Who The Hell Wants Only 1000 Credits Anyway?

The other day, I was watching Region chat scroll by when someone made a commend, asking if they could trade for a Continuity mod. I checked my profile and lo and behold, they were at Mastery Rank 6. I felt compelled to give them one of my Continuity mods for free, since I struggled for a long time without one. So I sent him a private message, invited him to my clan’s dojo and initiated a trade.

Unfortunately, the guy didn’t have enough credits. You see, every trade has a trade tax applied to it, and every trade costs credits. This really is just a silly credit sink and something to stop people mass-trading between alt accounts. Occasionally, some poor bastard like this Continuity-less fellow would get caught up in it and realise he needed 7k more credits to get his mod. But I wasn’t going to let this guy go home without a Continuity mod. I couldn’t allow it.

So I grabbed my Zenistar, jumped into navigation and took the guy to Seimeni, the Dark Sector Defense on Ceres where I used to farm for credits back when I was a noob and before the Index was a thing. Couldn’t have done the Index anyway since you need at least 35k credits minimum to do the lowest mission there.

After five sets of five waves (and one Shadow Stalker attack), the guy now had 127k credits (because I can’t leave a guy potless) and we headed back to the clan dojo to trade. I gave him a ton of suggestions and also gave him an Ignis Wraith blueprint and an Animal Instinct mod, which would give him enemy radar and highlight loot on the minimap. The guy was super thankful for my help and presumably ran off into the sunset with his Octavia and his new +30% duration.

But I wouldn’t have had to drag this poor fellow to Seimeni to get him all those credits if every other mission wasn’t so tight when it came to credit rewards. The guy was up to Uranus on the star chart (about half way through) and had been farming Sargus Ruk trying to get that damn Continuity, but he still had no credits. Most missions give you a very small number of credits. Alright, it’s understandable that E Prime, the very first mission in the solar system, only gives you 1000 credits, but it’s meant for brand new players who literally only have MK1 weapons. By the time you get to MR2 or MR3, you’ll start realising that you need a lot of credits.

It doesn’t get better with new content though. The Kuva Fortress, the newest ‘planet’, still gives stupidly small amounts despite being one of the hardest areas in the game. The Plains of Eidolon are fucking tight as fuck, giving you 1000-5000 credit packs for completing lower tier bounties, some of which might take ten minutes to complete if you get unlucky with the random missions.

But the problem is, credits only serve as yet another barricade for new players. On top of the lack of decent mods, the lack of endo to level up mods, the lack of resources to build things, the lack of slots to hold new weapons and Warframes and the lack of platinum to buy more slots, do we really need to reward new players with insultingly small amounts of credits? Really, it’s almost cruel for a newbie with their Excalibur or Volt or Mag to have to struggle through 5 waves of defense or a tedious Excavation, only to be rewarded with 1-2000 credits.

I’m not saying make every mission reward 20k credits. I’m just suggesting that we give normal missions larger rewards, so new players can build up a bit of money in their banks before spending it on weapons and weapon blueprints, and so they’re not reliant on early level credit farms like Seimeni.

Maybe then people will play normal missions more, rather than spending all their time in Dark Sectors…