I know it has been said that “we won’t reward huge for passive gameplay” but even from the standpoint of these distillates being somewhat useful for new players or even for leveling up greens, they are pretty pathetic.
Distillates gained from the Trait Bonus system are literally 1/2 or less in value as those gained without matching up traits on agents.
It is almost as bad as charging double the resources for dual-stat (2 symbols overlapping) missions and rewarding less than half of the 3rd resource. Such as needing 5 intel, 5 assets and rewarding 4 of the remaning resource.
So even as far as Tier 3 missions, which should be slightly more useful than tier 1 otherwise, aren’t worth bothering to seek out bonus rewards half the time. Half. Get 400cc as normal rewards (at tier 3), which is at least useful for greens, and yet the Bonus is only 200cc. Less than that of normal item fodder.
It was bad enough wasting time with the constant deletion of distillates after each mission becoming par for the course for nearly everyone who uses the agent system without making the bonuses twice as worthless.
All this for 3.5% to 7% boost to damage, which is the only worthwhile goal of the agent system as far as I can see. It will probably get slightly more advantageous once we are allowed to unlock more than a single support slot, maybe.
Be grateful, those of you who do, that reading the tiny text is enough for you. Or that getting every achievement they throw at us is a reason enough. You are an inspiration to us all.
Ok, I don’t want to argue about rewards, but when I read your response I did the math.
800 purple distillates are only for missions that at best costs you 10 resources. Given the UI and the way how cost/reward is you need at 5-10 other missions just to power the one with purple distillates.
So as far as “passive” and “no challenge”, or “risk” goes… it’s actually less clicks to kill dung boss and get you 3.6k XP dist. Not to mention the actual time and the need to sign in several times a day to be able to run that one specific mission. At that point it’s not longer “passive”.
Honestly I could care less about the argument of “its passive gameplay it shouldn’t be rewarding”. Regardless of actual rewards, it should “feel” rewarding. I should feel like I accomplished something when utilizing a system that someone or several someones spent quite a long frikken time developing.
So yes, it is pretty hilarious that this system that supposedly took place of actual content being developed such as more dungeons, game balance, a plethora of content bugs that have yet to be addressed, is boiled down to “its passive play, any reward is a good reward”.
No it is not. I play this game, I give this game my time and attention. That time should not be wasted by constantly click and dragging to delete useless rewards that could easily be replaced with something of actual value.
Simply making all distillate rewards purified could have easily turned utter trash into a tiny chip at the insane gear grind this game refuses to address. And to be completely blunt, if the rewards that are aimed at our advancement are going to intentionally remain trash, they should just fold the system in on itself and make all rewards agent only.
Give me a 200 distillate that increases the experience of an agent of my choice? Yeah, I’d use that. Make agent gear have tiers too? Sounds better than deleting experience because “passive rewards must be pathetic by default”.
I never indicated that I want them to be anything close to this. I do however want a bonus to be better than the normal reward. Good or bad, it is a Bonus, it shouldn’t be literally half that of the normal reward.
Yes, logically speaking you are turning 400cc into 600cc with the bonus, but you are also doubling the cost. I don’t care how many shards you have or how easy they are to obtain. Those costs add up and doubling the costs for a 50% gain isn’t a bonus in any sense of the word.
Not to mention they are aimed at “new players”, a system like this is supposedly intended to attract those right? Do you think a new player is going to be happy paying the same cost they do for 250 exp yet only get 100 exp?
You and others may be “fine with it” as-is, but making the system better isn’t exactly going to make your lives worse. That is all I am saying.
Well, it might open the flood gates for pedestrian non-whale casual gamers to actually get something out of the agent system. That’s… probably a bad thing in the eyes of someone designing grind for grind’s sake and the players they cater to?
Personally, I suspect the agent system actually feeling like it offers decent rewards would be a great way of selling more boosters to more casual players. But SWL isn’t actually aimed at those, is it?
If you consider this starts at lvl 15, the distillates aren’t horrible for those leveling by any means. For the lvl 50/legendary crowd, yeah not so great, but I find they’re still useful (I’m only at mythic gear). And doing just the weekly is a really nice bonus for the leveling crowd - for a passive activity!
I don’t recommend this to anyone, but I made my own ‘mini-game’. I add all those distillates to a green item and then when it hits 20, I feed it to an epic or mythic piece. It does add up without being a shard killer. Again, it keeps me mildly entertained and not complaining about worthless new content.
The big thing - if you don’t like the agent system - don’t use it.
It’s like the museum, fun for those that enjoy it, but not a requirement. If you’re min-maxing at the highest tier, you’d likely want the agent buffs regardless of what items do/don’t drop. I consider the drops a nice bonus and I enjoy figuring out the best agent to send on a mission (plus I like the story text of the missions).
But assuming you don’t quite know what you’re doing - like a legitimately new player - they are pretty bad. At that stage shards are not dropping like grains of sand in Egypt yet, so wasting them on bad value distillates is a problem.
I feel new players running low on shard for bad reasons is not a desirable, but currently a somewhat likely outcome of the agent system. To me, that seems a pretty compelling reason to make some kind of adjustment.
Tier ones give less than 250, which to me is the basis for standard empowerment increases. These feel somewhat low yet given that they can be used on any item (versus matching a pistol with a pistol) its decent enough.
My issue is with the bonus distillates. At Tier 1, you get maybe 200cc as normal rewards. Bonus ones, however, give 100cc. Personally I would throw this away, even at low levels trying to increase a green that feels bad, especially for a bonus.
I have no problem with these being basically worthless (your mini-game aside) for level 50’s. Though I’ve yet to reach a level 50 agent so I cannot say how viable the rewards there are, by that point I’d at least have an interest in the end-goal versus the daily routine.
I’m not looking at these as a level 50 in high mythics, I just toss them out if I don’t want to bother wasting shards, I am instead trying to see it from the perspective I had when I first started playing the game.
I think making them purified (i.e., no shards to use) as suggested above would fix everything - the distillates would still be crap, but at least they wouldn’t drain resources. They’d help low-levels despite the shard-starved nature of those levels, and they’d cost the right amount of shards for high-levels to bother with them.
Agree with this 100%. And not just as regards the agent system, which I am completely ignoring as being mindless fluff. Funcom’s habit of wasting valuable human and financial resources on developing such utterly pointless little gimmicks rather than working on game basics is absurd.
I mean, really, the answer should be that “Bonus” distillates should always match the “base” distillate, and if you meet the requirements and succeed at the missions, instead of getting a 300 and a 150 distillate, you get a 450 distillate.
Either that, or just remove distillates from bonuses. I personally have begun to avoid any missions that give bonus distillates just because the time it takes deleting them annoys me. Could easily make Anima Shards/XP/Bags the only bonuses and almost nothing would change.
Which has been the stated purpose, they aren’t intended to be worthwhile to mythic+ geared players. This thread is about the bonus distillates also being pretty worthless to appropriately leveled gear (ie, greens, blues).
