The problem with pure chance in Relics and how to potentially counter it

[X0ll0X]

In this post, I’d like to present some of my problems with the current Relic/Prime Part system with an example using numerical data as well as converting that into time. Following that, I’d like to propose a supplementary system that, in my opinion, would greatly help alleviate those problems. As to why picking this moment to post this monstrosity of a post, it’s a matter of both finding enough time to put my thoughts to words as well as the whole thing consolidating recently. I didn’t want to just have it stand as some vague, half-baked idea and a shrug and sadly that requires a couple more words than I’d like.

As to my insignificant person, I’ve played WF since around the time TotalBiscuit did his video on it and as such have experienced plenty of the changes. While I’m only MR 22 as of this writing, it’s mostly because I get quickly distracted by explosions and spent most of my reported 2.6k h (according to steam) formaing weapons/frames I like until hilarious overkill gets achieved. Bad luck certainly played its part. 

Also, English isn’t my first language and as such particularly phrasing and word choices can be awkward and clunky. Also run-on sentences. I do apologize for those issues in advance as well as the length of this post but I got a point to make. Trust me.

 

I’ll be using obtaining the Titania Prime Systems blueprint from scratch as a practical and timely relevant example. Statistical analysis is something I haven’t needed to use for a while, so apologies if the numbers are wrong even with the assumed simplifications. The drop rate data comes from the wiki. I’ll ignore relic packs since their drop rates aren’t that transparent and I don’t see them matter in the grand scheme nor in cases of bad luck. For the sake of simplicity for the calculations, how those calculations can be scaled up, and because I prefer playing WF like that, said calculations will be made for solo.

The first step would be obtaining Axi T5 relics. The chance of obtaining one of those ranges from, for example, the comically low ~3% in C rotation of void T3 defense, to more reasonable 6.5% and 11% for B and C rotation for regular T3 defense. In my opinion, there are only 2 missions to choose from for obtaining the relic in question: T3 interception with 14.29% in both B and C rotation or Lua disruption with 14.29% in B and 12.42% in C rotation.

This means we got lucky and it drops in a mode where you can force B or C rotation repeatedly in every round and don’t have to rely on a single 3-12.5% chance every 4 waves as in most other places or with other relics I had the displeasure of trying to obtain.

The goal is to get B rotations, which means that, theoretically, one could simply let every defense fail but one thus activating them all “at the same time” to save some time. Still, after some testing, the tileset does seem to cause pathing issues (for both me and the AI) and you can experience bad luck with the key drops. As such, I’ll assume the average time per round to be (an optimistic) 4 minutes to compensate for bad AI, navigating the terrain, the pause in between rounds, and trips back to the orbiter. Because of those factors, which you can’t influence that much through superior firepower, I don’t expect the 4-man time per round to be much lower than 3 minutes.

We know the drop chance for Axi T5 in the given circumstances is 14.29%. To put that chance into perspective I’ll be using expected values and values to have a 90% probability of obtaining at least 1 of a given thing much as the wiki does.

Plugging in 14.29%, it means we expect the correct relic to drop every 7 attempts - or rounds in this case. However, since the universe isn’t obliged to be nice and neither is the game, it can take significantly longer to obtain a single relic. To get to a 90% chance of getting lucky at least once it takes about 15 rounds.

To convert that into something more tangible, I expect it to average out at around 28 minutes of farming per single Axi T5 relic in a very generous, new game mode compared to basically all the other alternatives. Even with other mission types with quick-ish modes, I expect that number to easily double (when dropped on A rotation or both B+C) or even quadruple - assuming it has the same high drop chance as in this example. Even here, you could have a 10% chance (ie, the same chance of getting a rare drop out of a radiant void relic) to not see a single Axi T5 relic after 60 minutes of just doing Lua disruption as fast as possible.

 

With the relic obtained, we get to the second part of the grind: Void Traces. Because Titania Prime’s systems are a rare drop and getting the relics is a bit of randomized hassle, radiating the relic to increase the drop chance from 2% to 10% is in order.

Wiki tells us that cracking a Relic nets around 6-30 Void Traces. I’ll assume normal distribution in that range and take 18 as the number of Traces it’ll average out on. Without boosters (either direct resource booster or Charm), this means I expect to crack about 5.6 Relics to get to the 100 Traces needed for a single Radiant Relic (no actual Relics need to be harmed in getting Traces, of course). Being generous and assuming there’s a Lith capture fissure active and your network is fast enough to transition in and out of missions to average to 2 minutes permission. This still means spending 11 minutes and 6 seconds gathering resources after farming for a Relic to get a single 10% chance of obtaining a rare item.

 

Finally, it’s time to earn the fruits of your labor and open that relic. Due to the Relic in question being of the Axi tier, let’s just say the mission takes 5 minutes and you obtain… a common drop as will be the case 50% of the time. Calculating the expected and 90% values, you get the expectation of 10 attempts to get a single rare drop after all the preceding work and to get to 90% you need 22 Radiant Axi T5 relics.

To put this convert this into time investment using the numbers I proposed above: I expect a typical single attempt to average out on about 45 minutes. With bad luck involved some of these runs can easily clock up to 76 minutes per run with a 10% chance, the same probability of getting the desired item, of it taking even longer. Even without the RNGods screwing you over with the actual Titania Prime systems blueprint drop, this means an expected average of 7.5 h of active farming to get this single rare relic drop. And this is with very favorable farming conditions for the relics themselves, lest we forget. Just being unlucky on that part in this example can bump up the active farming time up to 12.5 h.

 

Now to address the elephant in the room: yes I’m aware that farming it with a full 4 person squad can reduce those times to less than a quarter of that due to factually getting 4 attempts at the same time and in a surprisingly less significant way increasing efficiency at which Traces are gained through the extra 5 Traces/player when your drop gets picked by others as well as Charm stacking. I’ve also neglected the Traces gained when opening the actually intended relic. Then again, looking at the numbers, the Traces - while annoying - don’t seem to be the major time sink compared to the rest.

Thing is, I work retail and after a long day, I want to just bullet jump through a mission exploding everything in sight - not deal with randoms that’ll likely object to my preferred playstyle, dawdle around, or criticize my Fashion Frame game. I love the core gameplay loop but neither have the mental energy nor time needed to deal with the petty and grandstanding behavior I’ve sadly experienced too often in public sessions. The friends I’ve played WF with have started logging in less and less as well so that’s not a true option either. Then again, I tend to find it slightly difficult to keep a group of 4 motivated throughout what’s an expected 1.5 h intensive farming session with so many other distractions on the market.

On top of this, these calculations ignore the extremes at either end of the bell curve. One might get lucky and get everything first try or, as I’ve painfully experienced twice myself, it takes significantly longer than 22 Relics to obtain a single rare drop. I haven’t kept precise records of it - partially due to frustration, partially due to sheer despair - but I estimate it took me in the region of 50-60 flawless to radiant Relics to get a single Vectis Prime receiver (I had the necessary number of Relics due to the conversion from Void Keys to Relics). To get Vauban Prime systems, I invested about 30-40 Radiant Relics personally with another 10-20 ones of the same quality sponsored by my friends.

To be frank, when that happens, it’s extremely disheartening. When the middle finger of proverbial monkey’s paw rises in the form of 2 unneeded consecutive rare drops while farming Traces, it feels like any time invested is neither being taken seriously nor respected. No matter the effort put into it, at the end of the time-intensive process, the best you can do is rolling for the same 10% chance per person and hope that the RNGods finally have mercy. No real choice involved, no chance to increase the odds through skill, with the time in between wasted getting unwanted relics that probably end up as 15 ducats each and nowhere closer to your goal.

And that’s assuming you can still get the Relic in question is still obtainable and not hidden behind something ridiculous like C rotation on survival. I’ve been burned enough times that I’ve basically given up on getting rare drops out of Vaulted relics. Why should I work to give myself heartache?

 

To try to remedy this, I propose introducing a new currency/point system that’s compatible with the current system that hopefully won’t de-incentivize the core gameplay loop but still allows for a measurable sense of progression towards a single drop. Keep in mind that I sadly lack the statistical analysis skills to calculate the true impact of the suggested mechanic due to the complexity of scenarios. It is instead more derived from numbers present in-game and my own gut feeling. Also, I don’t want to eliminate working for something, I don’t want to just be given things or participation rewards for not falling off my chair. The following is what I feel would counter the sense of futility when farming something rare - especially something rare out of vaulted relic.

The way I see the currency work is by making it inversely proportional to the probability of the items in intact Relics. By taking the inverse, multiplying to get close to natural numbers and doing some minor rounding this would translate to 4 points for common, 9 points for uncommon, and 50 for rare drops. To reduce bloat I’d set the value of commons to 1 point (using the unrounded, raw numbers) meaning you’d get 1, 2.3, and 12.7 respectively. To make those numbers nicer looking, I’d do some creative rounding to get to 1, 2, and 12. Sure, It’d take one less common to get to the value of a single rare, but then again, uncommon drops also give fewer points. As mentioned before, I’d want this system to be somewhat of a safety net for the chronically unlucky and not replace the current system entirely. In the raw form, it’s likely going to result in obtaining the intended item in the expected number of attempts of the rarity in question but with other Relics helping out as well. To counter people just burning through throw-away Relics and only obtaining the one actual Relic needed to get the one new rare prime part contained within, I believe introducing different investment multipliers for each rarity tier might be an option. To mirror the 3 common, 2 uncommon, 1 rare pattern seen in relics, I’d set those multipliers to 1, 2, and 3 respectively.

In actual numbers, this would thus mean that to force a single rare part to drop, you’d need to invest 36 common drops, 18 uncommon, or 3 rare ones. This should also allow for the new currency to be universal across all relics instead of just being bound to a single Relic; for those points to “transcend” the boundaries of the relic they originated from.

To get the points I imagine an option to “transcend” (or whatever term will actually be used) the item obtained from your Relic will be offered. The part will be lost completely, thus forfeiting the item itself as well of potential Ducats/Platinum gained by selling/trading it but you’d be one step closer to obtaining a part you actually want.

I feel that restricting this choice to only your own relic will help avoid making this method the “only” choice through group tactics and could be explained through lore. One of the reasons I chose the word “transcend” earlier is that I could easily imagine the underlying in-universe mechanic as the Tenno dissolving the Relic with void energy the moment it’s cracked open to form a flavor of energy that can influence fate itself. For me, it would make sense that to do that one would have to “study/learn” the relic intimately and thus would only work on the ones you’d bring yourself thanks to proximity and familiarity. As to the power itself, there’s already plenty of powerful and diverse abilities in the game fueled by creepy children. Fate manipulation under certain circumstances shouldn’t be that much a stretch.

To actually apply the points to the Relic, I’d put it as an option after upgrading it to Radiant. It would kinda make “sense” and it would de-incentivize just using this mechanic on any and all common drops. Even though they’d be 1 to 1 interchangeable, commons have a 25.33% drop chance each anyway, so I’d personally find sinking 100 Traces into one a bit of a waste. It’s exactly one of my bigger disappointments regularly encountered while trying to farm a rare Prime part.

So in summary, you’d have a system where you could dissolve Prime parts into 1, 2, or 12 points by effectively destroying them and then spent 100 Void Traces plus 1, 4, or 36 of those points to get a specific reward of your choosing.

 

As mentioned before, those numbers are picked informed arbitrarily to better exemplify the system as I imagine it and to show a bit of a ballpark. The main take away is to show the advantages of such a system. You could spend some extra resources to get that single specific requiem mod needed to drive away you Lich after burning through all the other relevant relics in vain. Instead of getting annoyed over getting an old Relic, or one from which you already have already all the parts, while farming for the newest one, it could potentially get you anywhere between 1/36 to 1/3rd along the way toward the rare part you’re working for. Instead of getting annoyed over repeatedly getting 6-12 Traces while at that stage, the frustration could be tempered by also converting common drops into measurable progress. The expected fastest way of getting any specific part will likely still be going at it with a full team with boosters and charming cats but there’d be an alternative for those times you found a single dusty vaulted Relic with a weapon or frame you recently (re-)discovered and want to try out. You wouldn’t have to fear just wasting it for nothing and reduce the current zero-sum mechanics where it can feel that it simply isn’t worth trying to go for a specific Relic payout unless you have loads of time. I’d love to be able to jump into WF for a couple of missions and feel like I’ve actually made progress instead of just “wasting” time.

I do love playing the game, but sometimes the sense of futility can overwhelm the joy of exploding entire groups of Grineer while flying past them like some cackling, misshapen, technicolor rocket.

 

And to those wondering about the market effects these changes would have, I sadly can’t help there. For those wondering why I’d like to see a system like this while trading with other players exists, I can answer that and the inability to estimate the economic effects at the same time. My experiences with randoms in public matches pale to the bad experiences I’ve made while trying to wade through the avalanche that is trade chat. I’ve spent hours trying to sell decent Rivens only for the few private messages sent my way to be hilariously delusional and abrasive. I’ve personally been met by open hostility for the capital offense of trying to engage in some standard, polite mmo-style (and irl-style for items without a fixed value) bartering, nevermind asking if I could just get the one part instead of the entire set. I’ve heard friends who haven’t given up on trade chat tell stories of getting blocked and/or reported for those same “offenses”. In short, I had to decide whether I’d like to spend my ever-more limited time playing the game I unironically like and occasionally getting frustrated or shout into a hostile and petty void with no guaranteed payout other than lost hope in humanity and a distinct hatred for the term “god-like”. I chose the former over the latter.

 

Again, I’d like to apologize for the length of this post but I’d like to be both thorough and sufficiently precise linguistically to present the idea clearly. While also suffering from a terminal case of innate verbosity when given the chance.
 

[Steel_Rook]

From experience writing lengthy posts, I'd recommend adding bolded section titles or some other means of subdividing your post. Chances are, you'll get more readers that way.

Unfortunately, I feel compelled to be a bit nihilistic here. I've spent a lot of time complaining about the Void Fissures systems, how random it is, how punishing it can be, etc. - pretty much the same complaints that you have. Every time I've voiced those concerns, however, I've been reminded of a part of Warframe that the regular users among us never really run across: the secondary market. Whether by choice or by circumstance, DE have fostered an entire subculture of people who've essentially turned Warframe into their job, opening Void Relics and selling their contents. I fear that any attempt to address the Trade system or the Void Relic system from the perspective of a player is futile, since neither is currently design with players in mind.

I've often regarded F2P games with the mentality of "there's no such thing as a free lunch." There's a free path towards earning everything the game has to offer, but the game's core design REALLY does not want you doing that. Suggestions to make it easier, less annoying or less random to earn these "paywalled in all but name" items is that we're arguing against deliberate design. Fairly recently, I finally broke and lost my patience for Warframe's grind. I've put up with it for two years, I can't any more. Once I resolved to buy my Primed crap rather than earning it, my mindset shifted into a surprisingly familiar state. Years ago, I played a game called Payday 2. Every few weeks, the game would release a $5 weapon pack with a couple of guns and mods in it. Every few months, the game would release a new Heist for $7. I tended to buy these as they came out both because I liked the game and for the sake of completeness.

I'm sitting in Warframe in possession of most but not all things, at least as far as my Profile will show me. The moment I considered spending 100-200 Plat per new item released with Prime Access out of Platinum I've bought on discount (so call it $10 per 1000 Plat, ~$5 for a Warframe an two weapons), I realised I was basically playing Payday 2 all over again. Yes, Warframe is a F2P game in terms of general designation, but it more or less fits exactly into the old PD2 model, which is to say a paid game with paid DLCs. Yes, you can earn those DLCs in-game if you REALLY REALLY wanted to, but the game kind of wants you to buy them. Of course, the game wants you to buy them for 80 MOTHER#*!%ING DOLLARS!!! through Prime Access, but you can usually buy those things for a few hundred plat if you wait a few days for the secondary market subculture to catch up.

Warframe is no longer a F2P game to me. It has become a paid title no different from The Division, legacy Destiny or anything else for sale on Steam. Maybe I'm just a whale and it's my own fault. I'm sure people will crop up to tell me I'm wrong and they never spent a time. They just EARNED their plat and got everything that way. Well, I no longer have the patience to. I have a job which earns me money with which to pay for entertainment. I see no reason to "work" at my entertainment in order to "earn" in-game money with which to pay for my entertainment.

WITH THAT SAID...

I would personally like to see significant changes to Void Fissures. For one thing, I'd like to see Void Traces themselves either removed entirely, or I'd like to be able to dissolve relics into Void Traces. The relics and their contents are already a Loot Box Grind as it is. Additionally grinding for the currency needed to open them is pointless and annoying. Someone in the past suggested getting rid of Void Fissures entirely. Let us equip a Void Relic, take it with us on regular missions and fill it up with earned Affinity until it opens. Let us open it early for a lesser chance at a gold drop, mimicking the current Intact/Flawless/Radiant design. That does bring in SOME issues with Affinity farming, this is true, but I'd argue that those issues ought to be addressed either way. I know, I know - "Warframe is a grindy game." Not only is that not a good thing, though, but it also doesn't excuse some missions being MASSIVELY more lucrative for Affinity than others. Giving players individual superior "places to farm" drastically reduces mission variety since everyone ends up running just one mission over and over again.

Or skip the middle man and just give us a "deterministic out vendor." Baro is a good design choice in general, since you can trade your Primed Crap to him for currency with which you can direct-buy items. It's just that the items Baro sells aren't the same as the items you trade to him for currency. Even the worst of the Paid Loot Boxes offer us a trade-in currency with which to direct-buy what we want. Warframe's Void Loot Boxes don't, and I really think they should.

[TheLexiConArtist]

8 hours ago, X0ll0X said:

I’ll be using obtaining the Titania Prime Systems blueprint from scratch as a practical and timely relevant example. Statistical analysis is something I haven’t needed to use for a while, so apologies if the numbers are wrong even with the assumed simplifications. The drop rate data comes from the wiki. I’ll ignore relic packs since their drop rates aren’t that transparent and I don’t see them matter in the grand scheme nor in cases of bad luck. For the sake of simplicity for the calculations, how those calculations can be scaled up, and because I prefer playing WF like that, said calculations will be made for solo.

The first step would be obtaining Axi T5 relics. The chance of obtaining one of those ranges from, for example, the comically low ~3% in C rotation of void T3 defense, to more reasonable 6.5% and 11% for B and C rotation for regular T3 defense. In my opinion, there are only 2 missions to choose from for obtaining the relic in question: T3 interception with 14.29% in both B and C rotation or Lua disruption with 14.29% in B and 12.42% in C rotation.

 

We know the drop chance for Axi T5 in the given circumstances is 14.29%. To put that chance into perspective I’ll be using expected values and values to have a 90% probability of obtaining at least 1 of a given thing much as the wiki does.

Plugging in 14.29%, it means we expect the correct relic to drop every 7 attempts - or rounds in this case. However, since the universe isn’t obliged to be nice and neither is the game, it can take significantly longer to obtain a single relic. To get to a 90% chance of getting lucky at least once it takes about 15 rounds.

To convert that into something more tangible, I expect it to average out at around 28 minutes of farming per single Axi T5 relic in a very generous, new game mode compared to basically all the other alternatives. Even with other mission types with quick-ish modes, I expect that number to easily double (when dropped on A rotation or both B+C) or even quadruple - assuming it has the same high drop chance as in this example. Even here, you could have a 10% chance (ie, the same chance of getting a rare drop out of a radiant void relic) to not see a single Axi T5 relic after 60 minutes of just doing Lua disruption as fast as possible.

 

Finally, it’s time to earn the fruits of your labor and open that relic. Due to the Relic in question being of the Axi tier, let’s just say the mission takes 5 minutes and you obtain… a common drop as will be the case 50% of the time. Calculating the expected and 90% values, you get the expectation of 10 attempts to get a single rare drop after all the preceding work and to get to 90% you need 22 Radiant Axi T5 relics.

To put this convert this into time investment using the numbers I proposed above: I expect a typical single attempt to average out on about 45 minutes. With bad luck involved some of these runs can easily clock up to 76 minutes per run with a 10% chance, the same probability of getting the desired item, of it taking even longer. Even without the RNGods screwing you over with the actual Titania Prime systems blueprint drop, this means an expected average of 7.5 h of active farming to get this single rare relic drop. And this is with very favorable farming conditions for the relics themselves, lest we forget. Just being unlucky on that part in this example can bump up the active farming time up to 12.5 h
 

These are rookie numbers.

Let me take you all the way back to Valkyr Prime and recount the tale of getting her Chassis. The Axi V5 Relic that destroyed my will to live and proved how bad the low end of the delta can be to me.

You say, 'drops on B and C rotations' and use a mode to force that. I say, 'dropped on C rotations only, and you had to obey normal reward structure'.

Like any good solo lad, I did my grinding on the most reasonable node. Xini. Squads might do Excavation faster, but a) that's semi-forcing a Frame choice to be sure of protecting the papier-mache drills and b) solo excavation power carriers. No thank you. Interception's fairly close alone, although the map here is still one of the worst. A few frames could wide-range or remotely interrupt a capture, and the Zenistar's disk still functioned (rest in peace, sweet prince).

I got fairly consistently unlucky here with drops and it took me an average of 7 gameplay hours in mission between each drop of my target relic. Just one. Yes.

I'm going to nicely skip over the void trace grind for now, but that's additional busywork. Obviously, I'm not going to do anything but maximise my odds, so Radiant Shares are the order of the day. Forced because acquisition is unreasonable.

One radshare has a 34.39% chance to yield the rare. It took me 8 radshares to finally see it, putting me squarely in the bottom.. let's see.. 3.4%. Not even as bad as it could have been, but still bad.

The result: 56 gameplay hours in Xini, plus trace farming, plus recruiting and relic cracking time, for a single rare part drop through the system's intended acquisition path.

 

And people wonder why they see players aborting pub missions on the hunt for randoms with new relics. How many Axi fissure sessions can you drop in and out of in 7 hours? In 56? Odds on you having gotten the drop by sheer brute force long before farming out your own - pretty decent.

 

Partial solutions to the intended Relic path's problems already exist, but DE keeps shooting themselves in the foot.

Endless Fissures would have provided a setting in which to farm more relics than normal (and target an Era) while also farming more Traces at the same time due to the Fissure Bonus tiers. But this was killed dead-on-arrival, by making it require consumption of a relic each time to increase this bonus tier (and access the resource multipliers for Traces, or the bonus refined, era-specific Relics). You expend more relics than you gain due to dud rewards in the tables.

Bounty Reward Rotations do completely solve the biggest issue of not being able to target a specific relic with your time investment, and it actually works staggeringly well for this purpose... when we're allowed to target the relics we want. Unfortunately, all too often, and at times all too consistently for releases in a row, DE have been shoving only Unvault relics into the Bounty reward tables. Unless Bounty tables can rotate through every Relic not currently in the vault, it can no longer serve the purpose of fixing the systemic issue.

 

This leaves us with the black sheep of Relic acquisition. A path that was never meant to be the primary source, but a mere sink for excess - Syndicate relic packs. With Relics came the removal of pre-grinding the keys to the doors behind which new items are going to be locked - you need new Relics with each new introduction - yet Syndicate packs remain singularly as a lingering path to pre-grinding by stockpiling Standing medallions. This makes it automatically superior to the pure RNG relic grind for a new release, because you can work toward it whenever you feel motivated, rather than waiting for the gate to be raised (new relics in drop tables).

And yet, that's not great either. You still have to gamble with all your pre-ground Standing, because those packs might just decide to blow your entire bank and not give you that one certain relic you want. Usually an Axi. So.. it's better than pure RNG grind, yet worse than Void Keys were, and worse than Bounty farming could be if they only allowed it to function.

[eboomer]

Just run rad shares or intact shares depending on item rarity.  You'll get the item within a few runs.  I almost always get all the new prime items on the very first day they drop, as do many others.  It takes a few runs sometimes, but it's really not that bad.

[X0ll0X]

On 2020-04-15 at 7:12 PM, Steel_Rook said:

Bolded section titles

The secondary market, buying plat, and trading for parts.

Removal of Void Traces and using affinity to upgrade relics.

Deterministic out vendor Baro

Let's go through this point by point in a truncated and abbreviated version (quote snipped and summarized to achieve just that).

I'll keep bolding parts in mind for future reference. That said, in my opinion the different points and thoughts are already subdivided by the paragraphs and overusing bold always strikes as a bit over-importantly loud. As is, the text has a bit too much one thought flowing into another to make clear section titles without major rewriting which seems a bit of a waste considering the fatalistic outlook painted by your post. Also, it's quite a bit off-topic all things considered.

I don't mind people paying for stuff and thus supporting the game itself. I'm also in the lucky position where I can spend the occasional tenner on the game. I mostly spend it on boosters to counter the lack of vast amounts of free time that comes with holding a job. Sadly, for me putting some effort into actually getting the parts myself is substantial to the sense of fulfillment of getting a new weapon/frame in the first place (unless the underlying mechanics of acquisition feel too much like the game significantly disrespecting my time as the player). As a result, it's another reason why "just buying the part" isn't really an option for me. As to the secondary market, I have very little regard for gold-sellers in any multiplayer game due to how they shift and skew the market for anyone who basically has any other sort of commitment IRL (and thus impacting at least one part of a game for the worst) - never mind the exploits, scams, and spamming that often go alongside such secondary markets. It's in the best interest of DE to introduce QoL changes and mechanics for the majority of players who aren't involved in such things. After all, they're the ones actually likely to spend money on the game as opposed to taking a gamble to live off an intellectual property that's still in beta and flux and needs to stay healthy to survive.

While I would welcome the removal of a layer of the fractal farming model we have currently, I see some potential issues. The timing of opening the Relic at the correct time is likely going to be a bit of an issue with 4 different tiers of shininess. That could be remedied by just simplifying it to just Intact and Radiant - after all when going for anything other than the common drops Radiant statistically offers the best odds of obtaining it. Even with the simplification and having Fissures where you then open the single equipped Relic, I still fear the Affinity conversion will be sub-optimal or require another kind of lens/adapter to happen. Looking at Focus still isn't a pretty sight. Finally, Traces do offer a bit of flexibility by being farmable separate to the relic, meaning that you can just do it in preparation whenever a fast mission rolls around and without having the Relic itself. If you then get lucky with the drop, those Traces can be used on another Relic straight away - something that wouldn't be possible by tying it to Affinity.

A trade in system is what I tried to set up in the confines of the current game and farming loop. DE has shown willing to introduce band-aid mechanics to cover up shortcomings in balance and QoL (hopefully until the underlying mechanics that cause those problems get addressed on a fundamental level), as such I reckon a system like the one I proposed is likelier to get introduced than something that straight up invalidates, removes, or requires extensive remodeling and -balancing of current systems. While using Baro as a part vendor would make some lore and gameplay sense, it would create a couple of problems. First and foremost is how DE would incentivize  players to try and get the new even a single of the new Relics in the first place if Baro will have all the parts at some point. One way would be multiple different currencies and introducing a sizable delay between a new release and Baro getting it in stock. However, the first will likely devolve into a mess that relies even more heavily on community-generated spreadsheets than what we have now and the latter risks people just waiting the timer out without really addressing the current issues with the Void Relic system. Also, to go back to the secondary market you mentioned, I suspect that having Baro sell the parts for Ducats will likely kill off that sector quite quickly unless said parts are priced prohibitively high.

On 2020-04-16 at 1:54 AM, TheLexiConArtist said:

These are rookie numbers.

Bounty Reward Rotations

Endless Fissures 

When I set out to calculate through an example, I wanted it to be both timely relevant and more focus on averages and realistic farming decisions to avoid the entire thing to be dismissed as a giant bad faith argument. Titania Prime is new, so I used her rare part and after doing further research found that in this hypothetical scenario, I'd try my luck with disruption due to the possible drop table manipulation and me massively preferring that gamemode over interception (on a side note, it's quite a failing that you need to do pre-farming research outside the game be anywhere near efficient).

I could have mentioned that even with that setup you can get more unlucky than that but didn't since I hoped that even with the average people would get the point. So let me use this opportunity to remind people that if you get hit by both unlucky 90% threshold scenarios at farming the Relic and opening the things it would translate to about a 1% chance of a rare drop requiring 28 in mission, active player hours at quite focused intensity with plenty of opportunities of it requiring longer than that in real time due to organizing squads, loading, bugs, and connectivity issues. That translates to 7 hours of constant, mind-numbing farming in a full 4-man squad provided everybody is contributing fully to getting it.

I'm sorry you had to experience the odds you described, but just anecdotally retelling extremes isn't going to convince people and just opens up the bad faith argument. Just look how it was completely ignored by the poster above going "just radshare, bruh."

Here I wanted to follow up with going through the calculations with a relic that couldn't be force dropped in disruption like in the example I picked and found out that, unless I missed something major or the Wiki is incomplete, only the Relics containing unvaulted parts weren't in any disruption drop table. All the regular relics can be farmed as described in my original post by either forcing B or C rotation. Mind you, I'd still say the system needs improving despite of that and kinda needs a safety net as the one I proposed but at least the horror scenarios of days past can be avoided. By doing the same mission type for every single farm. Yeah, it can still use plenty of optimizing. I've also refrained from mentioning up until now that in science a 95% is more often used as a cut off point for plausibility instead of the 90% as used by the Wiki. When getting in the range of those deltas, you're looking at 20 rounds of disruption for a single relic and/or 29 opened relics to get a single rare drop (which would line up with the 8 radshares you had the misfortune of having to work through).

The next obvious step to make a point would've been to see how much it'd take to farm unvaulted Relics but here as well you can get "favorable" odds by not farming at the wrong place. In regular missions they're only added to the drop tables of missions in the void along with all the other relics of the same tier, diluting the pool and making -together with the sub-optimal payout/reward structure- the farm less than ideal (with the possible exception of unvaulted Lith relics which can currently be obtained with a 12.5% chance by spamming T1 void capture).

Bounties, while not my personal favorite due to the forced travel time, contain only the unvaulted Relics alongside regular rewards, offer multiple rewards per "mission", have a chance of offering a bonus reward (when the game doesn't screw you over with near-impossible bonus objectives like the plains capture one where a single bug accidentally crushed by a Grineer on the other side of the map fails it), and a full one can be done in 5-15 minutes depending difficulty and annoyance of given stages. With how, to me at least, the bonuses seem to work better on Orb Vallis, I've approximated the currently expected relic payout as the following (with full bonus and thus extra reward): 0.77 Lith S9/T2 bounty, 1.5 Meso O4 Relic/T3 bounty, 1.57 Neo G3 or N11/T4 bounty, and 1.71 Axi S6/T5 bounty. Combined with the tolerable completion times, when not getting screwed by the pool picks for the Neo Relic of choice, this seems to be a pretty tolerable way of farming the relic.

To be completely honest, now that they've seemingly added all the regular in the disruption drop tables, I'd prefer this split over trying to merge the two categories (with a possible exception being the introduction of a void disruption). It prevents bloat and thus diluting the respective reward pools too much and thus improves the overall chances of getting the Relics you need.

And yeah, I do agree that it would be nice if they reintroduced true endless missions where you can just reroll the same relic. It might be combined with arbitration to somewhat balance the increased value getting out of a single relic by arguable difficulty on top of arbitrations being endless anyway.

[TheLexiConArtist]

32 minutes ago, X0ll0X said:

(My) anecdote and 90%/95% probability

Disruption vs. Non-Disruption

Unvaulted and Bounties

And yeah, I do agree that it would be nice if they reintroduced true endless missions where you can just reroll the same relic. It might be combined with arbitration to somewhat balance the increased value getting out of a single relic by arguable difficulty on top of arbitrations being endless anyway.

I'm never pretending that's a likely scenario, but for anyone who's not experienced it, that example anecdote of the low end of chance is a sobering thought. It shines the light on why people might choose to do the more 'underhanded' thing of skimming out of publics, and paints a stark contrast with the old Void Key system, which had direct and indirect ways to mitigate that bad luck in the farm. Your farmed currently-unwanted keys would become useful eventually (when drop tables rotate through), and you were never more than a quick recruit into a 20-minute survival away from another pull on the slot machine. With Relics, bad drops are just bad drops. Never anything but fodder when you have the contents already, and a failed run might be another 7-hour slog away from repeating.

Disruption's scaling of rewards is its only saving grace. Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're still referring to squad play for that efficiency? I'm not a fan of the Demolisher/Demolyst mechanical designs turning off 99% of potential approaches and boiling it down into a mere DPS race, and as a solo player it is very slow; you're hindered by spawn rates for key drops, implausible multitasking, and even finding any single Demo is a bit of an adventure because you can only poke your nose down one path at a time. I haven't tested the actual average time investments for a full rotation (and they can vary heavily at that), so I can't immediately confirm whether this is still superior to running Interceptions with 2/4 or 3/4 'wasted' rounds between your targeted rotation's rolls. I suspect it may still be somewhat better, but not by as much as with squads, and also limiting due to the DPS race nature.

Plains bounty bonus objectives are a mess, I freely admit that. Especially if they were fixed (and Liberate the Camp stopped showing up as an objective in 99.9999% of bounties, when it's the mostly badly designed and slowest of them all, then I wouldn't be averse to seeing the Relic selections in Plains and Vallis being separated so that more relics in total can be target-farmed in Bounties overall. Failing that, DE could just duplicate the number of otherwise 'normal' rotations, keeping everything else the same but expanding the relic selection that way. Scarlet Spear shows us the difference targeted efforts can make when it comes to the time-to-cred-to-Arcane there, as compared time-to-RNG-Arcane in Eidolons. Having the RNG layer removed (mostly, you still have to check the bounties to see when your relic's up) is invaluable, and I don't want that precious resource to be stagnated with unvault after unvault, never to see 'current' relics again.

You might have misunderstood me for Endless fissures; it's not using a relic at all that is desirable here. Not getting more loot out of a single relic or anything, those days are long past, but just as a measure to provide an option to consolidate one's efforts at acquisition - getting normal mission Relics, getting additional and pre-refined Relics of a known Era, and getting a better rate of return on Void Traces, all within the same mission. The limitation of cracking open a relic to advance that bonus structure is completely arbitrary and defeats the purpose of consolidation - each part is individually no different than their faster and more reliably available 'standard' approaches, so.. if you want to gain Relics - and obviously you're going to want to do a share when you get the specific one you're targeting, so you're not cycling that right back into the mission - you're better off with the fissure-agnostic farm, and better off farming your Traces in the two-minute Captures/Exterminates.

[Steel_Rook]

2 hours ago, X0ll0X said:

I'll keep bolding parts in mind for future reference. That said, in my opinion the different points and thoughts are already subdivided by the paragraphs and overusing bold always strikes as a bit over-importantly loud. As is, the text has a bit too much one thought flowing into another to make clear section titles without major rewriting which seems a bit of a waste considering the fatalistic outlook painted by your post. Also, it's quite a bit off-topic all things considered.

That's fair enough - it's just a suggestion. I'm mostly basing this on personal anecdotal experience. You've seen my posting style - I type A LOT. On another forum, I used to occasionally post random "editorial" threads just musing on game design and other topics, not too dissimilar from my thread on challenge, difficulty and reductive combat here. In my experience, it helps to compose a large proposal as a mini-dissertation, broken up into sections either providing context or exploring individual important aspects. It tends to force a more structured approach to thread creation, and it also tends to help people skim a bit more easily. Because people WILL skim. Section headings help them only skim to the next section, rather than straight to the end. But again - to each his own. Whatever works for you is fine, and I'm certainly not criticising.

 

2 hours ago, X0ll0X said:

For me putting some effort into actually getting the parts myself is substantial to the sense of fulfillment of getting a new weapon/frame in the first place (unless the underlying mechanics of acquisition feel too much like the game significantly disrespecting my time as the player). As a result, it's another reason why "just buying the part" isn't really an option for me. As to the secondary market, I have very little regard for gold-sellers in any multiplayer game due to how they shift and skew the market for anyone who basically has any other sort of commitment IRL.

I get where you're coming from. One of my long-standing issues with F2P games in general is the no-win scenario of monetisation. The game is made deliberately unfun and grindy to make you spend money, but spending money shoots you straight to the end of the game and kind of misses the point. However, my personal opinion on the matter has shifted over the years. As my personal time diminishes and I grow older (and so more cynical), I value "pride and accomplishment" less and less. Payday 2 was the game that finally did it in for me, since I vastly preferred BUYING my guns and their mods as DLC than #*!%ing around earning Steam Achievements to unlock them. Recently, I had to take stock of my experience with Warframe because I was REALLY burning out on it, and I came to the same conclusion. This is a paid game with monthly DLCs masquerading as a F2P title. If I treat it as such, I can stick to playing just what I like and have more fun with it. I bought the Corinth Prime (off the secondary market, I'm not paying 80 sodding dollars!) and have had a ton of fun with that.

In short, I get what you're saying. Earning your own stuff is part of the experience for you. I was just saying that I don't think DE can really appreciate this. The secondary market is BY FAR the largest sink for Platinum AND a decent way to pretend the game is actually free when it kind of isn't by design. Giving us easier access to loot or even making secondary market trading easier has the potential to tank Platinum prices A LOT. As such, I just don't think they're ever going to do anything about it. People might complain, but there are enough whales like me who got tired of the grind and now buy Platinum in order to spend it on the Market. I'm sure they have metrics that show exactly this. To me, Prime Parts are a lost cause. The secondary market gold sellers own them now, and DE have no incentive to change that.

 

2 hours ago, X0ll0X said:

While I would welcome the removal of a layer of the fractal farming model we have currently, I see some potential issues. The timing of opening the Relic at the correct time is likely going to be a bit of an issue with 4 different tiers of shininess. That could be remedied by just simplifying it to just Intact and Radiant - after all when going for anything other than the common drops Radiant statistically offers the best odds of obtaining it.

I personally more envisioned it as the game giving you the option to either open the Relic when it amasses enough Affinity, or else waiting until it amasses more affinity - enough to bring it to the next level. That way, you can open the Relic quickly, or you can hold onto it, spend more time with it, and open it as radiant after a longer period of time. Granted, people who routinely run Relic missions for Intact relics are probably going to find this approach slower since they'd already be sitting on over 1000 Void Traces. For me, though, it's an ideological issue. I hate practices which involve rentals, consumables and upkeep. I hate having to grind missions I have no real use for and don't enjoy just to amass enough currency to play a few rounds of the missions I do enjoy. It's why I eventually gave up on World of Tanks - far too much pressure to play Premium Tier 8 tanks to build up credits, because my Tier 10 Type 5 Heavy almost always loses me money when I play it.

That's a bit of a lost cause in Warframe, though. After DE shared their stance on "intrinsic rewards" (they don't seem to believe in them, long story short), I kind of gave up on Warframe NOT wasting my time on bullS#&$ consumables just so I can play the damn game. I like Liches... But to play them, I have to go grind Kuva Fissures. Even Railjack ended up in-mission abilities being consumables crafter with progression resources, and we dodged the Umbral Upgrade rental by THIS much because people REALLY don't like rentals in modern times. As such, this suggestion is very likely unrealistic. But eh - I collect game mechanics, and I personally like this one.

[X0ll0X]

1 hour ago, TheLexiConArtist said:

I'm never pretending that's a likely scenario, but for anyone who's not experienced it, that example anecdote of the low end of chance is a sobering thought.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you're still referring to squad play for that efficiency [in Disruption]?

Failing that, DE could just duplicate the number of otherwise 'normal' rotations, keeping everything else the same but expanding the relic selection that way. 

You might have misunderstood me for Endless fissures; it's not using a relic at all that is desirable here. 

Apologies if I made it look like you were misrepresenting the frequency at which luck this bad happened. I myself initially thought about including my two anecdotal times I somehow angered the RNGods so apopletically that it took me far outside of the 95% confidence interval to get a single drop just to highlight how soul crushing going through something like that is. I most definitely agree that there needs to be a way to somehow make unwanted relics have value beyond the occasional Forma or as sources of Ducats and Traces hence me putting the time and effort into these posts. I decided against it because I didn't kept the precise records (and even if I did, I have no way of validating them) of those dips into hell. As such, I feared that it would only serve to negatively impact the perceived integrity of the post in its entirety and make all the calculations based on data that people can just look up when skeptical. In general, I wanted to avoid the fallacious counter argument of "it has never been this bad for me, so there isn't a problem when you just do what I do". It might be a case of observational/confirmational bias, but it seems to me that the prevalence of objective permanence and a grasp on statistics is too low for not to happen.

 

The disruption efficiency is based on the very scientific method of me semi-casually soloing the mission, going to round 4 while clocking the time needed per round and getting a feel for the perceived difficulty and extrapolating that on some potential optimization. That said, I might've abridged the initial "about me" section too much to the point of underselling just how much I like to make stuff explode in-game and how I tend to gravitate towards glass cannons. Add to this little to no compunction to forma stuff until I get them to a state I'm satisfied with and you get quite a lot of damage potential. Hell, I put a 7th Forma on my Daikyu just to fit Terminal Velocity on the Exilus slot (to force the ragdolls through even more parallel dimensions until they stuck to a wall). Because I knew it was going to be a dps race, I took my Hall of Malevolence Mirage equipped with the glorious Kuva Bramma (who still needs its interaction with Mag's Magnetized fixed). I was able to one comfortably one-shot the Demolishers at round 4 still through what's basically highly concentrated carpet bombing. On top of that, I play WF with headset and am generally quite audio-focused in shooters. As such, I can quite reliably find the bastards. All of that probably heavily distorted my assessment of the mission type.

That said, with how the reward structure works, I still believe that especially the later rounds can be done particularly quick even in solo. Since to get B rotation and to continue the mission, only one conduit need to survive. Since the negative effects for failing only apply for the current round, you could just defend the first one and let the others fail, kill the likely key carriers to activate all conduits as soon as possible and then kill the first Demolisher you come across, or activate the conduits until the one with the bonus appears and only protect that one. All in all, for the way I play Warframe its a pretty quick and safe way of doing things.

 

For me for adding the regular relics into Bounties to feel satisfying, it'd probably need the system where the bounties cycle through fixed pools to be changed that (at least to some extent) a player can just pick which pool they want to go for - hell, it might even be enough if they had a "regular" set of pools and a "Relic" one where most regular rewards were replaced by the non-unvaulted Relics. I'm really not a fan of arbitrary time gating of game modes and increasing that nonsense directly by just increasing the number of pools seems like a really bad idea in my humble opinion.

 

Yeah, I've misunderstood the setup for endless Fissures and yes I do agree that would be a nice addition. Just the ability to significantly increase Traces from them compared to spamming fast, low level fissures would be quite welcome. More diverse ways of getting Relics would also be great. Disruption works pretty well for my preferred play style but that doesn't mean there isn't a problem by far and people with other preferences should be able to make a meaningful choice about where to farm stuff like Relics - an option that can hopefully be achieved by buffing the viability of other modes instead of nerfing the disruption into oblivion.