I don’t think the “incapacitated” gimmick is good. It just makes me not want to use the system anymore. Why punish players using this system? The wait for the missions themselves is enough ‘downtime’, you really don’t need to add a punishment downtime to this imo.
Also; the ‘droprate’ of agents on missions could use a boost.
I agree with you. I think that this will only be a problem for now as I only have 1 Agent. If I had 20 I could see where it wouldn’t bother me. I don’t see a way of telling if your Agent is getting “fatigued”, which would help with prioritizing which Agent to use. ( If I had any Agents… lol )
I haven’t experienced the fatigue mechanic yet (I did experience 2 8 hr missions however). The drop-rate for dossiers does need to be changed to allow for getting at least your 2nd, possibly 3rd, agent relatively quickly so players can actually get into the system. The low drop rates, with one agent (who in my case has failed every mission with well over 50% chance of success btw), can easily discourage people from using the system.
I too feel like it’s one too many restriction, we already have mission timers, mission cooldowns, avaidability of agents, matching bonus objectives…
I don’t see how further restricting the system does it any good apart from making it a stretch in how long it takes to max an agent.
I would understand it if agents were plentiful but I can’t see that right now. They probably get more common as the supply grows but never to a level where they are cheap enough to make them trash.
yeah, the high failure rate for 15 minute missions was a bit much… I facepalmed every time I opened the completed mission and what I got was " oh s##t, oh s##t, oh s**t, don’t tell the boss, k ? "
The aurum sink for rushing missions wasn’t enough they had to throw in an overpriced MOF sink as well.
Seriously though, I can see an agent who’s done a dozen 15m missions in a row going “Whoa, I’m resting for an hour, kay?!” But 8+ hours with no warning (no fatigue meter, already suggested in feedback thread) is a bit over the top.
On top of that make it cost 250 MOF to bribe them into continuing and it’ll get used far more than 8k mof to alleviate an 8 hour penalty.
Why is it always about the massive money drops instead of realizing people would spend far more buying in mass quantities rather than one single massive sum.
Its like the ridiculous cosmetics all over again. Offer 3,000 different shirts and charge 30k mof for 1 of each color. People will buy 1 shirt.
Now charge 5k for each shirt, people will buy 10 or 20 or more shirts. I’m no math wizard but 20x5k > 30k no?
I agree that the low drop rate, long timers, failure rates and chance of incapacitation appear quite frustrating at first.
Keep in mind however that the system has been out for scarcely a day with quite a bit of downtime thrown in.
As people get duplicates of agents they have, more will go on the exchange. As people get more agents, with only a small number of mission slots, you won’t have to send the same agent out again and again. Also, that first agent is a ‘recruit’, presumably the ones we get our hands on later will have better chances, and once we get some gear the chances will be better still.
I plan to give it a week or two, even if it seems slow/frustrating, before I worry too much about what needs to be changed. If they go overboard at the start and have to ‘nerf it back’ later, people will yell twice as hard.
Edit: Just a note on what Xekrin said above… FunCom has always had problems figuring out the ‘price points’ between where people will buy nothing, or at most 1, and where people feel there is decent value and will buy multiples. It’s digital product, FunCom… selling more to many people is way better than selling a few items to a few whales.
I understand what you are writing about. But I am afraid this game is in situation this would not help. Instead of it it will make a harm. I can remember how it went with scenarios and augments, during the waiting for Tokyo…
Let’s be honest here. If the Agent Network was a standalone mobile game (think iOS/Android), most of us wouldn’t spend five minutes with it before uninstalling. In and of itself, it’s not a fun game. Is it even a game?
The timers are up there with the very worst of mobile games and more importantly, there’s nothing to get you hooked. Even the most money-grabby of mobile games at least try to get you addicted to the gameplay before asking you to spend money to speed it up. I’m not getting that from the Agent Network. I’m getting endless wait times. If this wasn’t connected to SWL I wouldn’t give it a second glance.
I was really looking forward to having another path of progression, but this is just too slow and passive for me. And I don’t think that increasing drop rates on dossiers is going to “fix” that.
The real problem with the drop rate is that we’re not starting at level one.
Most everyone has done all the missions already, and is already L50. Having only one starter agent is somewhat of a wet blanket.
That way, everyone gets their noob agent, and everyone at L50 gets an agent they can feel good about leveling. And everyone (L50 anyway) gets to play with cycling between two agents on the missions.
Also, was it really so hard creating agents that you couldn’t make them faction specific - Capital letters WTF were you thinking? Swing and miss, guys. I don’t want Illuminaughty agents for my Templar character (even IF Carter is still infatuated with me).
Agent drop rate is low, but that’s okay. Figured it was intentional to take time, not have 40 agents in a week. (And I’ve only had one agent drop so far, so the RNG Gods are not blessing me with agents!)
The ‘faction’ thing, yeah that’s a bit off, but I guess as we progress we can skip those if it ‘feels wrong’.
The incapacitate as it is now does need a tweak. There should be some sort of fatigue mechanism or something, so you know to not send that agent out.
Overall it’s entertaining. Not the best mini-game like this I’ve seen, but entertaining.
Withoutascratch, there was an issue with it adding time to incapacitation as missions were done - disabled (free) until fixed.
So if anybody’s agent is red right now, just go into their screen and recover them for 0 MoF.
The agent system as is would probably be fine, if it had been in-game at launch or was designed for a game with a steady, large influx of new players. But even then, how one seems much more likely to not do anything much with the system because additional agents mostly don’t drop might not be ideal in terms of getting people hooked.
And to be fair, this would feel like a great time to really get into leveling an alternate-faction alt, experiencing this system as intended(-ish)… if Funcom hadn’t made SWL feel exceedingly alt-unfriendly to begin with.
As is, the agent system to me mostly feels like pseudo-content trying to get me to replay all the old missions for a rather too miniscule chance at maybe actually experiencing the pseudo-content. Kind of like it replaces Augments, I guess?
Only it looks like casuals will not be able to get more of agents - you need daily grind of 50 missions to get 1 agent or doing elite dungeons. Again … I guess for them casual means that person who buys crates and not a person who wants to have fun while playing their game…
Apparently I’ve had good RNG. I got my first 2 “drop” agents within 24 hours, after about 8-10 missions. Both in Tokyo, if that matters. (I guessed, right or wrong, that later content might have higher odds of dropping.)
One thing I’d personally suggest is something to do with the green distillates that the quests reward. Basically:
My agents give me green distillate items.
All my gear is purple or yellow, so putting green distillates in them costs me more in anima shards than it’s worth.
I can’t sell or vendor the distillates, so they’re stuck in my inventory.
Nor can I spend my distillates on agent-related gear to level that up.
At the moment, I’m forced to buy green trash, pump the distillates into them, and then sell them. I really don’t like that. I’d love for distillate rewards from agents to be able to level THEIR gear up somehow. Asking the disillates to scale to my ilevel (like cache distillates do) is asking too much, I realize, but…yeah. Right now the rewards are useless to me and actually serve as a negative incentive rather than a positive one. I do the missions to get the XP for my agents, not because it offers distillate rewards.
Actually so far I have been able to discard all the Agent reward distillates. It’s useless getting a 150cc distillate when it costs the same to use that as a cheap 1-pip off the AH for 250. Anything less than 250XP should be taken out, or made 0-shard cost.
Other types of reward distillates can’t be discarded but try the agent ones again.
What they didn’t tell you was that “dragon agent” you sent your agent to stop was an Illuminati double agent who was compromised. KG had them ‘retired’ the moment he was ‘captured’.
As Illuminati I know this to be true.
I agree with this. I don’t want all the agents too - it is not important and shouldn’t be important part of the game, just something else to drop and collect, but casual friendly in this game for me means that it is more tied to character progress than all the random drop for the same group of players as with everything else. There is no quest connected to it, no other mechanics, only a new drop to the old drop tables. So why for this case it cannot be tied more to faction rank up system ? 2-3 agents could be enough.
And my personal rant - Why there cannot be some lower agent drop from story dungeons? Why they are discriminating people who don’t want to do dungeons with 5 people but with 3 people - because basically that is the difference for me when I tried elite dung 1 (the only elite I got equipment for without grind), where it was all about a good tank, or a good healer and 1 shot mechanics if you are not careful enough, so the chance of the whole group dying was higher with the higher number of players. So I died that way 7x and got 800 shards and some upgrade packs. So nothing interesting for me really. So why it is such a problem for Funcom if someone prefer a different style? And it cannot be farmed because they limited this already with keys and lower upgrades.
Sorry for all the rant, I should write this in 1 sentence, but there was so much of asking already and they do it again…
Feel the same. Saw the Stream and thought the Rookie would be faction related. Clicked on the dossier and well, it wasn’t. So for now, I tested the system, know how it works and wish for my own faction recruit. I don’t want to train an Illu. shrugs
Also (since this is the right category for it):
Being handed newbies is all fine, but please not before rank 5 when we get our first uniform and our own faction is promoting US from newb to member.
At rank 3 or level 15, we are not at all trusted, we’re kept in the dark and surely not out of fresh content and in dire need of this Network add-in. So at this early point, it doesn’t make sense.
BUT: In general, I really welcome more faction related stuff! I am not at all against the new system.
You can delete any distillate that doesn’t come from the daily log in or from a cache.