Developers Q&A FAQ

Gear & Farming

Barik_Edo: Any plans on slightly increasing the amount of Omegas that drop from the Omega Battles?
No plans to increase Omegas from current Omega Battles. Plans soon to reward more Omegas from other sources.

Neo2551: Why are the gear requirements so unbalanced? Mk3 Carbanti, Mk5 stun guns, mk3 cuffs, mk8 biotech balls, mk4 comlink? Are there any plans to relief the burden in the short future?
We've substantially improved gear income for most players piece by piece over the last several months, but we know that there is more work to do here. Our next step for adjusting gear income is going to come out of looking at the impact of the raid rewards changes. Specifically, while most top-end gear will get a little easier to acquire as a result of these changes, we suspect a few pieces will still need some additional loosening, and we will have more to share on this once we get initial feedback and data.

dogwelder79: Are there any plans to alleviate the gear crunch problem?
I believe the answer to Neo2551's question covers our next steps for the gear economy. We have lots of plans and will always be working on this.

Are 7 dot mods and level cap increase coming? We have several people dedicating a lot of resources and time into upgrading the already existing content, I believe it is a warranted question to ask to know if this is going to cripple us in the long run.

Both the mod system and level system are designed to accommodate future increases in levels. We are not planning to change either in the very near term, but eventually they will be.

Here is what I would like to know about:
Any plan for gear that we have THOUSANDS of piled up? Sell back? Trade up? Something?

The game used to have a way to sell gear and other items. We removed it early on for two reasons: 1) Based on the economy, each item sold yielded very little in terms of Credits; 2) Players would sometimes sell valuable items accidentally which wasn't a great experience. With the addition of Territory Battles and somewhat to a lesser extent Territory Wars, there are more reasons to gear up and otherwise progress all of your characters. Given that, were we to allow players to "burn off" some of the lower-tier items and then bring out a feature that incentivized or even required the progression of other characters, that would also lead to a bad experience. Bottom line, we currently have no plans to convert these overages, and the above explains why we currently don't allow conversion. Hope that makes sense.

What’s the philosphy on characters being harder to farm than others? For example, shoretrooper is much harder to farm than most characters. He’s been in the game over a year. Is there a cadence at work here or is he so good that he will stay hard to get? That’s one example of many (nihilus, baze, etc.).

Characters serve a lot of different functions in the game. Some are key for Legendary events, others for PvE events (raids, TB, etc). And some are just good in PvP. In addition to the "where you use them" conversation is how powerful they are. We do our best to evaluate each time we release a character to the board, where all they are used, what's our intent around player use, and how powerful the character is. Some characters are intended to be chase characters and difficult to get because they are powerful.
However, as the game changes, power levels change and desirability can change. It's difficult for us to update locations of nodes because a variety of players may be actively farming a location and then be upset if we change the rules around it. It's something we'd like to tackle though and are actively thinking about it. I don't have a schedule yet, but we're looking into it.

It's not really a question, but more of a beef. I hate the way drop rates change on needed characters for events. Pretty greedy, guys.

We do not adjust drop rates based on when / whether characters are required for events, or otherwise adjust them dynamically based on player experience. See our answer to Rubberb0y for some more details on our philosophy around how RNG & probability can make players feel sometimes.