Weapon and Armor upgrade system needs to change

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

As it stands, the upgrade system for most things in-game works just fine. It's impactful and, in most cases, appropriately expensive. Equipment upgrades are where this falls apart. To be clear: Low-tier equipment may be fully upgraded without issue, but the system breaks down specifically for mid- and high-tier gear, along with any faction gear (which is typically high-tier).

The problem is two-fold:
First, upgrade costs for equipment are massive compared to even clone upgrades. For comparison, an 80-upgrade clone is quite possible to manage, if extremely grindy and way past overkill for anything the game can throw at you. This is because Medical Components aren't exactly hard to obtain in bulk. Equipment, on the other hand, wants you to farm 700 Faction Chips and another 200+ to max out a single piece of faction gear (which is the only sort of gear one may put 80 points into for proper comparison).

The first issue wouldn't even be an issue were it not for the second: Chips range from very rare to "Korean MMO players think this is hard to obtain" depending on type. This makes obtaining 23 chips (3:1 ratio of basic to common chips) to max out a low tier item somewhat of a chore - but doable - while fully upgrading any non-basic equipment sits somewhere between completely infeasible to completely impossible. Worse, chips are no longer obtainable via trade, so their rarity is not mitigated by other mechanics.

Possible solutions:
1.) Severely restrict equipment upgrade amounts across the board. Maybe normalize upgrade counts to 10/20 (or some other value) without/with the upgrade level tech . This would also have the benefit of preventing fully upgraded high-tier and faction equipment from being completely ridiculous.
2.) Change upgrade recipe requirements. Not needing hundreds of item chips per item sure would be reasonable, and I am a fan of reason. Requiring hundreds or thousands of items you accrue normally en masse is still somewhat reasonable.
3.) Make item chips trade goods. If you insist on keeping the requirement of massive numbers of item chips, then item chips (and probably others) need to be directly purchasable from stations. And probably cheaper. And faction chips need to not be restricted to Tech 10. And probably other things I am not currently considering.

[Toha]

I do agree on the point of needing insane amount of chips being a detriment. And making chips, including faction specific ones a tradable commodity is, I believe, a solution to this problem.
I myself am still below tech level 10 on all corpos and currently busy farming clone chips. Those are quite the hassle too.

[Valnak]

My hero with the perfect opinions, as usual. The only thing I'd add is bring back the old barter system in addition to the current one. It won't fix all of the issue our lord and savior Commisar Jon Fuklaw brought up, but it will relieve some.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Origineel geplaatst door Valnak:

snip

The barter system is still there. It's just that you can only "choose" to use it by having low reputation with a faction. Also, you get less in return for barter than full-on trade.

If you mean the old list of items that could be bartered with/for, I agree. As-is, weapons, armor, and consumables appear valuable because they have a credit value, but nobody will take them in as trade items, making their actual value 0 credits.

[Valnak]

Origineel geplaatst door Commisar Jon Fuklaw:

Origineel geplaatst door Valnak:

snip

The barter system is still there. It's just that you can only "choose" to use it by having low reputation with a faction. Also, you get less in return for barter than full-on trade.

If you mean the old list of items that could be bartered with/for, I agree. As-is, weapons, armor, and consumables appear valuable because they have a credit value, but nobody will take them in as trade items, making their actual value 0 credits.

pre .8 Old system:
You'd exchange a bunch of items for a certain value that "bought" items randomly off the faction tech list that were allowed to you by rep. I have only played in .6 forward, if it was even more different in the past I am not aware.

.8 New system:
You exchange a bunch of items for random items off a preset list determined by the faction (low rep) OR for trade points you use to buy those items.

My suggestion - let you choose which system with a toggle on the trade window. In addition to your suggestions.

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Origineel geplaatst door Valnak:

snip

I am aware.

I am still of the view that there's functionally no difference between pre- and post-0.8 bartering because both are mechanically the same. Only what can be bartered for and with has changed, and expanding what is actually valid for economic exchange is all that is necessary to reconcile the old with the new.

It's also a valid method for fixing the issues I originally outlined.

[BlackOrryx]

The fact that faction specific chips are now rarer than they ever were, really puts a dampener on how you can really upgrade anything (specifically anything WORTH upgrading) and truly makes end game missions more impossible than ever, that's not even the story-line missions! 5 skulls against the mars quasi faction, with stock weapons and legend armour, is a recipe for sending your clones to the shadow realm.
Access to faction chips, from a more reliable source other than successful completion of a mission (of which is a rather small chance to receive one) would be appreciated by the masses, considering they are required for the more rewarding upgrades of weapons and or armours!

[Commisar Jon Fuklaw]

Origineel geplaatst door BlackOrryx:

snip

I mean, legend armor is mid-tier and is thus adequate for Tezctlan's forces. It's not ideal due to the lack of poison resistance, however. Luckily, "acquiring" free Carnage Pattern from RealWare during the AnCom story mission isn't exactly hard to do, even if the mission itself is annoying as all hell. Or at least the second half of it.

If you don't want to/can't do that due to tech level, then mixing and matching Tezctlan chests/helmets with Legend pants/boots is better than just Legend alone for fighting Tezctlan. Or you can just run Percy + Hardened perk for bare minimum poison resistances. Q-Rifles might still ruin your day, though.

Anyways, back on topic: That's basically my point by insinuating that "Korean MMO players find it hard to obtain" in regards to faction chips. I'd elaborate further, but I have already belabored my points enough.

[Kanjejou]

Personally im fine with higher tier item needing more material to upgrade but its a bit ridiculous it ask for mutiple item that dont stack for one level...

One of the reason i mostly boost low price items (100-600 trade range value)

[BlackOrryx]

Precisely! Back on topic, the lack of faction chips, truly makes upgrading, anything worth upgrading more than a grind, to verging on impossible, having played this game since it was in its infancy, the changes in this current state of play tend to be making things like upgrading, something we should all be striving for, exceptionally hard!

[Kanjejou]

If chip were unindentified in mission and then getting indentified when finishing allowing us to get more than 1 per slot/mission could help a lot at least for common and basic ones.
later onbes coudl stay rare

[Michelozzo]

While I've not gotten into the weapon/armor upgrades post the last update, if there's a cap on the number of times you can upgrade something, why even have the costs escalate as much as they do? The escalating costs to me seems to be a holdover from the 'you can upgrade something forever' era of the previous patch.

[Kanjejou]

Origineel geplaatst door Michelozzo:

While I've not gotten into the weapon/armor upgrades post the last update, if there's a cap on the number of times you can upgrade something, why even have the costs escalate as much as they do? The escalating costs to me seems to be a holdover from the 'you can upgrade something forever' era of the previous patch.

I feel like escalating price is okayish but it get out fo hand too quickly