The Aya Issue

[DigitalDisciple]

Since this Prime resurgence update I haven't played Warframe in a week or two. I saw the prime resurgence come up and was under the impression that DE would give the chance of getting hard to get and rare frames and weapons, I also was under the impression that we would have a chance of also getting the prime armor sets & sigils using this new currency without paying real money. Boy was I wrong seeing that you had to buy regal aya let alone spend a bunch of money to just get things like the armor sets and some frames it really was just prime vault access under a different name. 

I thought it would've made sense that you could've got regal aya possibly by crafting and I wouldn't even mind if they made regal aya harder to get. I get it, they gotta make money somehow. but asking for 80$ to get something decent is a lot to ask. Though I wish the sigils and armor sets were obtainable without spending money and then if someone didn't want to take the time to grind they can decide to pay for the bundles and packs.

[Tesseract7777]

You misunderstood. While I think the way they did Aya was confusing and they should have just done it like old unvaulting packs with plat included, the fact is you shouldn't have ever expected prime accessories to be available for anything besides cold, hard, cash. 

No offense, but it was a weird assumption to make. 

They will never make prime accessories available without real money, nor should they. They need to respect the investment of those who support the game with their dollars and keep it running. 

There is no issue. 

It was never advertised as anything else I honestly don't know where some of you are getting this. I won't buy the packs because they don't have platinum, but I don't get why some of you thought you could just suddenly get prime accessories as F2P lol. There are plenty of F2P cosmetics, if you want the premium ones you gotta dish out money.

It is actually fairer than ever in a way if you really want the cosmetics, because now you can buy them ala cart instead of being forced to buy an accessories pack with boosters and other accessories you might not even want. 

Edit: Again, for the record I think the packs are priced too high. They are pricier than unvaulting packs and don't include plat, so personally I don't feel even the ones where I actually need the whole frame, which is only a couple, are worth buying to me. 

But the fact that prime accessories are still real money only is NOT the issue.

The issue is the packs are priced too high and don't include plat. They should have plat instead of endo. Apart from that and the high pricing there is no issue. Why would you expect Prime Accessories on a F2P path? 

[Dhrekr]

And what is the "issue"? That you jumped to unrealistic conclusions and were disappointed when it turned out that prime resurgence is 100% like prime vaults with a couple of fancy names thrown in?

[DigitalDisciple]

yeah I did set my expectations to high. I guess I do mostly find DE to be generous sometimes especially as of late with the umbra formas and making things easier to farm and the fact that you can earn platinum.

Though it is a bit strange that they even took this approach to begin with when they already had prime vault access.

[000-SERAPH-000]

I agree that there was definitely an understandable expectation, because that's how it works; they create videos, streams and imagery that generates expectations, and then people get excited etc.  They want you to have expectations. That's the point.

What they didn't necessarily 'make very obvious enough' it seems, is that there will definitely be a cash requirement.
And that is also understandable as an expectation for not having to pay real money, since Platinum was always the original "paid" currency already.
In other words, it's totally acceptable for someone to think that a 'new currency' would not ALSO be real-cash based too.

It's easy now in hindsight for everyone to say that 'yeah we should have thought as much', 'you should have known' or 'we could have expected some real cash involved' etc, but that's because NOW we know that it is mostly limited to cash only, and that the price is also rather damn high.
It's always easy in hindsight to pretend, speak and act like all our expectations were in 100% line with what we NOW KNOW...

Nothing was wrong with having the expectations that 'it would not be as bad', as we now know it to be.

Anyways, I believe that there could be good ways to remedy it overall and let both DE make the money they rightfully deserve, as well as letting the players make use of the existing cash-based currency (platinum) in order to enjoy the prime-vault gains:
- Platinum will always have real-monetary value, so players should be able to use platinum to purchase Regal-aya
- And then, if buying a Regal-aya pack or a prime-vault pack etc with real money, there could/should also be platinum as part of the packs too.

Ultimately then (in hindsight) we can have a 'new fancy-named' system that still is directly accessible to the hardcore players that ground their butts off getting platinum and those who used real money for platinum packs in the past too.

[DigitalDisciple]

Thanks Seraph, I didn't think it was wrong to have that expectation the fact that prime vault access already existed I simply just thought it was a counter to that instead of having to pay for those prime armor sets and sigils. It is what it is though, I feel they should revaluate those prices for regal aya at least or put more in it like platinum.

[Lutesque]

4 hours ago, Silverliyah said:

 

I thought it would've made sense that you could've got regal aya possibly by crafting and I wouldn't even mind if they made regal aya harder to get. I get it, they gotta make money somehow. but asking for 80$ to get something decent is a lot to ask. Though I wish the sigils and armor sets were obtainable without spending money and then if someone didn't want to take the time to grind they can decide to pay for the bundles and packs.

I mean.... Maybe you should buy a Prime Access or 2 and the re-examine the issue from the Perspective of someone who paid real money for Prime Cosmetics....

Don't get me wrong... I'm also upset that I can't get the Targis and Edo Prime Armor Set for Free... But at the same time.... Isn't that how this has always been ?

 

[Dhrekr]

5 hours ago, Silverliyah said:

Though it is a bit strange that they even took this approach to begin with when they already had prime vault access

To be clear... Resurgence is nothing more than Prime Vaults 2.0. The Vault was becoming old (the increase in retired Primes means the rotations took too long), so they have come up to with a more flexible model. And a couple of new names.

I'm entirely sure that if Resurgence meets the expected goals (sales, player grind), the Vault is going to be discontinued in 2022.

Nothing more.

[Vaalyah]

1 hour ago, Dhrekr said:

The Vault was becoming old (the increase in retired Primes means the rotations took too long), so they have come up to with a more flexible model. And a couple of new names.

 

Excuse for the probably stupid question, but I really can't understand. Why not adding a simple faster rotation? Like 2 different prime frames every month, or, don't know, 6 frames and keeping the same time a rotation lasts?

[Steel_Rook]

9 hours ago, 000-SERAPH-000 said:

What they didn't necessarily 'make very obvious enough' it seems, is that there will definitely be a cash requirement.
And that is also understandable as an expectation for not having to pay real money, since Platinum was always the original "paid" currency already.
In other words, it's totally acceptable for someone to think that a 'new currency' would not ALSO be real-cash based too.

They didn't? I read the developer workshop and my takeaway from it was "Prime Access, except in-game." I saw nothing to suggest that anything previously paid would be made free. Aya for relics, RMT Aya for Prime Access. There's even a section in there talking about why they removed Plat from Aya purchases - the reason being "we don't want players buying one RMT currency to get another." It's a weak excuse when the real reason is "we want new money" but I thought it was pretty directly spelled out. Look through the Workshop again, and you'll see DE question whether they should retire Prime Access entirely, and replace it with Aya.

Obviously, I don't want to suggest people should be psychic. Just that assuming that Warframe will give you free stuff is never really justified. This is a mobile phone game wearing the skin of a PC game. I don't know what it "used to be," but that's what it's been since I started playing.

[Dhrekr]

5 hours ago, Vaalyah said:

Excuse for the probably stupid question, but I really can't understand. Why not adding a simple faster rotation? Like 2 different prime frames every month, or, don't know, 6 frames and keeping the same time a rotation lasts?

All suboptimal in the long run.

More Primes per rotation means that you dilute enormously the drop tables or have to put the relics in weird places. We all know the frustration of looking for a specific relic that doesn't drop. Adding 6 frames means.... 6 times less likely?

Faster rotations... with 32 primes (currently) and 51 weeks in the calendar... here's a scenario: every single week two frames are offered, and then cycled, in a year each frame will appear only three times. Missed that single week in February, or had no luck? Have fun waiting for June.

 

None of them sound good to me, and they get worse each time a new frame is released. And this is a system that currently DE micromanages. It's a headache.

But... Aya has none of these problems. There is only one evergreen resource that doesn't dilute or complicate the drop table. If DE decides to unvault all frames at once, it's just a matter of everything being in the shop. Plus, the system could easily run on its own. Any new vaulted Prime just gets added to the rotaton in the shop.

 

At the end, I do not think that Resurgence is about making our life easier or less grindy in any way. It's about automating a system that DE currently micromanages (a waste of time and resources), it's about setting it up once, testing it, and then letting Varza give Relics and collecting money for DE without any further input or direction.

[sunderthefirmament]

18 hours ago, 000-SERAPH-000 said:

It's easy now in hindsight for everyone to say that 'yeah we should have thought as much', 'you should have known' or 'we could have expected some real cash involved' etc, but that's because NOW we know that it is mostly limited to cash only, and that the price is also rather damn high.
It's always easy in hindsight to pretend, speak and act like all our expectations were in 100% line with what we NOW KNOW...
 

When they announced the event, I skimmed the reddit post about it and quickly determined that prime accessories would still be locked behind real money purchases.  This was stated from the jump.

 

Apparently there was an incorrect tweet about it that got corrected.  But if you weren't sifting through tweet announcements, you wouldn't have even encountered it.

[Vaalyah]

On 2021-11-17 at 9:56 PM, Dhrekr said:

Faster rotations... with 32 primes (currently) and 51 weeks in the calendar... here's a scenario: every single week two frames are offered, and then cycled, in a year each frame will appear only three times. Missed that single week in February, or had no luck? Have fun waiting for June.

Instead now we have 2 frames in a single week. SOOOOO much different 😅 (and they will probably not come back again, by the way. So no twice more in a year)

The point is: if you miss something, your Aya and Regal Aya will be wasted, because at the end of the event, puff!, gone! So I don't think the system we have now is what you have in mind they could do...

[Dhrekr]

9 hours ago, Vaalyah said:

Instead now we have 2 frames in a single week. SOOOOO much different 😅 (and they will probably not come back again, by the way. So no twice more in a year)

The point is: if you miss something, your Aya and Regal Aya will be wasted, because at the end of the event, puff!, gone! So I don't think the system we have now is what you have in mind they could do...

If they decide to replace Prime Vaults, this is a perfectly flexible system. They can effortlessly have ten Primes in store each week, and there is zero reason why Aya couldn't become a persistent, evergreen currency.

Also, if you are a person who buys Regal Aya with real money and lets it be "wasted puff gone"... yes, ok. The Aya system is not idiot-proof. Obviously morons will always find a way to slip through the cracks. It's awfully good of you to worry and put yourself in their shoes, though.