Are Mission Architect Tickets Any Good?

[BlackSpectre]

I just discovered that Incarnate Threads can be converted into Mission Architect Tickets. However, looking over what can be purchased with Tickets has me a bit bewildered. Is it worth converting Threads into Tickets?

[Ukase]

Short answer: No, not worth it. 

Explanation: 

So, from an influence generation perspective, I see the exchange rate and wonder who's cocaine habit is this supporting. 

Just ballpark because it's not really my thing to sell super insps, but use them - occasionally, a super team yellow/red will go for 2M. But that's usually one buyer who's fighting a gm in an open instance or something that needs it in that moment. Penny-wise, pound-foolish kind of transaction if you ask me. Maybe there was a badge involved. 

Anyway, about the most I ever would expect from a super insp that I pay 30 threads for is 1M for the let's get paid today price, as opposed to - this character can just sit here next to Luna until this team red sells for 2M+. 
So..how many AE tickets do I get for 30 threads? 30 tickets. 

250 tickets to get 1 common IO recipe at level 50. Basically, about 8M inf opportunity cost for a common IO frequently bought instantly at 300k or less that YOU have to craft and pay a crafting fee and salvage for. 

75 tickets for a level 50 SO in your origin. So, that's about 2.5M opportunity cost for an SO that you can get certainly for less than 50k at any store. (I haven't used an SO at level 50 on any character ...maybe when HC first opened? I doubt even then. Can't recall. Doesn't matter. The discrepancy is obvious. 

80 tickets for a specific uncommon salvage. One that even when the marketers are up to their tricks I can get it for 10K, at the most 100k, this would be an opportunity cost of over 2.5M

8 tickets for a random common salvage. The math is a little harder, but Luna has super insps that go for 10 threads. And a super red could go now, this instant for some lame price like 222,222. Who among us would pay 111,111, half that price for a common salvage that may or may not be the one you want? Nobody, I hope. 

That leaves two categories remaining. 
Recipe rolls: Bronze, Silver and Gold. 
Now, I've done these before. This might be something a farmer would do if they were full on salvage with very few recipes, so they do about 5 asteroids, and pop upstairs for some random reward recipes. 
Bronze are 60 to 75 tickets. So...about 2-2.5M opportunity cost for one recipe that you have to craft and generate salvage for. Now, in the 10-14 range, which a level 50 character can choose - some of those are convertible into a decent IO. But, optimally, I can't see making much more than 4M, maybe 5 in a high demand period of the week for something like a -res Achilles Heel. Crafting costs and salvage are cheap; but even so it's a random roll, and I'd still have to burn at least 3 converters to get the proc, because the proc isn't in the bronze roll pool. So, I think at best, this is a very small profit, but more than likely a push, or a loss. 

The silver class goes from 450-600. I'm not even going to do math here. I just wouldn't do it. It would be one thing if we could do ticket run on an Atta cave map and not hit the ticket cap in 2-4 minutes when there's still 30 minutes of map left. But since we can only earn, I think it's like 800 tickets per map. Maybe 750.  Some small figure. 
So, you'd have to do about 20 asteroids to make even popping upstairs worth your time. And - you'd have to buy the salvage for the recipes if you intended to craft them. 

The gold class recipes are 3000-4000 tickets. Do I need to mention how insane this would be to even consider this? 

There is yet one category left. The payoff badge for 1000 tickets, or in this discussion 1000 threads. If you're t-4'd, and you want that badge, you might pay it. But, anecdotally, since there are other badges to earn in AE, it's not a big leap to just run a couple of maps to get those tickets and use them, rather than threads. The reason why is it takes 8 minutes maybe, depending on how fast you're moving to earn 1000 tickets. 1000 threads takes multiple vet levels, and that's with the 120 thread dump in the earlier vet levels. 

So yeah, AE tickets are a loser's game. You would have to be a bit of a gambler to go with the bronze rolls, and hope you're lucky. 
I can see if you see a ton of the super insps being sold for scratch might motivate a few folks to go for bronze rolls. But me...nah. 

Whomever put this option in either put no thought into it at all, or was just hoping people sucked at math or weren't paying attention. It makes no sense to me why the exchange rate is so bad. But, in order to make the rate good - they'd have to adjust the number of tickets for the bronze roll, or it would be too good, I think. But that's just conjecture on my part. 

Opinions will vary. 
 

[mistagoat]

Ukase sums it up nicely, not worth it. Back on live I'd use them for rare salvage once in a while but it's way easier and cheaper to just buy them on the AH now.

[Darmian]

27 minutes ago, mistagoat said:

Ukase sums it up nicely, not worth it. Back on live I'd use them for rare salvage once in a while but it's way easier and cheaper to just buy them on the AH now.

Totally off point but I've taken to referring to the 2004-2012 period as Retail rather than Live, since with the licence we effectively ARE Live now.  Your mileage may vary!

[mistagoat]

36 minutes ago, Darmian said:

Totally off point but I've taken to referring to the 2004-2012 period as Retail rather than Live, since with the licence we effectively ARE Live now.  Your mileage may vary!

Fair point! I hadn't really thought about it like that but you're 100% correct!

[BlackSpectre]

8 hours ago, Ukase said:

Short answer: No, not worth it. 

So, from an influence generation perspective, I see the exchange rate and wonder who's cocaine habit is this supporting. 

Whomever put this option in either put no thought into it at all, or was just hoping people sucked at math or weren't paying attention. It makes no sense to me why the exchange rate is so bad. 

Right???!!!  So I'm not crazy... it's the Ticket system that's crazy!

 

Too bad there isn't a Ticket to Incarnate Thread converter, but honestly I wish there was something better I could spend Incarnate Threads on than super inspirations. So really, an overhaul of the Ticket reward system would be what I prefer. At this point, with as much market data and AE mission completion data as we have now, it seems almost necessary. 

 

Thanks @Ukase (and others) for confirming what made my head go spinning yesterday. I just couldn't believe what I was seeing and wondered if I was missing something? Guess not! LOL

[srmalloy]

17 hours ago, BlackSpectre said:

Too bad there isn't a Ticket to Incarnate Thread converter

Just in terms of game lore, just how much increased connection to the Well are you going to get from crawling into your electronic navel, no matter how many virtual opponents you destroy? Going the other way, though, I can see Dr. Aeon coming up with a way to drain off bits of the unrealized connection to the Well from a character and pay them off in carnival trash (tickets), laughing maniacally all the way to whatever device he's working on to use them. 

[ZamuelNow]

On 11/5/2025 at 4:25 AM, BlackSpectre said:

Is it worth converting Threads into Tickets?

 

As someone who regularly plays AE, I buy uncommon and rare salvage with tickets at times.  But even as someone who does use tickets I'd absolutely never convert incarnate threads to tickets.

[lemming]

I suspect that exchange rate was based on how the market was thought of back then.

 

As an aside, super inspirations have steadily gotten cheaper on the market.   You can still get 500k often enough, but the market is saturated enough to make it not reliable.

[Hedgefund]

The thread to ticket exchange rate was a joke on day 1, which was not terribly long ago so the rates then were quite similar to now.  I'm of the mind this was implemented to have a response to "we should have something to do with our leftover threads besides super insps".  So now we have AE tix.

[Yomo Kimyata]

Way back in the beginning, many thousands of years ago before converters, AE tickets were a good way to make inf through random recipes.  That was back when a Steadfast Protection really protected you.  Steadfastly.