

For example, the MK1 Sigma Apoc requires 2,500 Titanium and 1500 Pustrels to make.

The MK2? Needs 3,000 Titanium, only 500 more than the MK1 and a whopping 4,000 Copernics, which is more than double the Pustrels of the MK1.

The MK3 also goes from 75 Asterite for the MK1 to an outlandish 300, with the Titanium costs doubling to 6,000, but only needs a mere 5,000 Cubic Diodes.

What the Hek is the rhyme or reason to these costs? Why do the house Varients of these weapons also need at MK1 similar resource amounts to the MK3 Sigma weapons?

Seriously DE, I mean no disrespect but what in the hell was the game-plan here? Because as it is it seems like you guys just randomly plugged in numbers without checking or thinking about the amounts of the drops needed to make even one thing.

Edited January 18, 2020 by Aldain

[Ham_Grenabe]

Just wait: Mk III equipment from drops requires 1,440 asterite per piece.

[MithrilDragon]

I'd like to be able to use wreckage of matching type to increase the house modifier on repaired weapons or stats on repaired shield/engine/reactor.  Even if only 2% of the stats are given, this would help mitigate the evils of RNG.

[-Takara-]

My request is to maybe triple the drop rates of MK3 parts in Veil missions and lower the costs to repair wreckage. I've been playing Railjack since launch(surprised I haven't gone insane yet with the state it was in) and grinding ever since for that Vidar reactor but still no luck. I really want to take my Railjack out for a spin, but I can't because I don't have the reactor to allow upgrades. Yes, I could just settle for whatever reactor I have for the time being, but why would I do that when I know there is 100% a superior one to the one that I have? Plus, with the ridiculous repair costs, why would I want to commit to anything that isn't a Vidar Reactor? That's literally burning resources for no reason. Even with the "doubled" drop rates, farming for a Vidar Reactor is still a massive pain because its from a 2% to a 4%. Yes, grinding for a good part makes sense, but take into account the time it takes to complete a skirmish in the Veil. I've average around 10-15 min per mission, maybe 20 if it has other objectives. I wouldn't mind such long mission times if the mission itself was actually enjoyable. Every railjack mission is exactly the same instead of having different missions with different objectives. They're literally all archwing exterminate missions, and we all know how much everyone loves archwing. For the time invested doing something that is not as enjoyable as the rest of warframe, it really doesn't feel good when the reward for that time spent is a relic I don't need. So if you don't get the thing you want, haha too bad, better waste another 10-20 min hoping you do. Even when you get the part you want, if it's not 1 or 2 percent off from max, it still feels pretty bad because you know a better one exists out there. That's another 10-20 min per mission for essentially a reroll for something better. Again, I suggest maybe tripling the drop rate of railjack parts. Make it 6% or at least make the percentages higher than relics, dirac, forma, etc.

P.S. Another thing that makes little sense to me is the acquisition of these parts. Why does Vidar and Lavan only drop from end of mission rewards, but Zekti parts drop from literally everything. Lorewise, I thought Zekti were suppose to be best of the best.

[Aldain]

Random update, why the Vay Hek am I finding so few Copernics?

More than anything Copernics and Carbides are the major inhibiting components in ever considering repairing or crafting anything. Seriously even with refinement from the forge I only have about 2,000ish compared to my Cubics which are near 6,000. I'm not sure why these are so much more rare.

Well that and Titanium, which I don't have much of it and the costs are still insanely high for how low the base drop amounts per asteroid (with no booster I average maybe 25-30 per asteroid) and most players don't have the patience to fly around for 20 minutes collecting Titanium.

I'd almost rather have rarer items like Asterite be the inhibiting component, because at least then it would have the excuse of being rare rather than obscenely boring to farm.

[667st]

Availability of good Bulkhead avionics is too low. Either farm most basic enemies, which are never enough or enemies that don't exist. Please add bulkhead drops to more enemies. Or just buff Lavan variant.

 

[motorfirebox]

I think the drop rates need a serious buff. I'm 7/7/9/7, I've played a lot of Railjack. And yet the only reason I have a Zekti Bulkhead is, I broke down and bought one off warframe.market. Similarly, I have yet to see a single defensive battle avionic (active slot 1) drop. I've got two or more of every other battle avionic, but not a single slot 1 drop.

[Neumeier]

I'd like there to be an alternative to getting Asterite. Titanium, and most other building materials, have an alternative way of getting them, besides grind farming them. i.e. Titanium and Fresnels can be gained as mission rewards. 

Right now Asterite is real bottle neck.

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_]

February 10 after the Lich/RJ patch.   Im on console and have been farming lots of veil to build veil level gear.   15k titanium is kind of excessive but ok....  The biggest hurdle to repairing wrecks though is Trachons.  We currently have a res booster and I got around 500 +/- Trachons per veil run.   That means after the res booster goes away it will be down to 250 +/-.   Of which I need 1800 to repair a single wreck....  Your talking about almost 8 missions which usually take me 45mins to 1 hour.  

All day farm just to repair 1 wreck...  is that what you were going for???    You guys need to take the average run time of a RJ mission vs how many runs you want people to have to do to repair a wreck.    

Considering wrecks are RNG on stats RJ gear is not just build one and done....  You are constantly looking for better.  You want to repair tons of wrecks.   This economy does not support this at all.  Not now and especially not after Res booster goes away.   

In my opinion if we take the time to loot we should get to repair 1-2 wrecks per RJ run (without res booster)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Trachons are one of the rarest materials to farm.   You guys markeds avionics in space, you marked wreckage,  you you did NOT mark resources..   Trachons can drop as resources from fighters/crewships and is unmarked in space.... The only other place I have seen it drop is in res containers in crewships and bases.

Res loot needs to be marked in space also.  

Or even better.... all loot in space should just get automatically picked up, regardless of range.  If we kill stuff, we deserve the loot.  

But please consider how often you want us to be able to repair wrecks and balance resources against that.  8-10 missions for 1 wreck is waaaay to much.

[UUDDLRLRBA_START]

On 2020-02-10 at 2:29 PM, (PS4)AbBaNdOn_ said:

Trachons are one of the rarest materials to farm.

I don't build one of everything (except perhaps, weapons).

The real shortage is Titanium (the new Alloy Plate) and Asterite (the new Oxium), since both Lavan and Vidar components use them (Zekti uses Fresnels, but since Zekti weapons tend to overheat quickly, I have plenty of those).

Reducing the components needed would not be needed if the drop amounts are bumped up slightly.

[Kaotyke]

I feel like the debris in higher level Empyrean missions should give more resources.

As of right now, people spam the 1st mission on Earth over and over to farm it.

[(PSN)Silverback73]

DE, please listen.  MK1 and MK2 house parts need to have their resource costs applied toward a higher tier upgrade of the same type.  Think of it as trade-in value like a car when going back to the same dealer.  Loyalty matters.

In fact, I would go 120% of value as you would still be net positive with an MK1-MK2-MK-3 build progression.  THAT’S incentive.

This way, players can gradually upgrade their Railjacks to deal with increasingly difficult content and not feel penalized.  The journey is rewarding and smooth.

I’m a vet who essentially is refusing to extend my grind by building mid-tier RJ components because they are a waste of time.

And so my RJ is a pretty Dojo ornament.

I am admittedly part of the reason that bottlenecks the current user base that will challenge the numbers needed for RJ to succeed.  I simply join other vets with viable high-end RJs and that is very limiting.

The problem, economy-wise, participation-wise, and progression-wise is that usage is disrupted.  Unfortunately,  the grind is already taxing enough, and even if MR was applied to all parts, still not worth it.  They are a waste to put into the game in the current system if MK1 and MK2 parts don’t offer secondary/tertiary benefits separate from tier 3 parts, either economically or gameplay-wise.

TLDR:  Incentivize players to build MK1 and MK2 parts by discounting the costs towards an upgrade of the same house type with reactors, weapons, and shields to keep them playing and progressing.

Edited March 1, 2020 by (PS4)Silverback73

[Bathynomus]

Basically all of the rare railjack materials and titanium are way too rare. It's not fun to farm hours and hours after doing the missions to get enough materials to repair ONE piece of railjack gear.It doesn't feel like a natural part of the game, when you have to go out of your way to get COMMON resources like that. And then there's limits on how much you can have. That's about as bad as having a hard cap of 30 normal weapons, just why? Railjack is not fun when you can't get new stuff, because you can't get enough materials without awful grind. And the amount of intrisincs needed is just too tedious, and later you're going to have more of them? Nah fam, no dice.

[Almagnus1]

On 2020-03-01 at 1:36 PM, (PS4)Silverback73 said:

I’m a vet who essentially is refusing to extend my grind by building mid-tier RJ components because they are a waste of time.

This is exactly what I did too, as the only thing the tier 1-2 parts were good for is unlocking the tier 3 parts.  Even then, I'm still scrapping everything that's not a tier 3 part, and I'm being really hesitant on crafting tier 3 dropped stuff because it's such an investment... and this kidna leads into some feedback I have with how things are managed that ties heavily into econ.

IMO, what DE needs to do to fix this is allow for me to upgrade parts with drops that I find and completely pull the RNG out of the system and have the components and armaments follow an upgrade path similar to the avionics, but tiered.  For example, I've got a T1 Zekti Widget, and I want to upgrade it to T2, so I max out the ranks of the Zekti Widget, then pay an upgrade cost, and it's now a T2 part.  I can repeat the same thing, but on the T3 unlock I now have a choice for which bonus (if applicable) that I'd like to have from a list of ALL the choices.  This way I'm more inclined to use what I find and upgrading the Railjack feels better.  It also encourages me to grind out multiple compontents as I'm able to better tailor my railjack to taste, rather than being at the mercy of RNG.

As far as the Sigma parts go, T1 should require the vanilla Sigma parts, T2 should require T1, and T3 should require T2 so, again, I'm able to slowly build up my railjack to endgame, and I can run missions and feel like I'm making progress.

And on a very related note, the various railjack aspects need to be looked at as all railjack ability intrinsics need to be as useful in Veil Proxima they are on Earth Proxima, otherwise you're forcing us all into the same build... which is boring...

[(PSN)nerdlegend]

Resources not being marked on the UI is one giant problem. Also needs to be much much bigger vacuum for resources. Starting to think the cost overall needs to decrease or increase massive one for the resources. Repairs costs and general costs need to decrease or resources go way up.  

[ChaoticEdge]

confusing and painful work earn materials to build a single weapon and it seems it cost way too much how it presented.  Yet it takes a long time to farm the materials, I think you need add universal vacuum for the archwing as well including the RJ cuz getting all these materials are pain the bottom.