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The general gist of grinding in The First Descendant is that you farm for materials and weapon/Descendant parts and then take them back to Anais to do some research. In turn, that research costs some Gold, but, most importantly, time.
You start off with short research times, like 10 minutes for some basic upgrades, but that gradually increases the more powerful items you want. Ultimately, one of the most powerful and valuable items in the game takes more than a full day to research, and that is after grinding for materials. Naturally, the community is not at all pleased with this.
It Takes More Than a Day to Research a Single Energy Activator
First off, to craft a single Energy Activator, you need to get the following materials:
- 55 Low-Carbon Activator
- 25 Conductive Metallic Foil
- 55 Heat Plasma Battery
- 72 Polyatomic Ion Particle
- 1 Energy Activator Blueprint
If that isn’t enough, when you get back to Albion and visit Magister Anais, the research time for the one Energy Activator is 30 hours. Yes, that is a whole day and six hours on top of that.
In one Reddit post, the community voices their frustration, agreeing that this should be something between 12 to 16 hours. Some users would be happy even with 24 hours, the reason being: “24 hours at the most. Being 30 hours puts you “off schedule” because you can’t just come back same time the next day, it had to be 6 hours…. where depending on when you might just need to sleep, so 1 1/4 days turns into two. It’s an aggressive sales tactic.” as KaidaStorm promptly explains.
The Community Agress That This is on Purpose
The consensus is that the 30-hour wait time is on purpose, to make you pay real money to speed up the process. Most agree that this is intentional so that you’d be enticed to spend some Caliber when you log in the next time.
User BaconKnight goes deeper, saying: “People don’t seem to realize, these “pain points” in the game are intentional. The developers aren’t dumb, they didn’t do this by accident. I guarantee you they spend countless hours with some very smart dudes with math and economics degrees figuring out what’s the optimal “pain point” to put in the game that isn’t so offputting to swear people off the game, but just irksome enough for them to be tempted to swipe. “
More players add to it, with comments like “The inconvenience is intentionally designed so they sell convenience” and “Has nobody wondered why the cheapest package of Caliber is just shy of being able to buy a Catalyst?”.
Of course, some players are not at all troubled by it, saying that you can focus on other things, play using other Descendants, and the like. But, being a F2P game, it is a sad reality that things like this exist. The developers have to make revenue somehow, but is it really necessary to play mind games with the players to force them to spend money? Hopefully, some middle ground will be found in the future.