If you want to farm rads you can do basically 4 things.

1. As always you farm Vana. D27-28 boxs will have at least a few rads. My most rads in a single Vana is 39 piece, but i saw 42 once in my party. Good old FSC is still the best place to grind. Crowns, heat, rarities, everythin in one place ;)

2. Dreams and Nightmares mission is supposed to be a bit faster ( and a bit harder ) than Vana regarding of rad farm . You get rads only at the 28th depth tho, aka lootlevel :) If for whatever reason you are actually short of eternal orbs (highly unlikely), it is also supposedly the best place to search. However given the 25th and 26th depth are not fix levels, can be a bit longer than expected. Also this mission is not good for crown and heat farm. So basically only grind this if you need rads and/or eternals exclusively. Altho' i would not recommend to run this mission just for the sake of eternal orbs.

3. You go to arcade and find a D28 arena. Its actually not that efficient, but probably the most fun way :) You can also try to find a D27 arena, but 28 is better.

4. Do a Shadow Lair. Darkfire Vana gives loads of rads . Averaging around 60-90 pieces. Of course you need an SL Key, so it is a bit expensive ( with full party 400-450 E ) , and probably the longest and hardest of the 4 listed way. But it is also fun ^^

Of course you need to play on elite difficulty always if you want to find rarities (higher chance).

What not to do : do not expect rads at D25 and D26. Yes, there is a chance of rad drop in those levels, but its actually not a very big one. :)

People tend to play OCH on normal difficulty. Do you play it on normal too, or elite? If normal : even last floor has small chance to drop rads. If elite: i'd call it bad luck. In any case: OCH is not the place to farm rads, thats for sure.

Oh, alright then. I guess i misinterpreted you, sorry about that.
I can agree that some boxes contain only coins or heat, no matter what ( i think those boxes are actually always red by the way ). Like you said in DaN mission at D25 and D26, and also the middle boxes in danger prestige loot levels.
Why is that? I dont really know, but it was always like that during my 2.5 years journey in SK. All i can say is i never played prestige missions for rads, i played them for prestige, or for fun ^^
Why do we get shinings too in D28... well, i guess its a bummer, youre right about that. But i can remember when drop rate of rads were much worse than nowadays. :) When there was actually no DaN mission. Or when you couldve found rads only at the last 2 depths, and with a droprate of nowadays' D25 and D26. I still can remember when i ran 3 FSC in a row and rad counter went from 0 to 0 to 3 . :D Now it literally wont and cant happen. So its actually much more easier to get rads now than 2 years ago :D

Alright so i can agree with some of the things you wrote.
But honestly? This is an already not hard game to play with. There is no need to make it easier.
If you know your game, and actually willing to play with it ( I mean thats the whole point right? If you dont want to play with the game, then why do you want to collect anything in it? ) then you can grind fairly enough radiants.
If you can remember a better droprate than nowadays, it must have been more than 2.5 years ago, before my time. So i came and play the game with already bad droprate right? And i still have more than 20k rads that i cant spend on anything anymore. But its a fact that there was much worse droprate than this 2 years ago, thus it got better now.
So its not that oh-so-hard in my opinion.

However just for good faith i can agree with U on D28 only dropping rads, not shinings. That would be a reasonable change.

For the danger prestige missions i would not change the boxes, in D26. But i would change the amount of crowns that you getting in D24 and D25. I would actually double it, cuz its really bad. You could add it in form of crown boxs at the end of the level easily. They probably made prestige loots this slim intentionally cuz they are there for prestige, not for loot... thats the only line of thinking i can follow. Not saying im actually agreeing with it, just cant see anything else behind it.

Danger missions were initially in the game more for challenging content. After the 7/30/2013 update however, the game became reliant on treasure boxes for progress, and thus the D26 40 treasure box room became very uh, promising.

Originally after that update dropped, sparks of life dropped like crazy, radiants started dropping at D23 and lower (shining fire crystals did not drop in stratum 6 at all I think), and thus people were starved for shining fire crystals. Then after many ideas, Three Rings implemented a "craft down" system for shining fire crystals, allowing all end-game players to turn their surplus of radiants into shinings, however you could farm several early tier 3 missions for shinings as well. Really, those crystal drops were wonderful.

However I'm the type of person who collects and heats a lot of gear. Before the radiant drought (radiants only dropping at depth 27 and 28, and even then rarely) you could make a piece of gear, and then have it all ready to go after a few runs. You never had to seek out radiant fire crystals as long as you played the game - it was really fun to make new stuff.
Now-a-days however, you have to be either talented at the game or have a lot of things going your way to be able to reliably get radiant fire crystals. If it's any indicator, I have 51k shining fire crystals, and 24 radiant fire crystals, and at least 4 5* items ready to level up. While I can heat and fully level something up in 2-3 days, that requires a massive time investment and constant running of Dreams and Nightmares. This is okay for me, however I do not believe anyone should have to do this just to level up a gear piece, especially when they have less going for them. New vanguards shouldn't have to run dreams and nightmares on loop just to get an item to level 10.

At its core Spiral Knights isn't a difficult game. However, that isn't to say it isn't difficult to play when you account for accumulated skill (experience), connection (doesn't matter how good you are if your connection decides to bug out on you and make you walk into that freeze trap), and hardware. Additionally, you need end-gear game to farm the end-game to level up your end-game gear so you can farm the end game... Well, hope you see the circular issue there.
It isn't hard to farm for radiant fire crystals. However, it's a huge time investment for something that shouldn't be this big of a time investment. Players get bored if they don't see progress, and fire crystals are RNG, meaning you can never see how far you've progressed.

It's not necessarily that I want to collect lots of gear, it's that I want to have a lot of options. Making new weapons, trying them out, mastering the items, figuring out where they best fit... That's fun to me. Chaos + brandish charging + swiftstrike for thousands of hours in vanaduke isn't fun for me, and as it stands, that's what pretty much all players suggest new players do.

I don't know about you, but if I were a fresh vanguard, doing only that would kill my interest in the long term fun of the game.

Keep in mind you are assuming a new vanguard can hold their own in firestorm citadel and are playing on elite. Most new vanguards cannot do either of these things unless they've been taken on firestorm citadel runs already to lead them up to the mission.

Most people don't have the time to kill or the patience to keep their items at a lower level. As such, it's frustrating to play the game for several hours and make zero progress in leveling up your gear because you can't handle the harder content, and you're just told "oh play on the hardest difficulty so you can level up your gear".
Basically, the radiant scarcity hurts new players who just got into tier 3, and old players who want to get the most out of the game. The radiant scarcity does not hurt people who have a very small arsenal and use that arsenal everywhere, but have also played for a long time.

You'll find the "clueless vanguards" will often be grouped up with other "clueless vanguards", due to them playing on lower difficulties. This just leads into more heartbreak until someone redirects them to the "elite" difficulty, where they can die and beg for sparks but at least things will be more rewarding when the others can carry them.

At this point I outright refuse to run firestorm citadel solo because the first two floors suck all my willpower to continue out by the time I've finished them. No other boss mission does this to me - I'm very often soloing levels because I move really swiftly through levels and can control aggro in fights. I find that fun. I simply cannot find firestorm citadel solo fun, and even when farming in an efficient party it's the conversation that makes you keep going, not the actual fights. I already do that in /g.

But the D27 and D28 arenas aren't really... feasible either. Those are randomly generated and not reliable. If they were you can bet I'd be headfirst into that as my farming grounds - it's one reason why apocrea is my favorite rotating event.

Yep yep clueless ppl wont complete FSC for sure, no matter how many are them :)
But.
The same is true for JK mission also. Every single player who gets there needs help with that mission too. And probably with the other bossfights also, but im singling out JK here, cuz...
Well i got a few reasons.
First off i actually think soloing JK is pretty much worse boredom than FSC. I dont know why, maybe its just me, but i feel exactly the same way, as you do in FSC. Difference is i get paid for FSC and not for JK :P Unless i get lucky and find an advanced/elite orb *_* (note: RT is my favourite mission, so im not bias about FSC)
The other thing is when i started to level up an alt account it turned out that with experience, you still struggle with JK, and you actually struggle with it more than with Vana. Reasons? You can kill Vana with 4star level10 weapons. On the other hand you can kill JK with 3 star level 10 (im being generous here, cuz 5-2 HoH mission after JK only requires 3star level1 gear) shadow weapons too, but it is actually harder than FSC :D And even after you did that, your shadow weapons will lose their weight (well after RT they are more or less useless in ranked missions).
Sooo i'd say from this perspective JK is actually a harder mission than FSC :p But ofc that sums up you know those missions inside-out.

Altho' the main point here is none of the above. The main point is you wont complete JK or FSC or any other "hard" missions without friends, or people who know what they are doing. Thats what basically this game is about. Cuz its an mmo, you play together cuz its more fun, and you teach each other what to actually do in the game. Of course as time goes by you learn how to solo these things, and you get the proper weaponry too (Grim Repeater for JK, lawl :D). Sure you will solo them a few times, but after that you will just realise, its simply more fun with at least 1 more player. :)

As for the arena's yeah i love them too. They occur from time to time. Not always, but more often than one would think.

I think you posted in the wrong thread pal. This is talking about red treasure boxes, not the equinox promo.

Aye, clicked the wrong thread in another tab. Just pretend I'm responding to the promo box item chance thread. ;)

That being said, paintool does highlight the frustration that's caused people to quit. The game needs to double down with reducing time to farm for crafting/forging needs (well I have too many eternals and shinings, so it'd be appropriate to say re-balance instead). They need to make people feel it's worth it to login still.

@Veridiandynamics
To get people to play with they should give login rewards to lure them back.

We used to have a big login reward: mist energy. Of course, a lot of players just used it to craft and logged out.

We still have a tiny login reward, that encourages players to play for a little bit each day: prestige missions. But it's not much of an incentive, especially once you cross 45,000.