The agent system and red agent gear

-!!WARNING: LONG POST WITH MATH!! TL:DR: Red agent gear is so rare it isn’t realistically achieveable and the “Curious of our time” achievement is pretty much impossible in the lifetime of the game no matter how optimistic if you don’t plunder your retirement fund.

So…after recently putting some thought into it and crunching the numbers it came over me hoiw ridiculous the red agent gear is. As someone that is willing to put his face to the grindstone when it comes to agents and ran quite a few missions/e1 dungeons I am quite used to putting time into things but the red agent gear surpasses the possible and needs me to spend time with the system for years on a daily basis to even see one and boosters are not better either.

I understand that Funcom wants and needs to make money but I fail to see how the geargrind to red is motivating in the least to put money into it when they chances are worst than on any other rng ingame by a longshot.

Lets go into the number department. Some assumptions but we should be in the right direction numberwise:

To buy one red gadget you need 500 hexcoins. Lets say you have put your mind to it and wanna buy it with boosters…lots and lots of boosters. In average you get 2 hexcoins per booster which makes 250 boosters (or if we wanna be optimistic lets say 3 which makes it 167). With an aurum cost of 125 aurum per that means you spend 31250 aurum (optimistic: 20875) which is 265 Bucks (optimistic 180) or assuming an exchange rate of 280 marks per aurum 8.750 million marks (5.845 mil).
All to get ONE red agent gear bag (assuming rng doesn’t hate you) that doesn’t need to be the wanted 1 stat/unique item.

Ok, so you don’T have that amount of cash. So you wanna farm it. Not better on that front:
There are between 46 and 47 tier 5 missions (depending on your faction. Templar have one more.)
Of those 46 (lets equalize templar to the other faction for ease of calculation) 6 are bagmissions with one extra having it for critical success which is negligible. How rare they are is hard to figure out but lets go for 3 days until you spot one realistically, 1 day the optimist/ 24/7 player and 7 days the pessimist/ casual that still looks into the game daily as that seems to work as a good rule of thumb. I would like to use hard numbers but a lot of that like the chance to appear compared to other missions is only known to funcom.

For the success chance we could assume someone has mythic gear and the best agents but for a realistic look Quartermaster+Amir+Giovanni and epic gear is probably the most realistic that the average player can afford since outside of endgame players it rapidly gets tighter in the mof purse.
The best case is 48.5% with mythic and stuff like Boone which kinda shows how far fetched it is and the more realistic level is 39%.
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So you get optimistic a bag every 2.5 day, realistic 7.5 for a regular player that is hooked on the game and every 18 days for the casual which still feels a little rose colored glasses but approximating is the thing we gotta do.

Now you got a bag based on Secretfox aka the dropresearch site we guess how many bags we need and you guys assume how much it varies, deal?
91.25 Epic/7.58 Mythic/0.58 Legendary
So an epic every 1.09 bags, a mythic every 13.2 and a legendary every (drumroll) 172.4 bags…-.-
That means for our days until bag:
Optimistic gets a mythic every 33 days (a month of glued agaisnt the monitor) and a legendary every 431 days. 4…3…1
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That is the unrealistic optimist 24/7 player that needs over a year for ONE legendary.
Now for the realistic regular daily player. A mythic every 99 days or roughly 3 months and a legendary every 1293 days. Who is in for playing the game a few more years until their first legendary? SWL is younger than the average time to be expected for a red gadget.
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And now lets see how it looks for more casual players aka the pessimistic expectation:
A mythic every 237.6 days (So nearly a year…they probably do backflips of happiness for seeing their first if ever) and a legendary every 3103.2 days or every 8 and a half years. Which is longer than SWL and TSW are out combined!

How funcom expects someone to ever reaching this is beyond me. Even the most optimistic outlook is still a minimal rng that makes even things like the box look common. (if you do the first set of dailies on 4 bag sidemissions you get 12 bags…with 431 days that gives you 5172 tries and since the most common suspicion is that it is 1 in 1000 that means 5 boxes by the time you optimistically get a red). But the fun doesn’t end here cause there is also unique gear and the chance getting all that for the achievement “Curious of our time” (For the sparkle faction agent…snort).

There are 21 possible agent gears and 6 we want and we obviously don’t want doubles, assuming one can get that even, who knows (double unique gear XD I want screens of that).
So 28.6% for the first, 23.8% for the second, 19% thirds, 14.2%/9.5%/4.7% for the fourth, fifth and final.
Which means you get them around: 3.5, 4.2, 5.25, 7, 10.5, 21 bags…after a total sum of 52 bags you should have them all.

Given our previous calculations we can see how much in aurum/mof and money that one achievewment would cost:
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Buying the achievement clocks in at 9360-13780 Bucks or 304-455 MILLION Mof…which probably is more mof than the whole free 2 play community has by a longshot and more money than any sane person should or could spend.
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How long would you need to play for it:
Optimistic: 61-62 years
Realistic: 184 years
Casual: 441.8 years
Which pretty clearly shows that one will not get the achievement without paying plenty.

There are many things one can do to change this grim looking prospect and I really let it up to everyone to think up something. You guys were always good at brainstorming wild ideas.
Some things I would like to see but I don’t bet on.

  • Gearys Coffee should give a epic bag on normal success.
  • Epic missions that currently give only destillates should also get epic bags. Noone cares for epic missions that cost like epic bag missions and give like 1200 destillates.
  • Quality of life remove the green bags from tier 5. Once you are settled to do tier 5 regulary you already have better stuff that green bags are just a waste of space. Even if you want to have them go on the AH and just buy them or better
  • Give us a way to cycle in new missions. We pay for it.
  • 1 percent on an already relatively rare and hard to get mission is rough. Either make epic missions easier so you don’t need dungeon/regional or rare booster/SA collectors agent or up the chance. Even doubling wouldn’t swamp the market.

How smart or dumb those suggestions are if someone of the devs even reads it, I don’T really expect it but more than anything wanted to get my gripe with legendary agent gear of my soul and show how ludicrous it is.

I do have one other issue with the system which is the unrewarding boosters but other people already talked about that in length and it is a corner were the problem is the hex system and not some fancy pancy math. I can do math but I feel like I would fail more with criticizing systems.

P.S.:Feel free to point out mistakes in my logic. The post is long and the edit window crappy…hard to spot it during creation especially when you need to think in 10 diffrent directions.

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Tier 4 & 5 missions should only reward purple bags, not blue and certainly not green. The purple, 3 stat, almost impossible missions that only reward a gear bag on an outstanding should give mythic bags. Also get rid of all the two-stat gear because it is always worse than an equivalent level single stat item.

The hexcoin economy is likely never getting fixed as long as there are still players throwing thousands of dollars a month at it, so the best we can hope for there is that those players can actually afford what they’re doing :v:

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What I think is that if it at least had something equivilent to the destillates of caches you would feel some level of progression or the investment getting return.
I know maxed people don’t need destillates but something…be it agent xp destillates, items that let you cycle missions or cut their time. I tried some during Anniversary of the new freemason boosters and it was just depressing looking at those green agent gears for 1 hex coin…

It’s a headache. While I think patron is good value for money spend I currently can only discourage people from buying boosters. Which given that I am one of the more optimistic people toward funcoms systems should be an indicator.

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I’ve often thought that the system would be better if the drops from agent gear reward bags could be sold for Hex coins. Given the staggering amount of Hex coins you need to buy anything, it really sucks that agent bags are the only way to get them.

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It would from the player’s perspective, certainly. Given that they clearly felt there was a market for 500 hexcoin bags, I doubt it would be better from Funcom’s perspective :v:

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So, TL;DR: It’s probably not a good idea for Funcom to make achieving anything feel this unrealistic, so maybe making some adjustments to lessen that feeling is a good idea.

I couldn’t agree more. The agent system should’ve been something that feels like a cool, fun bonus to get into like similar systems in other games do. It isn’t anywhere close.

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I’m probably somewhere between Realistic and Optimistic in my checking of the Agent Network and running missions. So far, I’ve got 4 Mythics out of 440 Blue Bags, and 3 Mythics out of 41 Epic Bags. This feels so huge, and to think most people probably still haven’t seen a Mythic is staggering.

To know getting a Legendary is so stupidly rare, I feel like even I may never see one, let alone one of those unique gear pieces for the Achievement.

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I haven’t been keeping close count but I’m also around 3/30 for mythic from purple missions (and no legendary). I run them all with Petru at 39% with the only single-stat mythic I’ve gotten, so I only hit about 1/4 of the ones I see. I just don’t care enough to buy and level Amir or the other agents with good odds on T5s, and I’m not at all interested in blue bags. I also have this weird resource imbalance (300, 700, 1100 of the 3 resources) cause of only running Petru on the missions that consume them.

Definitely would be nice if the gold icon only popped up when it’s a mission I can attempt, with a gear box in the rewards.

I dunno past a certain point of unlikelihood (eg. 5 months with no peculiar box) I just don’t treat it as part of the game, same as you can’t get Halloween achievements except in October.

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But with Halloween, you get to look forward to October and having a reasonable shot at getting those achievements. And you can plan ahead for those. Here? Nothing, and no way of even knowing if, say, in the case of the boxes, there is some weird bug preventing you from getting one at all.

I definitely agree with the agent gear that, while it is meant to behave like gadgets, it would feel at least a little better if after getting 10-20 pieces of blue gear that no one wants anymore, you could somehow trade them all in for points towards getting something better.

Well, call it the Mayan event then. Only source of the cosmetic spear and sickle, and you can’t do it and no foreseen date in the future when it’ll happen either.

I haven’t really kept track of the mythics but I’ve had 2 legendaries drop so far from probably close to 100 epic reward bags. Sadly both were the same 2 stat legendaries and are outperformed 99% of the time by any single stat mythic. In other news I’m am now just playing the resource collecting game like many others with close to 2000 of each resource. It’s more like 1600/1850/2100 but still.

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The Mayan spear and sickle skins are purchasable for Aurum last time I checked.

I haven’t found any legendary gear yet but the thought of it being the almost entirely worthless 2 stat stuff is horrifying :v:

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trolled
Yup, sometimes I feel like the game is trolling me! :rofl:

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Woo, I wish I had that level of resources. Since I run all Blue, Purple, and Vanity Bag missions, my resource pool remains low.

Yeah I guess I’ve been almost purely farming resources. I run any purple bag missions or the ones for the cosmetic gear (ie. shocking steps) but otherwise it’s only tier one missions with agents that award additional resources.

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You know this is one reason I wouldn’t even think to try to collect hexcoins for the legendary bags aside from how much that would cost it just isn’t worth the risk of a legendary that is worse then your mythic gear.

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I see two major flaws with the mathing. Though, be warned that the post was tl;dr and I sure as hell didn’t read it all. The first flaw is that the data gathered by SecretFox for agent gear drops is far too small a sample size to even begin to properly estimate the drop rates of red gear, let alone the named red gear which we can confidently say have an even smaller drop rate. The second major flaw is that you assume I have a retirement fund to plunder.

In other words, it’s my opinion that your conclusions are too optimistic and the actual cost of completing this achievement is significantly higher than you’ve calculated.

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I could have sworn I saw the Curious of Our Time achievement removed from the achievement list within the last few weeks, and just noticed it back again yesterday. I agree it seems impossible to collect just 1 leggo agent gear, let alone SIX uniques.

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You kinda found one of the major pains in my butt during calculation. I have very little info about the real droprates and underlying math. As such it is optimistic but I found that if even the optimistic case looks bad (heck…even the optimistic version of the optimistic case) than no matter how much worse reality is it doesn’T change the verdict from impossible.

In the beginning I tried to even pinpoint the chance of getting an epic bag mission in the 3 slots were your work would have been instrumental but than I realized I miss critical rates of mission chance. So I split it into three estimations.

If better data comes along I gladly correct the data until than it is probably as good as it gets from a statistical point.

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