Zard. If it makes you happy and puts an end to this. Let me say it straight: you are a low skill, terrible player. I ignored your feedback and attacked you and all the other top players who I also believe are also low skill and greedy, etc.
Yay. End of thread. I have nothing more worthwhile to add to this thread.
All I want is to have a discussion about an idea that you had without being insulted.
Now, would you elaborate further on it? You said that you didn’t elaborate fully. And while you are right that most of the time ingredient farming as it is can be boring, and you would rather have a way to have fun with it, you also have to take early game progression into account. Any ideas on what else you would do, such that you could make the ingredient progression more fun, and still keep it at the same rate? As well as have the same exp scaling?
I respect your opinion, and I apologize for the initial post I made. It wasn’t well thought out, and you are right, I was having a bad day.
What if they made last week’s SC Battle the battle you have to go through for ingredients? Perhaps not the highest level but maybe the first 3 or 4? And then with each new SCB the previous one gets moved to the silver mine boss battle or something like that. It would also increase the rewards for figuring out the SCB successfully.
The only reason I lean towards it helping earlier ranks was because one of your points was the amount of tickets limiting what you can get, which kinda solves itself at higher ranks.
Also you don’t need to grind the levels anymore since the max cost was put to lvl 100, by the time you finish the story you’ll basically be there already.
Like I agree the current system is pretty boring but then so is farming for anything in literally any game. As much as I’d love to make this farm less dull it just fastracks those early levels imo
That’s why I was wondering if there is some way to make the grind more interesting, while still retaining the same rate.
Apology accepted Zard.
Ok. So let me re-write my proposal with all the feedback received thus far. It won’t address everything. But it’s better than my initial proposal as I add others feedback in.
Alright, the biggest concern is the removal of tickets and speeding up of early game:
Currently, you need tickets in addition to keys to attempt a mission. The real limiter here is tickets and not keys as the key session lasts 1 hour. More than enough time to burn all you tickets twice over if not more.
The ticket requirement is more or less there so P2W players can throw their gems at ticket refills. While, the key limit is to prevent or reduce overspending.
Now everyone has a clearer idea of why each are in place. Let me address the removal of tickets issue.
To keep the P2W players happy, they will be able to refill their keys. But they can only refill them using a gem once every hour. Therefore, early P2W players get a better deal, they get 3 goes per gem instead of maybe 1 or 2. Sure the devs won’t be getting as much as the old ticket setup. But I believe it’s a good balance and the right thing to do, to limit the key refill to once per hour.
The keys will refresh one at a time at the rate of 6 hours instead of the current 12. This is so F2P players don’t get hung up on ingredients and I believe will be comparable to the current ticket system. Considering that most people will use the rank up trick to have 2 runs at the mission they chose per key.
The downside is obvious. We will be able to spend the tickets on other things and not to mention, we no longer need to wait for tickets to return in order to maximise the number of attempts at an ingredient mission. This will obviously speed up the early game. The real question is, how much will this speed up the early game? As someone who has just recently gone through it. I can say, not much. I rarely grinded in the missions cos I didn’t need to, I was able to get most of what I needed from playing the stories, events, etc. And probably the most overlooked aspect is that early gamers have very low ticket capacity. They get refilled in an hour or so. The real limiter when I needed the ingredients wasn’t the tickets or keys. But rather getting the event ingredients.
Also, keep in mind that players can always refill their tickets, so an overflow of ingredients is an invalid argument.
The next point is, players can stock up during the ticket refresh time. I see this as a good thing. It gives players something else to do while they wait for their tickets to return. And when they are ready to use the ingredients, they can do so without having to make special time for it. (When you take time out to do something, it’s a chore. But if you do something else while waiting for another thing. It’s no longer a chore, you’re killing time - unrelated, but this is why most taxi drivers love to talk and drive). This makes the game feel less draining and keeps people interested.
The key point here is, the focus should be on the stories and events, not the basic ingredients grind.
Hopefully that addresses the concerns with removing the tickets.
Now the mechanics of the new basic ingredients grind:
1 key = 1 entry.
Each entry allows a player to put their team against say 40 monsters. Within every 8 monsters is an ingredient monster (there can be more, but at least one will appear). Once the ingredient is defeated, you earn that ingredient at the end of the battle regardless of whether you defeat the full 40 monsters or lose. Obviously, there will be a bonus for defeating all 40 monsters.
However, as many have said, the entire game does not have such a base foundation to use to create such gameplay. So an alternative is to use the level approach found in the first ones stories.
1 key = 1 run.
A run does not have a time limit. You can play level 1 then comeback and play level 2 several days later. To end a run, tap the end run button. In which, the level will reset back level 1. In order to start a run, you will need to tap the start run button and that will cost 1 key.
The rewards and challenges will be the same as per the original wave approach. Each level is harder than the previous, but better rewards. Obviously, won’t be as hard as SCB (unless we are getting the same rewards). With the exception you need to win the challenge in order to recieve the ingredients.
Thanks for bringing this back around to the original topic, let’s do it right this time!
Reading about how it would actually work it sounds interesting… facing progressively hard battles with it costing a key to reset back to level 1. That sounds like it would be fun but it might ultimately turn into a grind as the battles will be practically the same each time. You could randomise the monsters which come but that might simply remove the difficulty element of it. Can you give some more thoughts on that?
I was thinking that perhaps they could use SCB teams from the long past and update them once a month. There would be 4 stages, the first being an easy fight (as they currently are) then the later stages being the expert, master and extreme of an old SCB. This would require some effort from the Devs to update them each month though.
However, I still have a few pressing concerns about the whole idea:
Farming is never really a “fun” part of any game so are the ingredient missions really that bad that they need changing? As you said yourself, they don’t take up much of your time/tickets anyway.
I am unconvinced about the removal of tickets for the entry. You still haven’t really explained why tickets shouldn’t be needed other than making early-game players free to use their tickets on other stuff, which is basically just asking for a buff. I mean if they weren’t taking up a large proportion of your tickets then why was this a problem which needed changing? Additionally, keys restocking every 6 hours is insane! This was recently changed from 24hrs to 12hrs and if ticket entry is removed the key restock rate should probably be slowed back to 24hrs rather than sped up!
I like the current system where you have to use tickets for all the main parts of the game and you can choose whether you spread them out or focus on one particular thing (e.g. youth fruit) and farm that particular thing incredibly fast. With ingredients, silver and youth fruit instead working on their own key restocking I feel like that would get balanced to assume we’re playing them a certain amount each week and if we ever need something in a rush it will be harder. This basically takes away the control from the player so while it may be a buff overall it’s a negative for the game design in my opinion.
There’s a saying, just because it’s always been that way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way. I’ll let you map that to point 1).
The reason why tickets has to go is because the ticket thing would not work with how the new key works.
Previously keys opened the doors for an hour. Players can attempt a mission as many times as they like, therefore tickets were needed to prevent over farming and is another way for players to burn their tickets, thus another way to use gems.
With the new proposal, keys either reset the the mission or provide a one-time entry. So there is no need for the extra tickets road block to prevent over farming. And because the key is a one-time thing. It means players can only attempt the mission once.
It might be a bit hard to visualise, but with the old approach we were able to attempt the missions a great number of times per key - 7+ even without spending any gems. So when you look at it from this perspective, a 6hr refresh time is reasonable.
Obviously there’re other things to consider such as the amount of rewards from the levels, how hard the levels are and finally, if the timing is indeed too short, can always increase it back to 12. But I’m pretty sure 6 is the better number based on what I’ve described.
As to point three, with the new approach, players still choose which missions they do. They have 6 keys, 3 silver, 3 gold, allowing them to choose the mission to reset. And they get a key back every 6 hours. So the wait is not too long.
I’ll say one more time, but I ingredient missions are well balanced the way they are. The only problem I think for many players are the catch rate odds.
Bottle, pixie are ok, easy to get. As well as bronzmouth and silvermouth. But the genie, goldmouth, harps and pyramid are stupidly annoying to grind.
First harps and genie catch rate should be increased to at least 50 %, you need a crap ton of them and the 43% just isn’t fair.
Pyramids are way to random, I get ton of geo mid and but 0 cryptamid and few aqua/aeromid. The spawn rate should be tweak so the pyramid you own the most is the least likely to appear.
Jeez this thread is turning into a short novel, I’m only at the third paragraph
If anyone want to write a summary I’d appreciate it lol
In regards to ingredients I will say that we need more access to a quantity of them. In particular omegamids since they are becoming exchanged for crypts some. Plus a good number of newer mons seem to take 2 of them. I’d add the omega as a low drop rate along with crypt if possible in honesty. The Blitz being one of them. (Vorabook is the other main one… but to a much lesser degree).
I think the early game and ingredients are balanced out fine, players who just start out need to adapt to the game and learn about wich monsters they really want and need to be UE’D
While later players still need to work for their New mons to get UE. Im fine with the ticket system and keys system as is, the missions are boring granted they are as such for a reason 
i dont think any thing needs a change except maybe the capture rate of a cpl ingridients like the harps -_- but that all, nothing else is wrong with it IMHO
After having to go through the ingredients grind for a few new mons. I realised. What I really wanted changed wasn’t the ticket/key system (it was never my focus, but a required element of the wave approach). What I really wanted is to reduce the meaningless grind.
I understand that, there is always going to be some grinding involved. However, I believe there is a better way to lessen the grind for everyone. Therefore, I reflected upon what I posted and put some more thought into what everyone else has said and come up with the following conclusions:
Taking the 3 points above into account, I have a new suggestion:
Inside each ingredient area, there will be 3 levels to choose from, each level will cost different number of tickets and the amount of ingredients rewards is comparable to the number of tickets spent, along with XP earned.
E.g. Take the youthful fruits scenario:
This way, for higher ranked players, instead of just hitting repeat for 6 times, they just do the Level 3 challenge once.
This will have minimal effect on the early game as players won’t have the ticket capacity to do the higher levels and likewise, the extra 1 TP for mid levels won’t affect them much. But instead I see it as an added bonus to ranking up.
As to the appearance and capture rate. I also agree with others. I believe there needs to be some tweaking, but that is another totally different can of worms to open and much more harder to solve. Will need to understand all the rates, etc. I’ll leave this to someone else.
I love that suggestion. It’s good to know the key/ticket system wasn’t a major concern of yours, especially considering I think it’s the most touchy topic for other people here. I think what we were all trying to achieve here was the following:
Reduce the irritating grinding of doing the same mission over and over once you’ve opened it (e.g. silver / youth fruit can be like this with their 15 ticket cost entry)
Making the fights more interesting
The latter is a lot harder to do, and that’s where our ideas were getting complicated. I’m not sure what simple ideas we could have which would not take too much effort from the Devs to design… it’s probably not possible. However, your idea is a very simple way to improve on (1) that I do believe would benefit people in the late-game. It’s actually quite similar to the first idea I suggested here but compressed from 15 levels of difficulty to 3 (I’ve already said that 15 was a mistake at my time of writing lol) 
The only tweak I’d make to your idea is that I think the harder levels should give very slightly more rewards for the tickets required. I’m not talking much more, just something like level 2 gives +10% and level 3 gives +20%. That would encourage people to go do the harder difficulties if they can and make ingredients and stuff just a little easier to farm in the late-game (where it doesn’t really matter, just a nice bonus for them as you usually get in games with this sort of thing). Also, to clarify the idea I think for the specifics you’d agree that the faces, harps/lamps and pyramids only need 2 difficulties while the others have 3 difficulties? I suggest that because the pyramid and harp/lamp missions already cost lots of tickets and the faces have 3 different missions already.
I’m not sure how strongly I feel about this issue but it certainly wouldn’t take much effort from the Devs to make. Just a few more battles to design and implement. It won’t give them a direct gain but it’s a small improvement to the core content of the game I think they could appreciate is worth the time.
Not gonna lie I see absolutely no reason why this can’t or shouldn’t happen. It’s easy to implement and has no negative effects that I can think of.
Plus it gives more of an incentive to actually improve rather than just grind out, assuming the ticket/reward ratio makes it worth it
Just realised I got the rewards slightly off.
Level 2 should have 2 super de-aging fruits. Likewise, Level 3 should have 4.
I agree, the rewards need to be better than what I’ve outlined. As players who do level 1 of dungeon-based missions, you get more chances to pick up more side goods.
I don’t know what the max ticket limit is. If it’s over 120, it’s doable to have 3 levels for those high ticket missions too. And maybe give them some extra bonus such as higher chance to encounter cryptomids, for spending all that time required to reach such a high rank.
This new idea i agree with much more then the original one, this has enough potential for the devs to at least think about for the near future,
Max tickets is 138 I believe. It goes up by +1 every other level after hero rank 100 I think. I’m hero rank 180 with 128 tickets. I think 60 tickets for the highest entry cost on anything is the most necessary. 120 tickets take 12 hours to come back which works out nicely.
The every other level starts at rank 86 if I remember correctly. I’m happy either way. Be a while before I get to 120 tickets. 