Originally Posted by
FlyingV
This thread was inspired by those discussing the topic in the 11/14 update thread and suggesting its own discussion. I agree with the suggestion that it would be best that they were phased out. Shards may have some quaint tie-in with the story line, but they are something of a great disservice to the game overall and here are the reasons why:
1. Traditional grind/leveling is eliminated. When I was starting and quite resource poor, it seemed silly to "waste" gold and materials on leveling. Once I achieved 4* territory, characters that were not maxed were not even played. ALL leveling has been done artificially.
2. As a result of the artificial leveling, characters are not played. I have a good 90 4* maxed (or above) characters and I am confident that I have put NO serious play in at least 75% of them. 50% or more have been max-leveled to their current evo level without playing them at all. Consequently, I have missed out on the experience of learning their strengths and ideal parings. This is because natural levelling is an arduous process that makes no sense against the convenience of artificial leveling, which when presented with these shard rewards is an automatic must. Thus, this convenience has unintentionally gutted the game experience.
3. Store bonuses are ignored. If I am cramming shards down this e throats of my toons all day and only playing maxed chars to build others, why would I care about XP bonuses for sale? Remove shards and suddenly my Ironite gets a whole different priority shift should I want to cut the maxing of my light voidling by 3 days.
4. Removal of shards cleans the game up. Server resources needed to keep tabs on 1*-5* shards of each color as well as colored and clear 1*-3* evo shards are freed up. Newer players are less overwhelmed by the removal of all this candy crush perphery. This also removes another variable from being tweaked regarding intentional/unintentional bottlenecks and drop rate tweaks. I can't tell you how many threads I have seen cluttering the site ISO the fishing spot for 1* reds or 2* blues.
5. Shards compete with other badly-needed resources in the rewards chest. Usually we get 1-3 rewards, typically 2. We need runes, shards, evos (for both) talismans, souls, gold, ironite, and skill shards. That is a lot of shit to keep up with and when you only have so many hourglasses, you are only getting so many rewards. For every time we don't get a shard reward, we stand a better tali, soul or rune chance. Suddenly unintentional bottlenecks of these items gain a bit of automatic relaxation.
What to do with the no shards gap then (like LOL dungeons)?
Skill shards. Skill shards preserve the story line about Eddie's soul, blah blah, for campaign mode. There is also less unfairness when devs modify characters in which players have heavily invested such rare shards as there are now more ways to earn them and recover. Morover, there are many ways to structure this, depending on how simplified or complex devs want to make this to streamline/free up resources or preserve game heritage.
Simple: fragments. Skill frags get a resource window above next to gold, SoT and ironite. 100, 500, 1,000 (whatever) frags = a skill shard. LOL dungeons drop frags, and if necessary, gold and other filler (maybe yellow drops Gold, purple drops ironite, color-coordinated rare souls, etc.)
Preservationist: make shards as we have them today soul frags... red, yellow, blue, etc. 100 (or whatever) of each color is needed to form a skill shard. Evo shards are needed to interface the shard to a character, so say, six 1* red, three 2* red, and two 3* red would be needed to fuse a skill shard to a warrior, whereas the same numbers of super rare clear evos allow the shard to be fused to ANY character. 5000 trooper badges now earns 1 skill shard and the clear evos to fuse with any character.