This mainframe thing is OK (not really) for single toon, but it's really aggravating if you want to play an alt from time to time. I have to put in 7 marks for 1 month rent and 28 total for all the enhancements. Not mention to in game cash for in game electricity. Can you change it to for the whole account rather than just one toon? It's so alt-unfriendly and game-wise it literally sucks.
...having multiple toons on multiple timers, all running out at different times in the middle of raids. Ouch. And you can't even pre-buy the stats either until they run out--always in the middle of something. It needs to be streamlined and the timers either removed, or made to be able to buy them early. I prefer timers removed. I made a post about this and the cluttered secretarial-work no-play zone of it, but we'll see. I don't mind it as a whole, but not as a pachinko machine I need to keep running to and flipping buttons because it stopped me from having more.
For an alt, it means running 1 Omni raid and 1 Omni alert every 2 months to get the marks you need. The cash to charge the batteries can be made from selling 1 plan (which could be transferred through the shared bank), or 1 piece of gear you can collect just doing almost any piece of content. No offense, but if your alt is not running even 28 marks worth of content a month, why do you care if they are fully equipped up or not? I'd also guess they are not fully equipped in other ways like their gear(Armor) and augments/artifacts/allies. None of that stuff is required for old content BTW...all of which would pay the marks you'd need. Not that it couldn't be changed, but it's a pretty inconsequential problem with several options for overcoming it. Now, I will go with what beardrive said about not being able to re-up without it expiring. It would be nice to have the option to reup the 'boost' in the last 3 or 4 days, like you can re-up the batteries in the last 50%.
Out of all the things that are ult unfriendly this is at the bottom of the barrel. If you are getting these perks for your alts than it means you’re probably trying to run something with them. You would literally have to go out of your way to not run anything to not have enough marks to unlock these. Also if you have the orcl ally than you shouldn’t be spending on repairs which means you’ll have money for the gen perks. If you don’t have orcl than what are you using? If you have higher quality allies than it means you are running more things which again means you have more stuff to sell. If you are barely running anything than why not get orcl or why even unlock those perks?
The mainframe and its "renting" is really just a system that was initially designed to annoy the premium players that had access to it when they had a 2k cash cap. Nowadays it's just dated and all-around inconvenient when we have to re-purchase that third tier of upgrades with source marks, without the ability to do it preemptively like the batteries. The rent part of the system should have been ditched when the devs finally made it accessible to everyone, but ever since seeing ally Cyborg's passive requirements, it just makes me think this nuisance will stay forever now that devs have an excuse to keep it in "synergy" with certain allies.
Five end game bounties. Each give 8 source marks a week. So just doing the bounties gives you 40 source marks a week multiply that by 8 weeks (2 months) that is 320 source marks. Doing nothing but a quick bounty. (Phase 1 in both maps typically has more people doing them) To completely charge a battery from 0 is 4500$ in game cash. A green shoulder gear gets you 6615$ from the soda vendor. Also it's called planning. I have 6 toons. I left them all waiting and on the first I logged in at night and paid all their bases to have all have the same rent date and the battery you only have to pay about every 15 days before they lose some efficiency, 1 month to reset. It's not that difficult.
I don't use henchmen or sidekicks so I don't pay for those boosts. I got my 3 toons synched up so their boosts expire on the same day.
Getting everything on the same day is SOOOOO much better. Worth running with a 2 ball drop or janky white mods for a few weeks to let them sync up IMHO. I run with people that are un-synced and it's so much more of a hassle to basically treat each item as a separate trip. Might be the OP's main issue. If you have them synced (even if using henchmen and sidekicks) it's 12 visits a year, 6 of which you need to up both batteries and boosts, the other 6 only batteries. If done separately it can be upwards of 72 trips a year.
While I agree that it could be better, I don't really have a problem managing all of my toons as made so that they all expire on the same day and I redo them all back to back once they expire. But it would be great if it was was improved, or simply just allow us to unlock them permanently for like 100 source marks each.
