Combining Trade Up and Fragment Recycling Crafting.

(SnakekillerX) #1

Not sure if this sort of thing has been suggested before, as I don’t normally read people’s suggestions on crafting as I’ve been sitting on this idea since fragment recycling came out.

Both crafting systems (trade up, and fragment recycling) are decent methods of getting load out cards. It’s clear however each one has its own strength, and flaws over the other.

Trade Up (original method):

While this did serve to get you different cards of all rarity types, it took a long time to make a cobalt card, and was pretty expensive in the long run too.

It was an extremely tedious process though because it required you to trade up credits along with…

a bunch of lead cards to make a random iron card for a merc of your choosing.
a bunch of iron cards to make a random bronze card for a merc of your choosing.
a bunch of bronze cards to make a random silver card for a merc of your choosing.
a bunch of silver cards to make a random gold card for a merc of your choosing.
a bunch of gold cards to make a random cobalt card for a merc of your choosing.

Even if you had all the resources to do it all in one sitting, it would probably require a few minutes of crafting cards and picking the ones you wanted to use for the next trade up.

In the end you usually ended up with a cobalt card with a load out that you probably didn’t even care for, and if you used it was mostly for the bling factor.

You could also use Trade In to trade a few cards of one rarity for a new card of that same rarity. It was basically the only way to reroll a cobalt, and didn’t seem worth the loss. 3 cards for 1 new card which might even be the same as the original 3 you were trading in.

Fragment Recycling (current method):

Having a certain fragment value attached to each type of card rarity and allowing you to just craft a card (recycling) is definitely way faster and easier in order to get a card on a merc of your choosing in the rarity of your choosing.

There are 2 main problems with this system…
The prices are completely unreasonable and crafting anything over bronze (imo) isn’t even worth it due to the number of fragments needed and the credit cost incurred.
It eliminates progression since you need both of these currencies to make a card.
You are better off waiting until you can make the highest rarity card you are willing to make before spending those fragments and credits, as crafting them in order iron -> bronze -> silver -> gold -> cobalt would just be a waste of both fragments and credits if ultimately you only want the cobalt.

I think both systems are decent (not the best, not the worst) and actually merging the two together would make for some interesting results.


Potential Crafting System
I think it would be great if they just took what worked with both systems and linked them together.

There would be 2 methods, one being more accurate, but expensive, and the other being less accurate but cheaper.

Method 1 (Trade Up) - Trade 1 card of any rarity for the SAME load out of next rarity.
This method would guarantee you that cobalt with the load out you’ve always wanted, but it will take you a long time to get there due to the high fragment and credit costs.

Method 2 (Fragment Recycling) - Using recycled fragments, craft a card starting at any rarity. (with maybe an option to still pick the merc) This would be cheaper than Trading Up but you have no control over which load out you get.

By combining these two, you have a greater range of control over what you are trying to craft. Do you want to test your luck or just get a bunch of load out cards to test them all out? (use recycling)

Are you after your favorite load out in the best rarity? (use trade up)

What about Crafting / Weapon kits?
Since there are two options for crafting, you can use one item for each type of craft.
Crafting Kits can be used to reduce credit/fragment costs of Fragment Recycling crafts.
Weapon Kits can be used to reduce credit/fragment costs of Trading Up crafts.

Again, I don’t normally read people’s crafting suggestions so I’m sorry if this is similar to someone else’s suggestion.
I’m not listing prices for Trade Up vs Fragment Recycling as there are too many variables to think about before being able to put down numbers.

Wonder if the new system will look anything like this or not, or if they’ve even started it yet.

(KUST__LunarTM) #2

Don’t forget the main reason fragment crafting was frowned upon: Elite cases. The system was designed to be overall cheaper if you only crafted up from leads (presumably gotten for free from drops), but for those who are dedicated to supporting the game, they will probably have bought several Elite cases and have their hands on quite a few silvers and golds, but since the fragment algorithm didn’t take that into account, it made crafting starting from those cards much more expensive compared to just trading up.

(ClemClem7) #3

Wall of text incoming.
Tldr at the end

As I would be happy to finally get this 343 cobalt sparks, I don’t really agree on the 1st method. You basically can have any cobalt you want just by buying its bronze little sister. It will be a loss in 3 way:

  • too easy to get the card you want, as it’s just cosmetic, it’s fine to make it hard or luck based to drop the one card you want, veterans might be pissed off, because of the time they spent farming that one card.
  • Less profit to splash damage from people who pay to have the card they want (there are people who can pay 100 bucks to have their dreamed card
  • It will stick you on 1 card. I discovered many loadout on mercs just because I dropped an other loadout rather than the one I wanted and I always played with before (aka 343 sparks).

The recycling system was only made to save time when upgrading from lead to anything over bronze. This point was critical because a lot of people was annoyed of this lost of time.

But the devs made a bigger rework and screwed this system. All we wanted was a system where we were able to bypass the low rarity cards trade up.

All they had to do was to give us the ability to recycle cards we don’t want and make a higher rarity card with it, but with costs of old trade up system.

If we want a silver card (value 36 leads), and we have 15 leads (value 1 lead each), 4 iron (3leads each) and 1 bronze (9 leads each), we can get the silver at the cost of the successive trade we had to do if keep the old system:
5x lead to iron trade up: 5x500=2500 credits

  • 3x iron to bronze trade: 3x1000=3000 cred
  • 1x bronze to silver trade: 2000 credits
    = a total of 7500 credits.

Then you have a transparent system from the trade up system, but you save time in the trade.

But I don’t think this idea will get out of this thread, as I already explained it many times, and someone always post a new thread about it a’d I have to explain it again and again…
And the worst is that I am on my phone, and this freaking autocorrect give me headache.

Tldr:
They reworked the old system too far, they just had to upgrade it. I think the old system was good, but just made us loose too much time. There is a way to combine the 2 system, and it’s much more simple than create a all new system. It just need some ability to bypass some step of the old system (as explained here if you have some time to loose)

(SnakekillerX) #4

True, but that is what i meant about it being expensive. You would be able to up-tier by getting the bronze card off the shop, but thats just one ingredient, it would still be a fairly expensive fragment/credit dump to move from tier to tier, which each higher tier costing more than the previous.

Realistically people would probably have to use several weapon kits (assuming you are about to use them to lower the fragment/credit cost for up-tiering) in order to afford a cobalt craft. These kits could then be sold on the store page (as many people have already requested). Allowing people to still be able to drop money on the game to work towards the cards they want.

This is more of an end game feature for people to spend their excess fragments/credits towards a loadout card they want, rather than fighting with RNG forever.

(K1X455) #5

Consider my experience in crafting a Gold Phantom in the current system…

[list][]I had to save up to 167 lead cards (exclusively lead loadout cards) from ingame drops, 4x lead from SD’s downtime, and approximately 110+ from opening equipment cases. []Translate that into credits; translate it roughly into actual $$
[]I had to add 25kCredits to craft the gold
[]I didn’t get the expected loadout from the potential sets I choose to keep in case it gets drawn by RNG; it didn’t come with the skin I want; it came with 2 augments not complimentary to the role of RECON; it did came with the primary weapon I wanted
[*]I recycled the Gold card and felt a tremendous loss[/list]

Seriously, I’m just frustrated because I got less fragments for my gold and lost 25kCredits.

(The_N00Ba) #6

I do have to say deciding to only use lead cases to make your gold is all on you.

Just like in the trade up system you have the option to use the iron and higher drops to make your cards. Not doing so means making the card you want will take longer just like in the the trade up system.

167 lead cards is greater than the original 144 you needed in the trade up system.
The change in RNG for the higher rarity cards though does allow a player to get more higher rarity cards to help pay for the extra 23 leads.

If the player, however, does not use the higher rarities to make their cards and they pay for cases they effectively add an extra 23k to the cost above what they would have paid for in the trade up system.

add this extra 23k to the required 25k you have to pay to craft the card and it equals
48k
In the trade up system if you only used lead cards you would have to pay 52k in total trade up cost. Granted it would not have been that noticeable.
even with the extra cost 48k < 52k

The pain from not getting what you want is still the same in both system. It sucks.

even if you only include the 25k loss that is still less than the 52k you would have lost in the trade up system

you paid 2500 fragments to make the card and received 2150 fragments back. this is a 350 fragment loss. 350 equals about 24 leads or 24 cases if you prefer. This difference in cases is due to rounding. this loss of 24k plus the 25k (=49k) is still less than the original 52k

With the 2150 you receive back that equals about 144 leads which is about the same amount of leads the original gold cards in the trade up system equaled to.

You do actually technically “lose” 10 fragments

144* 15(lead fragments) = 2160

This is the only rarity I found that did this. Again due to rounding. and the cobalt gives you more fragments than before.

Even with all that math though nothing can remove the fact that the presentation of both systems is different. Some of the loss is more obvious in the crafting system than in the trade up system as mentioned by many many many people.

There just needs to be a better illusion I think. :slight_smile: