Yesterday i noticed i never got the other saxum or jugulus set mods beyond the common ones, and I quickly realized that's because the drop chances are absurdly low. I've long ago accepted there are some things i'm never going to get in this game despite my often rabid completionism. This will have to be one of them i suppose.
Today i also wondered how one would go about rebuilding the game to reduce content island syndrome. I had to give up though. It was just too much content to go through. Still, i had a few ideas if anyone is interested.
Well, one significant step would probably be to consolidate a lot of the "island-specific currencies". For example, Lua Thrax Prisms (to take a recent example) are only useful to buy Voruna parts, parts of her weapons, a captura scene and a few arcanes at a single merchant (as far as I know). There's a few different paths that could be taken to do this.
The most straightforward would be to have a singular island currency. But the issue here is that players that have accumulated plenty of extra over the years could simply buy their way into new inventory items and bling and completely ignore the new content. Moreover, players will hunt for the most efficient currency farm island and pile that up and ignore the other islands. There could be a time-lock; that a new currency stays independent for a while and then turns into the generic currency - but that doesn't close this hole. Similar with other gimmicks.
So the problem is that you (the developer) want players to be incentivized to play the new content at least enough to appreciate the work you put into it, and perhaps continue to play the new content after they farmed the rewards. One way I think might work well to deal with the range of island currencies is to use two things already present in Warframe - a process and a currency; that is, blueprints and endo.
Let's take Voruna, Conjunction Survival and Lua Thrax Prisms as the example. The play content consists of a quest, two nodes with a new mission type variant and the same two nodes in Steel Path. In terms of rewards, aside from an assortment of materials and other more generic rewards, there's a frame, two weapons and four arcanes. You can get these either via drops, or can slowly accumulate Lua Thrax Prisms and buy whatever you didn't get directly; the latter is good, as it cuts away the frustration at the tail-end of the grind.
Let's say that there's a counter on how many waves of Conjunction Survival you do (either 1:1 or some kind of ratio to the difficult of the wave). Once you've done the equivalent of 20 minutes, you get an inbox message from Yonta - "I've dissected the fascinating Thrax Prisms you've acquired on Lua and learned how to break them down... into endo, strangely enough" - that contains an infinite blueprint that takes an hour to break down 10 Lua Thrax Prisms into 1000 endo (or whatever ratio makes sense). So now you can take any excess Prisms and turn them into something more generally useful.
Next, once you've done the equivalent of 40 minutes, you get a similar message accompanying a blueprint that takes 24 hours to construct 10 Lua Thrax Prisms from 1100 endo (or some amount 'worse' than the reverse). So now you can, given enough time (and endo) make as many Lua Thrax Prisms as you need.
I just did a Steel Path Circulum 20-minute run and receive a bit over 60 Lua Thrax Prisms - so if I enjoy or am neutral on Conjunction Survival, I can buy a 50-prism weapon part with a bit under a half-hour of gameplay I don't find tedious. Alternatively, if I'm sick of it, I could use the blueprint each day for five days and get that same weapon part without feeling frustrated with the game. Or, of course, if it's content that is more frustrating than not solo and
nobody does it anymore.
So in this setup, endo acts as the go-between to, if it doesn't eliminate grind, at least allows your grind to be at whatever rock-face(s) you
enjoy most.
Years back I had a similar complaint about generic resources - that once you built the various weapons and frames, you had virtually no use for all the bits and bobs you picked up. You couldn't even sell a lot of them for credits, in fact. But then they introduced "Audrey the Third" and you suddenly had a sink for a number of them. Unfortunately, there's some limit to that, leaving only a trickle from new frames and occasional experimentation with new abilities; I think there should be an option for Helminth to produce, say, an ayatan sculpture by draining capacity. Or a small booster like what you can do daily at 30+.
Finding a way to tie together all the events and islands in
general a bit better I'm not confident about - especially with the quite ambitious "two ways to start playing" with Duviri content they're doing. It's at the point where it's easy for islands to slip out of mind and be completely forgotten about, so they need a spotlight to remind people.
Honestly, thinking about a few places where they
do use a spotlight. Arbitrations and Archon Hunts both have a setup where on any given iteration and for any given individual, a frame and one or three weapons are buffed in effectiveness. What if they did a similar trick with different content-islands and rewards? Let's say that today for you Conjunction Survival mission nodes get +100% affinity, credits, drop chance and amount, while for me it's Syndicate missions and for Bob it's the Sentient Anomaly in Veil Proxima. Perhaps it's a standard boost, or perhaps like with Rivens the boost % is based on the inverse of popularity.
So a reminder that a given island exists and some incentive to revisit it for a period of time. Again, doesn't really solve the issue of the islands being, well,
islands, but it helps some of the problems in the ocean around them.
(As an aside, I would also suggest taking the idea behind the Stratos emblem and make some similar cosmetic for each 'island' that has a unique mission variant - like what was done for Operation Scarlet Spear, or what happens with the Protovyre armor and syandana. That gives some ongoing 'progress' attached to the variant mission types.)
