Kuva in the Kuva Fortress: A Discussion

[(PSN)Zero_029]

So this probably will double as feedback, but as many will point out. I am on PS4 so I haven't received the Fortress update "yet".
However the feedback has been very telling, I played a little on my friend's PC & I felt it was fun (more on this later.)
The mode has only been out for barely 1 day so let's try & be understanding of that please. (Hence the Discussion part)

Also for the sake of Discussion, lets not mention/include Boosters. I like to believe that DE balances the game with boosters as an afterthought.
Meaning, they consider them but do not design content around/requiring them.

With that out of the way...

Now DE has stated that they want Kuva Survival to be an alternative Kuva method that sits between Siphons & Floods.
However, due to the scaling nature of Survival/Endless missions this doesn't sit right.
As the time investment for Endless missions cannot compete/match a Siphon mission. Especially since Siphon missions can be Speed run.

The Current State:
So it's only been out 1 day, but due to the sheer nature & hunger of the playerbase, KS (Kuva Survival) has already been run viciously by the PC playerbase.

The Community basically aligns on the following Bullet Points:
- 200 per Tower Reward is too small given the Difficulty, Skill Required, Level Range, & Risk necessary/required to obtain Kuva. fine as is.
(Contested: Many in thread replies say 200 is fine. I personally do feel it should be 250 or 300. But that's just me. Majority rules here.)
- Enemy Scaling is too fast & hence quickly makes KS a less efficient method to gather Kuva than Siphons after 15/20 minutes.
- Life Support/Kuva Towers do not scale with enemies. This aligns with the above bulletpoint.
 

So my friend & I discussed what could be more worth while/what could improve this feature & we had some ideas that we wanted to share.

Suggestions/Solutions to "The Current State"
1. Scale Towers
Personally, I feel that game wide ALL Defense Objects/NPCs, Extractors, & now "Kuva Towers" should scale every 10 enemy levels grown.
(Clarification: They don't need to match the enemy. But they should NEVER be 1-shot impo. It kills the entire "Endless" aspect of the mission.)
I feel this is a good middle ground for Newbie & Veteran players.
We both agreed that Towers/Objectives should remain durable enough to allow Newbies to defend them till they feel pushed too hard by the enemy & decide to flee, while keeping gameplay fair for Veterans who want to stay for extended periods of time.

2. Kuva Rewarded
My friend felt the Kuva Reward needs to jump up. He personally felt 500 per Tower is a fair amount (I'm not that good with numbers so I wasn't going to name any), as it competes with Siphons while not invalidating them. My Friend feels Kuva Survival should only feel inferior to Kuva Flood Missions. But he never gave me a Kuva Number for that topic...

3. New Feature: Kuva Flood Module
To mix it up & really help promote teamplay, every 5th Kuva Module (I forgot the name) gathered should overclock the Tower & cause an "Unintentional Kuva Flood" that reward 1000 Kuva if successfully defended.
Essentially during a "Flood" significantly more Kuva Guardians should spawn, Kuva should fill the screen & disrupt/distort the vision of the player within proximity of the Tower.
Now if the team doesn't want to do this then simply shooting the tower with Void Beam/Blast/Any Operator Attack will "reset the device" & revert the Tower to a regular Kuva Tower.

My Personal Suggestions for "Kuva in the Kuva Fortress"
Basically, my suggestions "might" be easier to implement than say additions/alteration to KS. It's basic yet I feel it's reasonable.
My intention is that I feel The Kuva Fortress should be "Ground Zero" for Kuva. As the Fortress is basically a floating tankard if you think about it.
I'm not trying to make Kuva readily available, but simply create more sensible avenues to acquire it.

1. Kuva Caches
Basically, I feel that like all other resources in the game. Kuva should have breakable/gatherable nodes.
These nodes should only appear in The Kuva Fortress, & during Kuva Siphon/Flood Missions.
The logic for them existing in Siphon/Flood missions is simply the fact that since Kuva is being extracted that it sometimes small clouds would form & crystalize or become so dense they are unable to reach the Siphon/Tower.
The Kuva Fortress just needs to have these as the entire Fortress should be somewhat "teeming" with Kuva. However, these clusters should be as plentiful as Gallium Deposits, Neuroptic Masses, Neural Arrays, Orokin Cell Arrays, & Argon Pegmatite. So "rare".

2. Kuva Drops
Simply put, all enemies in the Kuva Fortress, & all Kuva Grineer units should have a chance to drop Kuva. Kuva Guardians should be guaranteed to drop Kuva.
Kuva Grineer drops should rival that of Oxium Ospreys. while Kuva Guardians should drop Double the Quantity of Kuva Grineer.

I personally feel this would be a huge boon to Kuva Survival as regular enemies are killed in en mass in order to survive (life support drops) & to defend Towers.
Factoring in that they would be dropping small amounts of Kuva (we all know how quickly small quantities add up), then this would negate the need for the frequently requested feature of Rewards Scaling with time.
In fact I feel that Kuva Towers could remain at the current 200 Kuva if this were implemented. As now just basic gameplay IE: killing Kuva Grineer/Guardians is rewarding.
So basically, the Kuva people want as a "scaling reward" would actually be retroactively rewarded to players right from the very get go.
I REALLY like my friend's idea of Kuva Flood/Overlock Modules so perhaps that would reward 500 Kuva instead as the more plentiful enemies would obviously drop Kuva during the defense portion/mechanic.

3. Kuva Stations
During all missions in The Kuva Fortress. There should be a rare chance of Kuva Stations that spawn in rooms, I see them as mounted on the walls in those cool Bunkers, Dead End Rooms, & etc.
The idea is that while exploring the Fortress players might find a station & then they can hack it via a new Hack Mini-Game that once completed would then cause the station to "Draw/Extract" Kuva & force players to defend it for about 1-3 Minutes (Think Plains Bounty Defense length). If successfully defended it should reward Kuva equal or close to that of a regular Siphon mission.

The New Mini-Game would be one where Kuva is filling up a maze, and players have to move slides to block off the drains/vents so that the Kuva "flows" into the Circuit Breaker & causes it to short/malfunction, if the Kuva reaches the end of all 3 pathways the event begins.

 

So what are your thoughts on this?

How would you change KS while not disregarding the current "Siphon/Flood" Missions in game?
If you could add a mechanic(s) to Kuva Survival what would it be?

Would you rather add a mechanic to The Kuva Fortress all together?
Do you like my idea(s)?

Would you prefer one of my ideas be expanded upon?
Would you prefer Kuva be obtainable at all nodes at The Kuva Fortress?

Any ideas of your own?

Let's dig deep.
Play Devil's Advocate (stay civil), What If scenarios, & etc.

Let's try to have a civil discussion on this.

Thanks for reading this essay length post. 

Edited March 30, 2018 by (PS4)Zero_029
Typos, Clarifications, etc. Corrected some "I"'s to "he"s as they weren't my ideas. Oops!

[(PSN)CrimsonAxure]

I think they should add Kuva caches to all Kuva missions

But your Lotus won't tell you that there are caches, like in sabotage, you're all on your own

[saradonin]

I think Kuva Survival is a generally good idea, but it's scaled quite poorly.

It suppose to be somewhere in between Siphon and Flood, but it isn't.

Most Siphon mission can be easily optimized, due to division of duty:
- capture - capture target is usually located near the Siphon, so it's a quick catch
- mobile defense - it's potentially one of the longer siphon missions, but while player A focuses on MD, others can rush ahead looking for Siphon,
- exterminate, sabotage, rescue - objective can easily be completed while one player does the Siphon,
- survival - spread out, look for Siphon, do the Siphon, look for extraction, camp at the extraction till 5 minutes, no more, no less.
All in all with half-decent squad coordination, easily achievable in most public groups, regular Siphons efficiency is equal or higher than the new Kuva Survival.

Keeping that in mind I agree with all 3 Suggestions/Solutions to "The Current State".

I agree 200 Kuva per tower is too low, but 500 Kuva per tower may seem excessive. Following the survival rotation, it could scale differently for each rotation, like so: AABC1, where A1=200 kuva, B1=300 kuva, C1=500 kuva.

Except, why would anyone want to stay longer than 20 minutes?
To cater those who enjoy long runs every additional rotation cycle could have the rewards increased recursively, let's say by +100 per rank.
0-20 minutes AABC1, where A1=200 kuva, B1=300 kuva, C1=500
20-40 minutes AABC2=AABC1+100, so A2=300 kuva, B2=400 kuva, C2=600
40-60 minutes AABC3=AABC2+100, so A3=400 kuva, B3=500 kuva, C3=700
...
100-120 minutes AABC6, so A6=700 kuva, B6=800 kuva, C6=1000 kuva - it looks like a lot of kuva, but time invested and level of enemies (probably somewhere in 250-350 range) justifies the amount.

It may seem complicated at the first glance, but in my opinion recursive rewards would give us the incentive to stay longer and be appropriately rewarded, proportionally to the difficulty and time invested.

Edited March 29, 2018 by saradonin
typos

[ngrazer]

As much as I'd want to see Kuva as drops from caches/enemies and different amounts of Kuva per AABC rotation, I don't think we'll see anything like that in another year.

So right now I think the amount of Kuva per filter should be tweaked to around 300.

[Gremlin]

TBH I like how it is now due to the fact that it doesn't matter if something comes up and you have to dip. The team won't hate you for needing to leave early, since it doesn't really make a difference. Sure there are a few who go in with a premade squad, but most of the time it's not like that. Sure it'd be nice to have some special enemies drop very small amounts of it, but I think scaling on the siphons would just make it way too easy to aquire kuva. Currently, I only ran a ~30 minute survival and managed to make 9200 off of it (I use a booster) which is more than going through the siphon nodes and hitting the flood every hour. I think it's in a really good spot as it is with those things considered. If you want endless with scaling rewards, I personally don't think it should be done with kuva.  

[(PSN)WeeMalk5]

Yeah, one kuva grab node only is a shame becuase the fortress is amazing.

I agree if kuva was a general possible drop from any enemy or any crate on all nodes of the fortress it would see a lot more traffic. Simple but sensible.

[Roobski]

In my opinion it's a little too easy to farm, My clan farmed it last night and we were pulling 5-8k per run (with booster) for 20-30 mins work, in fact the only thing that slowed us down was the bug where the life support won't convert to a kuva extractor.

We were 2 x Despoiling nekros, 1 x Octavia and a frost, and tbh it was trivial almost effortless in fact, our life support never dropped below 75% at any time and we could easily deal with the mobs, granted we are experienced players using sortie level equipment. I would say best farm it right now as I suspect it's going to get nerfed.

P.S. the Kuva Guardians are so easy to kill now I almost feel bad

[(PSN)robotwars7]

4 minutes ago, Roobski said:

In my opinion it's a little too easy to farm,

having Kuva be easy to farm isn't a problem, because we already have a resource sink for it in the form of Riven rerolls. and as you said, you were with other experienced players with good equipment, so it would feel very easy to farm. if you're constantly trading/getting Rivens and rolling them, you're gonna go through a lot of Kuva in a short space of time, ad not necessarily get the results you want even after several dozen rolls, so there's really no reason it shouldn't be easy to get.

[(PSN)Zero_029]

Updated my OP

I meant to state that

"For the sake of Discussion, lets not mention Boosters. I like to believe that DE balances the game with boosters as an afterthought. Meaning, they consider them but do not design content around/requiring them.

Obviously my numbers aren't perfect.

I feel Kuva Fortress SHOULD be the Ground Zero of Kuva hence my personal suggestions. =]

[Firetempest]

 Don't see why they couldn't just re-use the earth Toxin Injector defense. Collect parts from Siphons and floods for a kuva filter. Find a kuva storage vat in the fortress and depending on the quality of filter you make. Activates the appropriate lvled defense for rewards greater than siphons and floods. Did we really need a middle ground between normal runs and floods?

[SilvaDreams]

2 hours ago, (PS4)Zero_029 said:

Suggestions/Solutions to "The Current State"
1. Scale Towers
Personally, I feel Defense Objects/NPCs, Extractors, & now "Kuva Towers" should scale every 10 enemy levels grown.
I feel this is a good middle ground for Newbie & Veteran players.
Towers/Objectives remain durable enough to allow Newbies to defend them till they feel pushed too hard by the enemy & decide to flee, while keeping gameplay fair for Veterans who want to stay for extended periods of time.

2. Kuva Rewarded
Basically Kuva Reward needs to jump up. I personally feel 500 per Tower is a fair amount, as it competes with SIphons while not invalidating them. My Friend feels KS should only feel inferior to Kuva Flood Missions. But he never gave me a Kuva Number...

3. New Feature: Kuva Flood Module
To mix it up & really help promote teamplay, every 5th Kuva Module (I forgot the name) gathered should overclock the Tower & cause an "Unintentional Kuva Flood" that reward 1000 Kuva if successfully defended.
Essentially during a "Flood" significantly more Kuva Guardians should spawn, Kuva should fill the screen & disrupt/distort the vision of the player within proximity of the Tower.
Now if the team doesn't want to do this then simply shooting the tower with Void Beam/Blast/Any Operator Attack will "reset the device" & revert the Tower to a regular Kuva Tower.

 

#1) It's to encourage people to actually defend them instead of just running around like they do in normal defense missions where people will end up all over the map because the defense targets are tanky as hell.

#2) 200 is perfectly fine because it can be affected by Boosters AND the Kavat charm bonus

#3) Again, not needed for the same as #2

 

If you do a 40 minute run you can easily score up 12K Kuva per run (With just the Kavat boost)

Edited March 29, 2018 by SilvaDreams

[Lenyatta]

Despite the already huge amount of feedbacks in the devforum strongly suggesting to change it before the release, DE decided to roll with it anyway, and guess what? it turned out exactly what people expected it to be:
-Not endless at all, players keep leaving after 15,20 minutes to rinse and repeat. No incentive to go further, no fun ensued, just mindless grind for mindless people
-Going endless is counterproductive, since after some time being there they start to oneshot the kuva tower, slowing your kuva farm and making it an high risk-low reward situation.
I wouldn't mind them easily destroying the towers as times goes by if kuva indeed DID scale with enemies lvl, it would be a fair challenge of high risk,high reward.
-An average of 4000-4600 kuva per 30 minutes run (smeeta and no booster) which translates in rolling one of your 10++ times rolled riven once per 30 minutes spent there
-It feels like DE kind of missed the point on this one, since the general demand was not only to have a mean to stay longer on kuva missions (for who wanted to do quick runs,there were already siphons for that) but also to get a sort of endgame challenge where you actually get rewarded for putting effort in it

[(PSN)Zero_029]

1 minute ago, Firetempest said:

Did we really need a middle ground between normal runs and floods?

Most folks new to Operators probably use Siphons as a easier eay to acquire Kuva vs doing Void (in level only) rank missions.

[SneakyErvin]

I dont see a problem with the reward of 200 kuva. The difficulty in Kuva Fortress is completely trivial, there is zero effort to it. Over the course of an hour you can easily get around 8-10k (dependant on if the oxygen towers bug or not) Kuva without a boost in the new survival mission. If the place actually had some difficulty tied to it a higher reward could be justifiable, but right now there is zero difficulty. The drawback of turning an oxygen tower into a kuva siphon is neglectable because the spawnrate of enemies will skyrocket, meaning so many more oxygen pickups dropping.

Sure other kuva missions can be speed runs, but not all other kuva missions are in optimal missions, neither are the floods. You simply cannot compare the survival to the most optimal siphon/flood because those arent consistant, kuva survival is however. Only inconsistancy in kuva survival is the group composition, mostly the players. But that also applies to all other kuva missions.

The only thing I can see is if they up the reward to 300, but even that is a stretch that may make all other kuva mission types obsolete.

[Factical-Tuckwit]

1 hour ago, Roobski said:

In my opinion it's a little too easy to farm, My clan farmed it last night and we were pulling 5-8k per run (with booster) for 20-30 mins work, in fact the only thing that slowed us down was the bug where the life support won't convert to a kuva extractor.

We were 2 x Despoiling nekros, 1 x Octavia and a frost, and tbh it was trivial almost effortless in fact, our life support never dropped below 75% at any time and we could easily deal with the mobs, granted we are experienced players using sortie level equipment. I would say best farm it right now as I suspect it's going to get nerfed.

P.S. the Kuva Guardians are so easy to kill now I almost feel bad

I was on these runs and the bug of not converting life support to kuva was what made us decide to extract earlier than we had planned to each time - please have a look at this DE?.

On another of the runs, 1x Despoil Nekros easily kept our life support above 70%.

Yes we are experienced however, unlike the various methods of sliptting the group required to speedrun siphons, the constantly relocating and then having to defend small areas made us stay within affinity range of each other. The nice by product of this is people took freshly forma'd weapons to level and we still got a more than reasonable amount of focus too (two aspects I see no-one discussing in relation to siphons / floods).

Is 200 / station a reasonable number - yes if it then scales. If it doesn't scale, I see the only incentive to go longer is if clanmates are levelling kit / focus and using the additional kuva gains as a nice bonus.

Edited March 29, 2018 by PSeeBee
typo fix

[Vanille]

In 5 minutes of endless kuva you get 600 (1200) kuva, the same amount you'd get on a normal kuva node for nearly the same amount of time, which relies on RNG and which nodes get the kuva mission while survival has a fixed pace and you can actually have some fun instead of hiding as operator waiting for clouds to spawn. Sometimes you can take even longer than 5 minutes on regular ones depending on what type of mission you got RNG'd for kuva. Like I posted on another thread prior to the update, endless kuva is an addition to keep earning kuva on a fast and constant pace after your limited amount of kuva nodes are done and you have to wait for reset. If endless gave more kuva, it would make those missions obsolete. You're not suposed to pick one of the other, it's a mix of both, and 200 is balanced enough around that amount per time, excluding floods for obvious reasons.

Life support doesn't scale because we have the means to protect them, DE probably wants us to use those and have team coop, the same reason excavators don't scale. Many frames can defend them, and Limbo is gonna shine since there are no corpus nullifiers.

[HKFrosty]

Made a hella long post in the official dev workshop thread but I will repost it here because my post is at like the 24th page of it.

TL;DR Gradually increasing reward amount. Starting at 125 kuva, increasing by 15 kuva each, capping reward amount after 24th harvest, which will then be 470 kuva each harvest.

So I have been discussing with some mates and did a 50 minutes run of kuva endless myself. Using the data I have collected and some analysis, the following proposal of gradually increasing kuva reward should work for both community and developers.

Keep in mind that these numbers do not represent the community in any way. Treat them as placeholders and references.

First of all, the following aspects have been considered when brainstorming.

Assuming Sortie takes approximately 30 minutes, a kuva endless mission with equivalent time should reward approximately 6000 kuva as in Sortie reward or slightly more due to kuva endless is a dedicated kuva acquisition session.

Normal endless missions take 4 rotation cycles for the majority to leave. In survival aspect, it would be 20 minutes.

Gradually increasing kuva amount should be capped after 40 minutes mark. Considering possible exploitation can happen and skyrocketing kuva reward may cause economy imbalance.

Based on the data I have collected when running a kuva endless mission with a non-meta 3 men squad, the following assumptions and approximations have been made.

11-13 harvests in 20 minutes.

31-33 harvests in 50 minutes.

Using the numbers above, we can approximate how much kuva can be collected in an average squad 20 minutes run in the current system, which is 2200-2600 kuva.

Using the data I have collected, I assume 24 harvests can be done at 40 minutes mark.

In this case, the total amount of kuva a Tenno can get after 40 minutes in the current system would be approximately 4800. In my opinion, this is not really rewarding considering capsule health is a fixed 4000 and enemies are exponentially harder.

Lets assume that the ideal amount of kuva a Tenno can retrieve at 40 minutes mark to be 7000. 

Then we can finally get into the main proposal.

To avoid impacting the kuva economy too much, the proposed kuva amount should be similar to the current system reward in terms of 1 complete rotation cycle, as that's when the majority will likely leave. 11 will be the approximate number for average squad harvest completion in 20 minutes.

Let 'S' be the initial amount of kuva that the first capsule yields, and 'i' be the increment amount of kuva per capsule.

(11 / 2) [2S + i(11 - 1)] = 2200 ...*

*Sum of arithmetic sequence

This indicates the proposed reward will be the same as the current reward system after a complete rotation cycle.

After the first 20 minutes, the kuva reward will continue increasing until 40 minutes mark, which will likely happen around 24th harvest. Using the ideal amount I have suggested, we can have the following equation.

(24 / 2) [2S + i(24 - 1)] = 7000

Because I hate decimals, let just replace 7000 with 7140. Slightly more than Sortie reward of 6000 but also more time taken. Fair enough I guess?

Now we can substitute the variables with S = 125 and i = 15.

Then we can have the proposal of initial kuva reward capsule to be 125 kuva, with 15 kuva increment each successful harvest.

However if we continue this increment after 40 minutes, players will get 12,730 kuva after an hour assuming 38 harvests have been done. That seems to be too much but given how players are dedicated enough to endure for that long, I suggest that the kuva amount should be capped after the 24th harvest, which yields 470 kuva. Considering that a capsule spawns approximately a minute after each and transitioning takes some time as well, the total time to complete a harvest is slightly faster than a normal siphon completion. A reward slightly less than a normal siphon mission should be enough.

In conclusion, after thorough considerations and calculations, it seems fair for both DE and the community that the reward can be gradually increased with the initial harvest to be 125 kuva, then increasing the reward by 15 kuva each harvest and capping at 470 kuva.

Please do point out flaws and suggestions. All these thoughts have only been made in around 2 hours and a half.

 

[EvilDarknessAlien]

Now remove kuva reward from sortie.

[Factical-Tuckwit]

30 minutes ago, PhoenixShadowEvil said:

Now remove kuva reward from sortie.

and that opens up a whole new can of worms about sortie rewards

[SirWolfen]

2 hours ago, SilvaDreams said:

#1) It's to encourage people to actually defend them instead of just running around like they do in normal defense missions where people will end up all over the map because the defense targets are tanky as hell.

#2) 200 is perfectly fine because it can be affected by Boosters AND the Kavat charm bonus

#3) Again, not needed for the same as #2

 

If you do a 40 minute run you can easily score up 12K Kuva per run (With just the Kavat boost)

What people seem to completely miss when against scaling rewards/incentive on this subject is that 12k for 40mins is trash. The kavat boost is rng so it's irrelevant to an extent as all that does is increase the possible amount. I think 200 is perfectly fine as well but it's nowhere near good if there's no other ways of earning it through the mission. People don't have one or two rivens to roll, a lot of people have 30+ and I would assume most like myself already reached that 10 roll cap on most and are at 3500 per roll. There's no reason to be overly stingy since rivens are already rng filled. 12k in 40 mins is hilarious because that's 3 rolls on a 3500 riven a single one not multiples. I'm not saying make it rain kuva but currently you're just being dumb running a mission for longer and subpar rewards compared to the shorter versions. The buff doesn't need to be overly generous in fact I think I see more people in favor of actual systems being added because it would benefit other aspects of the game moving forward. Personally, I don't care if they would do the AABC one that OP is suggesting in one and I also wouldn't mind the void booster scales for time spent in the void as well. Another decent one was bonuses per x amount of tower completed.

[Hypernaut1]

I think Kuva fortress levels needs high level Kuva guardian squads that carry Kuva around. 

[Midrib]

I just don't get it,

Kuva survival shouldn't be an alternative to Kuva Siphons, It should be flat out better.

Why shouldn't a mission that requires you to defend a fragile target while micromanaging your Life support with scaling armored enemies reward better than a puny level 30-40 mission that takes less than 5 minutes to complete ?

Increase the starting level of enemies if that is going to make it apparent that Kuva survival is geared towards high level players, but in no way should the effort put into a kuva survival mission be equivalent to Kuva Siphons.

Edited March 29, 2018 by Midrib

[SneakyErvin]

3 hours ago, HKFrosty said:

Made a hella long post in the official dev workshop thread but I will repost it here because my post is at like the 24th page of it.

TL;DR Gradually increasing reward amount. Starting at 125 kuva, increasing by 15 kuva each, capping reward amount after 24th harvest, which will then be 470 kuva each harvest.

So I have been discussing with some mates and did a 50 minutes run of kuva endless myself. Using the data I have collected and some analysis, the following proposal of gradually increasing kuva reward should work for both community and developers.

Keep in mind that these numbers do not represent the community in any way. Treat them as placeholders and references.

First of all, the following aspects have been considered when brainstorming.

Assuming Sortie takes approximately 30 minutes, a kuva endless mission with equivalent time should reward approximately 6000 kuva as in Sortie reward or slightly more due to kuva endless is a dedicated kuva acquisition session.

Normal endless missions take 4 rotation cycles for the majority to leave. In survival aspect, it would be 20 minutes.

Gradually increasing kuva amount should be capped after 40 minutes mark. Considering possible exploitation can happen and skyrocketing kuva reward may cause economy imbalance.

Based on the data I have collected when running a kuva endless mission with a non-meta 3 men squad, the following assumptions and approximations have been made.

11-13 harvests in 20 minutes.

31-33 harvests in 50 minutes.

Using the numbers above, we can approximate how much kuva can be collected in an average squad 20 minutes run in the current system, which is 2200-2600 kuva.

Using the data I have collected, I assume 24 harvests can be done at 40 minutes mark.

In this case, the total amount of kuva a Tenno can get after 40 minutes in the current system would be approximately 4800. In my opinion, this is not really rewarding considering capsule health is a fixed 4000 and enemies are exponentially harder.

Lets assume that the ideal amount of kuva a Tenno can retrieve at 40 minutes mark to be 7000. 

Then we can finally get into the main proposal.

To avoid impacting the kuva economy too much, the proposed kuva amount should be similar to the current system reward in terms of 1 complete rotation cycle, as that's when the majority will likely leave. 11 will be the approximate number for average squad harvest completion in 20 minutes.

Let 'S' be the initial amount of kuva that the first capsule yields, and 'i' be the increment amount of kuva per capsule.

(11 / 2) [2S + i(11 - 1)] = 2200 ...*

*Sum of arithmetic sequence

This indicates the proposed reward will be the same as the current reward system after a complete rotation cycle.

After the first 20 minutes, the kuva reward will continue increasing until 40 minutes mark, which will likely happen around 24th harvest. Using the ideal amount I have suggested, we can have the following equation.

(24 / 2) [2S + i(24 - 1)] = 7000

Because I hate decimals, let just replace 7000 with 7140. Slightly more than Sortie reward of 6000 but also more time taken. Fair enough I guess?

Now we can substitute the variables with S = 125 and i = 15.

Then we can have the proposal of initial kuva reward capsule to be 125 kuva, with 15 kuva increment each successful harvest.

However if we continue this increment after 40 minutes, players will get 12,730 kuva after an hour assuming 38 harvests have been done. That seems to be too much but given how players are dedicated enough to endure for that long, I suggest that the kuva amount should be capped after the 24th harvest, which yields 470 kuva. Considering that a capsule spawns approximately a minute after each and transitioning takes some time as well, the total time to complete a harvest is slightly faster than a normal siphon completion. A reward slightly less than a normal siphon mission should be enough.

In conclusion, after thorough considerations and calculations, it seems fair for both DE and the community that the reward can be gradually increased with the initial harvest to be 125 kuva, then increasing the reward by 15 kuva each harvest and capping at 470 kuva.

Please do point out flaws and suggestions. All these thoughts have only been made in around 2 hours and a half.

 

Your numbers would be a huge nerf at the get go. You say 2200 in 20 minutes with your scaling system, well that is 5 minutes of extra time for no extra reward compared to the current flat 200, which ends up at 2200-2400 each 15 minutes if no bugs occur. And this is me speaking from my own experience since the release yesterday. All my runs have been between 2200-2400 each 15 minutes in pugs with no special group setup.

[Pyrewyn]

Devil's advocate: the current amount of kuva is fine, running 25 minutes typically gives you 3.4k, and i can guarantee you that not only would it take longer to complete 3 floods (assuming you were even able to do 3 back-to-back), but it's also easier and more consistent, most players dont seem to realize you get a tower every nearly minute, and lotus sends a new one as soon as you complete a tower, it's not like waiting for another tower to spawn is a rare occurrence

Edited March 29, 2018 by Screamlord_Star

[Factical-Tuckwit]

but still zero incentive to go beyond the 20 min mark.