Bosses and Agari need a pity system

[shell ridge]

With the 30 minute cooldown between agari attempts and the fact I need multiple fragments to make an item unlike Warframe's one blueprint, it's taking a while to get some gear. For me specifically this is the Mendicant King's Suit of Rancor (the chest piece), it took me until my 26th kill to see my first fragment of the chest. At this rate, it's going to take me another 39 hours of killing the Mendicant King off cooldown to get the rest of the fragments.

[nocturne tiger]

are you sharing those kills? if not, for now i can suggest doing "shares" because i do agree we need some sort of system to alleviate this sort of problem, till then.. this is the answer (which i'm not too fond of mainly because inviting people is ultra buggy but also because it can be a inconvenience when one just wants to solo farm and chill for example)

[shell ridge]

Not sharing because I'm just logging in for a couple of minutes to kill the boss and leaving for a half hour.

[nocturne tiger]

understandable, well hopefully this feedback goes somewhere and helps this situation out

[spiral seal]

+1 We had a topic on this back on the the preludes discord. I thought it had gotten recreated, but I guess not...

[noble pebble]

Log in, kill 3 kings, then log out.... i have all my king parts so if you hit me up id gladly let you fight my king. But im sure you could find a group of 3 that want to do kings every 30 minutes

[potent relic]

+1. Not just agari. The forts and organ are on 3 hour timers. I did organ almost 30 times in the last 3 days just trying to get last piece for Wazards robes and instead I got 17 Falx. 3 Avex. And anything but the Wazzards robes. One day I got 9 Falx in a row! All of these were dupes. I play solo for the same reasons. Every drop this weekend was a dupe. Man RNG is a b**ch!

[spiral seal]

During p8, we used ot joke that you don't get to complain about drops till the 50 run. So, maybe after not getting an item to drop after the 50th kill/tale/event, the drop rate could increase with each subsequent run, until you've gotten it. Seems like that's high enough number of attempts, that it's very clear that the RNG is being stubborn, and not just player interpretation. I have almost 800 hours in the game, and most of that's been farming stuff that doesn't want to drop.

[limpid moat]

I would prefer if they just removed the 30 minute cooldown or reduced it to 3 minutes. I love grinding, so I'm okay with bad RNG. But bad RNG with long cooldowns makes the grind especially tedious.

All of Warframe's recent stuff has a pity system in the form of a vendor you can trade a resource with to get the items you're looking for. If a pity system was to be put in place for Soulframe, it would probably follow that formula.

[shell ridge]

Thanks for the offer, but my luck has finally turned and I got the drops.

[lyric hull]

I don't think we need a pity system.

Within about two weeks, I almost have everything except Wazzard set, Stag wep, Dwelion, and cogah runes.

For context.

I started in literal two weeks and got to that point.

[quick isle]

+1
I'm down to just the new bow and dewelion left to get. I started around Jan. 25th. I'm not a particularly social person and don't really want to do shares. I don't mind the grind and RNG, but I also like having a baseline of X amount of kills to get Y.

Right now, there aren't a super ton of weapons in the game, but I could see this getting out of hand, depending. I know I didn't enjoy Warframe's 'you need to be on this tileset to get [item] and it's RNG to get it and then it will be RNG to get the [item].' Or something like that.

'Cept Gathannan. I paid for that weapon. No way I was going to keep gambling on stag. Now with bear sharing those spots, I don't regret the purchase nor do I regret valuing my time over that grind.

[runic orbit]

wazzard robes
N-nW-head
E-SE-chest (kairness)
S-SE-pants

on a loop cant go fast enough to get it em all in 30 min + tales etc
once gets to only needing a few things. it can feel bad.
came down from 3h.
think my p12 playthu had king set before most things but thats tgaking advantage of kingshares which i find the 30 min to heavily reduced the need now more of a luxury
not against pity system havent felt need for it

[spiral seal]

As someone who's spent tha vast majority of this time fighting with the RNG and not getting stuff to drop within any reasonable amout of farming, I can't agree with anyone who says we dont' need a pity system. I still lack 3 of the cogah runes... It took around 115 agari kills for me to get the regualr runes, and another 100+ until the cogah runes started dropping. Also, the p8 gath and Orengall armor grinds, and precklies not dropping a fragment for almost a month worth of farming. And then not dropping a second fragment until 2 entire preludes later. It's all well and good when the RNG cooperates, but when the RNG decides to be evil, we NEED a mechanic to keep it in check.

[charred lark]

+1

[lyric hull]

How did you check for that? 👁️

[spiral seal]

The Avakot dot org people's new companoin app.

[lyric hull]

Neat app. I'll throw in my response once I do my fort and organ. As Gramp approves. ☺️

[lyric hull]

RNG is critical factor to Soulframe for not just giving players a goal, but also will be critical for wherever Soulframe finally establish a proper economy.

In Warframe, Bazaar and trading was a central piece of that economy. Because RNG is merciless, people traded to acquire blueprints and certain items that were difficult to acquire. This was also important because this was how F2P players acquire Plat to buy more slots.

I'll assume naturally that DE re-apply that approach here. Because it works. It what generate income for their games. Since their endgames are pretty much "Kill."

If you basically had everything on Soulframe within few days because Pity mechanic catches your bad luck in a net. Then you would struggle to maintain that level of interest in Soulframe.

You can argue they can add some endgames. Proper ones. But even that itself have a limit. Endgames are called endgames because it's an end to the game. Which for a game like Soulframe, wouldn't benefit well from.

Obviously though. I understand that pity system would be nice. But then that would also invalidate the entire point of Zenith's Arc store too!

Remember. Soulframe definitely have trademark of F2P game.

[tame briar]

They could also add something like a way to turn fragments you get that you don't need into fragments you do? Definitely not in a 1 to 1 style fashion but like say you can turn a fragment for gear you don't want into some general currency, and if you have like 15 of those you can turn them into 1 fragment you do actually want

[sick smelt]

+1 the RNG on the stag is probably also broken, but if we had a pity system where I could trade other stag drops or some kind of points or something in for gath frags, I'd probably have been able to work around that horrible RNG by now.

[spiral seal]

I can tell you that I don't play games for the grind. I don't enjoy the grind. Especially when 75% of everyone else starts popping of with "Well I got it in 10 kills"... DE has implemented multiple types of pity systems to Warframe, because they're aware of the tendency of Warframe's RNG to completely shaft players, rending it nearly impossible for players to actually use weapons, frames, mods, etc. Their recent devstream explained that they intend to also readjust the drop rates of things that're way too grindy in Warframe. When a game starts making you not want to play it because you're burned out on trying to obtain the things that don't exist as tradable and aren't in the in-game store, then the grind is actively working against the game, driving people away. Especially when it consistently happens to specific players. And we're not talking about "oh, I didn't get it in 5-10 tries like most of the other players"... We're talking about "It took me 115 kills against an enemy with a 3 hour (later shortened to 30 minute) respawn timer to get him to drop this" being something that most of the rest of the player base thinks you're being hyperbolic about, and the experience being something happening with 75% of such enemies for a handful of people. I've had a few people tell me that over 100 kills to get some of these things should be impossible, given the drop rates. In some games, my bad luck has contributed to people who thought they knew drop rates and "guaranteed to drop by" mechanics to have to rework their calculations. It's not just a frustration with WF and SF. Having intensely bad luck in multiple games over the decades tends to sour a person on the idea that RNGs are a thing.

[sick smelt]

This. The whole thing about statistically defined systems is the uncertainty factor.
But without a safety net, out of a few thousand to several hundred thousand people, you're going to have a significant non-zero subset of that population who fall well off and away from the center by a lot more than two standard deviations.
Telling people they're being impatient is just muddying the waters.

[lyric hull]

But grinding is how players keep playing. Without it, the only select players that will keep playing these games are either roleplayers, PvPers, or season-based players (Read Seasons for reaching first place or such. Think of PoE).

I already addressed that the RNG is how DE monetizes Warframe. And they will do so here. Zenith's store pretty much sell almost everything (that being, everything that is locked behind a game of probability except for unique cases like HoM or Ode where you get the pact almost straight up from faction trader.)

They monetized the grind because they know it works. Warframe is a open and shut case example of this. Even if they added pity system for some things, there are things they won't do like Relic.

It's why they hadn't implemented pity system for this yet. Because the only things you need to grind are weapons, armors, and runes. But once you're all done? There's nothing afterward but wait for DE to add something shiny and new.

The pity system in words of many people who answered this is

"Trade off what you don't want and get what you do want."

Basically once trading get implemented, just see if someone is willing to give you the fragment you need for the fragment they need.

It's community effort to trade. To sell. To buy. And this is what DE intend to profit off.

The name of the game is grind. And that's what they will continue to do.

[lyric hull]

People are going to be unlucky. That's intended. RNG is just cruel.

Even I will have a bad streak. I just accept RNG as RNG.

But I dunno where you're going with the impatient statement. I think you're reaching here.

[sick smelt]

yeah, sorry, the impatient thing wasn't aimed at anyone in particular
Just, you know, the usual trolls show up with their 'git gud' attitude about literally anything, and I feel this constant need to head that off ahead of time.

I argued with people on the warframe forums about whether or not we needed some kind of pity system for archon shards. The sheer number of examples of people getting a tauforged every other week was astonishing, but none of those examples changed the fact that I had gotten only 1 in the like 3 months following its release at the time.

That was at a time when they had just been introduced, so we all got exactly 1 shard each week, it was a different, predefined color for everyone each week, and ~20% of the people who did their archon hunt that week supposedly got a tauforged.

You wouldn't think people could show up to that horrible design discussion ready to tell you to "get gud scrub" but trust me, they managed.

[spiral seal]

Take your copium elsewhere.

[high tangle]

Eh, a bad luck protection system would be fine as long as it wasn't overblown. It took me like 30 something impids kills after I had gotten the chest and legs complete to get ONE helmet fragment. Some things are too much.

[spiral seal]

We're not asking for something like "it should only take 30 attempts to get something". More like "If it takes 50 tries and the RNG hasn't given you this thing that the math says should have taken 10-30 tries, then start bumping up the drop rate for that something a little with each try." That's the system kicking in a full 21 tries after most of the players have that something, and bumping up the likelihood with each try. Or, allow us to exchange other runes or a huge stack of harmony for runes. If you're having troulbe with a spacific fragment, allow Tuvalkane to trade you one fragment of that for say 50 fragments of stuff you've got built already...

There's a lot of us who have triple digits worth of fragments of stuff that we build back after the p7 reset.

[cursive socket]

👆

[spiral seal]

Numbers I posted are just for example. Adjust as needed to maintain balance of "this is keeping people engaged" and "this is causing people to get burned out and thus not want ot contenue engaging"...

[pseudo scroll]

That is insanely unlucky. For the regular runes It took me at most 3 agari kills on a boss that drop the rune to give me their rune. Most of the time it was the 2nd or first time. Such massive Contrast.

I feel you. 🫂

[pseudo scroll]

As long as the pity doesn't take away from player interaction or player trading then im all for Adding a pity.

Assuming player trading gets added. Since player trading will eliviate some of the frustration with not getting a drop a player may want. By allowing them to sell their unwanted fragment(s) and buy the fragment they want.

Though I do require some limitations Applied to the pity system.
Unique pity trade for each boss. Since each boss have a unique set of drops the pity system needs to take that into account. So that a player can't farm a agari expecting a equip not part of that agari's drop pool. Then use the unrelated shards to get another agari's drops. Prompting farming the correct boss. instead of just challanging one.

The pity system shouldnt out-compete player trading. This game is a online game after all. So players using the pity should have a worse trade then trading with a player. Ex 15:1.

Even following those 2 rules it is possible to help players that are as unlucky as vlad where it required 100 cogah kills for a single cogah Rune. Allowing them to trade for at least 6 Runes after 100 boss kills. when trading with the other Equipment shards they got.. If the player focuses 15 kills each of the 6 Bosses.

[sick smelt]

That's assuming player trading even lets you trade normal fragments. Warframe's trading doesn't let you trade random non-prime warframe blueprints for instance, or even a lot of weapon parts and materials. It also doesn't let you trade various consumable blueprints or the consumables themselves, with only the rarest things (things like fusion cores) and normally for-plat things (prime parts) being tradable.
There are exceptions where like some weapons can be traded if you leave them at rank 0 directly from source, but those are the exception, not the rule.

In soulframe's case, I'm pretty sure totems will be tradable, not as sure about Runes, but I'm hoping they will be as well. On the flip side, I have doubts about most weapon & armor fragments. We'll probably be able to trade the wyld stuff when that becomes farmable, but I would be surprised if we could trade random sollos frags around or anything like that.
Which REALLY pushes the question: will those of us who have been struggling for dewelion or gathannan drops be able to trade what we have for what we don't?

That's why I'm still largely in favor of a pity system regardless of player trading. Bashing our heads into these RNG walls just because these things are supposed to be "rare" but end up being basically impossible for those of us who fall on the other end of the bell curve for whatever reason, is stupid, and will just lead to burnout.

This concern people seem to have about a pity system going too far are also completely unfounded. DE has a strong incentive to keep these things difficult enough to get to make them look appealing to spend Arcs on. They'll math that out and set it right. You shouldn't worry about that angle. They've made multiple pity shops for other things in warframe in the recent past. They know how, they just (understandably) don't like putting in the effort unless they have to.

Oh, and for those of you who are subconsciously (or even consciously) concerned that people will be able to aquire things easily that you put a lot of sweat into: That's inevitable. DE will crush the grinds on a lot of things over time to allow new folks to reach later game content easier. That's just the nature of these live service games. It may be years from now, but it'll happen regardless.

[shadow olive]

Get some friends and kill the boss in everyone's instance

[spiral seal]

If the runes become tradable, yeah, that would fix a large problem. But we know from Warframe that somethings can be made untradable.
I don't think the "trade harmony or runes for other runes" needs to be locked behind a number of tries. We just need a reasonable exchange rate with whatever we'd be tranding it in with. Make the "spare runes" number something like 10 non-cogah runes (5 cogah runes) for a non-cogah rune, and 20 non-cogah runes (10 cogah runes) for a cogah rune. Harmony should be amounts equal to what you'd get from reducing that many runes . That seems like a fair example of "Spent quite a bit of time actually farming runes" to show that someone has been shafted. As for fragments, It just needs to be a significant number of fragments from something you've built. 50 and 100 fragments from anything you've built have been the typical numbers that have been agreed on as "I want to burn the RNG's house down with all these spare fragments" when we've discussed this on the old Preludes discord.

As for needing seperate drop rate handlers, yes. We know that's possible because of the Archon Hunts. Each archon has its own possible tauforged shard drop chance. Not getting one from Amar only increases the chance for Amar. With things in Soulframe not having that 3 week delay, I'm sure we could agree that a smaller chance increase would be fine, even if it doesn't kick in until you've killed that boss 50 times, run that organ 50 times, etc.

[lyric hull]

I don't feel like Totems and Runes would make for great tradeables. The reason for this argument is because Runes and Totems are matter of finding the right thing or just doing the boss-killing. If you take about no more than 4 hours total doing Cogah, you'll definitely be able to get almost all the runes exclusive to Cogah. It's not even funny just how simple it is. The main pain is having to wait for the respawn timer.

My main struggle of getting runes were usually Nimrod. But once I get Nimrod rune, then I just ignore Nimrod as I don't need anything from them.

So it's mainly just waiting for last 3 runes to drop, and then there's no point in going to Cogah. Cogah is intimidating, but once you understand how it works. It's just more levels, and some debuff. Not as terrifying as it is.

[dapper rose]

Took me over 2 weeks to get flitsmoke, genuinely miserable

[sick smelt]

Whether or not we would want to trade them, and whether or not DE would allow them to be traded, are two separate things.
I was talking about the latter, and it sounds like you're talking about the former.

Folks do trade the harder to get mods in warframe, and sometimes folks like Strauss here get shafted by the RNG. So I also disagree on your argument that we wouldn't trade these things. Maybe not in larger numbers, but there's always going to be a few for each person that for whatever reason refuse to drop.

[lyric hull]

I mean that's valid! I just feel like it's not that bad right now.

I would understand runes where they are far harder to obtains than just Cogah boss running which is usually waiting for 30 minutes.

[sick smelt]

The game is also pre-alpha, so it's not really fair to judge that situation on how it is right now. It's DE, and we know what they've done with warframe. Cogah is probably going to get more developed, and many more things will be added to drop tables in the future, diluting the pools.

[lyric hull]

Yeah. We will see many things to come.

[sick smelt]

All I was originally trying to say, however, is that trading isn't the one-shot solution to the RNG problems. DE very likely won't let us trade everything, and for good reasons.

[lyric hull]

Yeah. But at end of the day. Trading will be very good solution to lot of bad RNG pains. Because someone out there is unlucky getting the bear sword frag but is getting load of stag spear frag.

[sick smelt]

Rarer items like dewelion and gath fragments, if their patterns from warframe hold up, likely won't be tradable for instance, and that's going to be a problem that will need a proper pity system.

[lyric hull]

Ye. I already got a gath spear frag after about 13 to 14 Stag kills. And this was on votive so I can affirm that you can get it from votive.

[sick smelt]

Weapon and frame blueprints in warframe aren't tradable, so I suspect that these fragments won't be either.

[lyric hull]

Probably not. We will wait and see.

[sick smelt]

I've done in excess of 80 stags via votives and a few random encounters. I have had 1 out of 2 fragments since forever now.

[lyric hull]

I'm only down to just Dewelion (2/3) and Gath spear (1/2).

Once I finish those. I just got nothing but runes and totems to do and spamming Organ for Wazzard as that's all I get..

And then Endless spam.

I hate it!

I know the END is in sight.

the grind must never end, Envoy!

[sick smelt]

Glad to hear you're enjoying yourself. I'm sick of stag votives and relogging hell trying to roll them. I've got 2 swords and gath left on my to-level list for mastery, and after that I get to actually just focus on weapons I want and not all of the trash swords and shortblades.

My enjoyment of the game is the buildcraft, not the endless grind.

I've literally leveled a large chunk of my arsenal for mastery while trying to roll that last gath fragment.

I see an obvious problem with that statement -- being able to say that means I'm either doing something wrong (I'm not; I checked) or there's a problem with the RNG in the game.

I did also round out all of my faction ranks and purchases and max out their standing for whatever DE might add in the future. And killing that many stags has loaded me with various joineries. So it's not like the farm has been entirely in vain. I would just like to have done all of that across more varied content. But the RNG shafted me, so here I am.

[sick smelt]

Finally got my second gath fragment at approximately 101 stags, not counting the fragments needed to craft the other gear.

[spiral seal]

Welcome to the 100+ club. 👍 At least Gath no longer needs 5 fragments.

[quick isle]

Still no Dewelion fragments. Constant rotation of Hewyl and Vella.

[stoic heron]

Dewelion. Enough said. 4 hours of Dewelion farm, shared both Vella and Hewyl, back and forth. 0 drops...

[dull solar]

You are lucky, I'm over 100 and not 1 so far, started doubting it is on the drop table at all.

[granite meteor]

+1

[small quiver]

took me like 200+ attempts to get all 3, then got another one right after i was finished crafting already

i have video evidence it exists >.>

definitely needs rate adjustment on that though, spent way too long doing those runs

[quick isle]

[potent relic]

Do kearnhold. Got all 3 frags from there ~15 runs. 30+ runs of Dewyl and friend and never saw one

[slate thistle]

+1, all RNG grinds need a pity system so that there is some sort of developer-designed 'worst case' for each farm