Most of the problems with the current progression and weapons prices result from the removal of Auraxium. Auraxium was never on live, but in the beta, it was a separate resource used to unlock weapons earned in many similar ways to certs. It was removed late in the beta due to farming and complexity issues. Since both Auraxium and certs were used to unlock permanent things, it was decided to join them together. Cert gains were increased by 4x to compensate. At the very end of the beta, cert gain rates were dropped by 1/2 directly through gain rates, and possibly more indirectly through changes to the capture system. The concern was that players were progressing through content too quickly and unlocks were supposed to take "a long while". The reason I say possibly is because cert gain rates are highly unstable across players at best. Part of the reason for this progression explosion was that resources that were previously only spendable on weapons were now spendable on skills, and vice versa. By combining them into a common pool, the gains were tied to each other, and skill progression was indirectly tied to weapon prices. Now SOE can't increase cert gains without lowering the value of their weapons. Discussion with people on the forums and off the forums convinces me that the current "slow max" system of player skills possesses objectively fewer choices and limits the player more than a fast-cap respec system. Implementing such a system would be a major overhaul that I don't think SOE has the time or energy to do right now. With weapons and skills tied to the same system it will never be an option. Worse, even if SOE did want to fiddle with player skill gains, they CAN'T because its tied to weapon systems. If they ever want to mess with the skill system at all, they should probably re-implement Auraxium as a resource.
I get the feeling from playing this game that a lot of different people were trying to pull this game into a lot of different directions and what we've ended up with on the live servers is whatever survived the political infighting. My problem with only being able to unlock things with certs is that they are hard to come by, and you may buy something you regret. I now realize that I really have no use for 200 extra ammo, since it takes up the SAME slot on my suit as 25% health boost. Wow, ok, so 200 certs down the drain.
I get the same feeling. I just make my observations. Again, slow-max punishes experimentation by both being slow, and by not having a respec option. I was in your shoes during the beta which bummed me out pretty hard.
The problem with Auraxium was that it allowed you to progress in all facets of the game simultaneously. SOE wanted to make you choose between a fancy new gun or another grenade, or more ammo, or more armor... etc. It extends the life of the game (in theory), and simplifies the currency system.
It got removed when it was used as the sol currecny for aquiring weapons instead of certs for upgrads. Sinc Arax was resource base many people would just AFK in the warpgate to get enough Arx to buy the weapon they want. All that did was jam up server ques (and it would hurt $tation Ca$h sales as well) Instead of fixing it so that upgrades or power implants were the only things that used Araxium they just removed it all together with the power implants as well. (not to say that the power implants were bad but they do not compare to a new weapon) So fix it? NAh just throw it away.
Yes, it does put guns and skills in the same system and simplifies currency. I mentioned this. The "progress in all facets of the game" is a flawed argument because current certs allow this even more than Auraxium does. What actually reduced players ability to progress in all facets of the game was the high gain rate of certs and auraxium during beta. Cutting the gain rate on progression resources is what extends the "play time" of the game, again, at the cost of player enjoyment. This is tangential to the point though. Because guns and skills are in the same system it actually complicates what you can do with skills dev-side because modifying your skills and/or skill gain rate impacts the value of your guns. This adds another messy behavior to balance tweaks on skills and adding new skills to the game, and balancing is a messy enough process already. I'm aware that auraxium gain mechanics incentivizing idling was one of the reasons it was removed, but either modifications to the original mechanics or a new set entirely could be used to make idling pointless. Its concievable that the auraxium system wasn't reliably controllable dev-side due to the way it was implemented which is not something you want competing with your income. The primary thrust of my post is that weapons and skills should have separate currencies, maybe with an extremely inefficient conversion rate for people that really want one or the other in the short term. It just makes more sense to have them disjoint, even if its a little more complicated player-side. Player skills can then be treated separately from sweapons for rate of gain, auraxium boost implants can be implemented to be a more desireable version of xp boosts for weapon junkies, and the entire Station Cash pricing/auraxium gain rate would be independent of how player skills progress. As far as combat implants go, I never understood why they weren't purchased with infantry/air/mech resources. Those are the resources for expendables.
