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I realize this a fan run subreddit, but in the off chance someone with any connection reads and agrees with this, I would like to go into details on the flaws of the current Echo System, as well as one way to potentially fix it.
The catalyst for this is the recent update which just cranked up the tedium of echo collecting to a whole new level. As now we can only hold up to 300, there is no lock or favorite system, and you have to go through and sell them 1 by 1. The first time you sell everything it might not seem so bad, but keep in mind, depending on how often you play, this will be a regular activity you HAVE to do. Maybe once a week, or a month you'll have to go through every single echo you have, and meticulously sell the correct ones. This will only further be compounded with each new content update adding more echoes to the pool.
Clearly all this update did was kick the can down the road, instead of doing anything to future-proof the system. This is a terrible thing for both the Devs and Players in the long run, and quite possibly will lead to people not wanting to play.
For a live service it's important to try and cut down on bloat in areas where you can, so the playerbase can spend the majority of their time in the most enjoyable sections of the game. So how do we fix this echo system, cut down on inventory management, optimize the amount of information tracked on the back end for the dev's, and keep players engaged on the grinding aspect?
One way to go about this is to condense every echo of a specific enemy into a single entity. What does this mean exactly? Let's take the Goblin Hunter Echo as an example. If you kill a bunch of Goblin Hunters, over time with the current system you would stockpile a bunch of their echoes of varying rarities. What I want to do is condense these dozens of inventory filling echoes into one single echo. With my proposed change, the first time you kill a Goblin Hunter you would automatically get a white echo. With repeated kills increasing the rarity at a certain threshold, without ever giving you duplicates.
These threshold are subject to change, but the general idea is it should be different based on normal enemies and bosses. Giving players a reason to actively hunt down and grind certain things.
Normal Enemies: White: 1 Kill / Green: 50 kills / Blue: 200 Kills / Purple: 500 Kills
Boss Enemies: White: 1 Kill / Green: 10 Kills / Blue: 50 Kills / Purple: 100
Then to upgrade their levels, it can simply use the preexisting currency of Memory Dust. This way we don't need to bloat the menus with an additional currency, which is a problem a lot of MMO's, and live services run into after several years. They can end up with dozens of currencies, and systems which just push new players away out of confusion.
One potential issue this system might run into is the inability to equip duplicates, or at least use the same echo across multiple characters/weapons/builds. The simple fix for this is letting the player equip the same Echo on as many things as they want, BUT for each of the same echo equipped on your CURRENT loadout, the capacity cost increases by a % for all copies of that same Echo. The current loadout referring to the active Hero, Weapon, and Accessories. If the capacity cost ever exceeds the max, the game won't allow you to confirm the change.
This whole system will give players things to target farm in a grind game. It also massively cleans up the Echo inventory, gets rid of a lot of future inventory management, and keeps the amount of information stored on the back end to a minimum. It's important to do a proactive fix now, instead of a year down the road when there are too many enemies and echoes to keep track of, and players are too invested into the system.
If this change were to be made, to make it up to players playing, I would suggest giving them the echo of each enemy based on their current highest rarity owned. Then converting the new Echo currency into Memory dust based on some kind of ratio. I think in the long run this would be beneficial to everyone.
If anyone actually made it to the bottom of this wall of text, what do you think of this change? Would you hate it, are you happy with the current system, or do you have an idea of your own?
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