Some artifacts are more useful than others. Probably every player has a small pool of artifacts that are being rotated into the active spots.
Due to frequent swapping, the artifacts requiring 24h cooldown are less valuable, most of them are valued below "worth keeping".
What do you do with these?
Do you upgrade your valuable artifacts as soon as you can?
Do you keep a few so in case you find a more valuable artifact you'll be able to upgrade it right away?
Or do you collect them all?

If a future update will allow cooling down artifacts to be removed from the active spots, and continue their cooling down in the unused box - even if it's done at a penalty (doubling the cooldown time for example), these artifacts will suddenly boost their value. Even more, you could have multiple artifacts of the same type, and use the second one while the first one is cooling down.

I upgraded my first artifact, then noticing there's a huge gap in value between passive and active artifacts, thought that a future update will rebalance them; thus started collecting artifacts.

You need to use your artifacts to upgrade other artifacts. If you upgrade an artifact, its boost double (2% -> 4% for example), so upgrading is deff worth it. The active artifacts currently have no purpose, due to their minor boost compared to their way too big cooldown.

Keeping artifacts for if they might become useful later is pointless in my opinion, if you just keep them laying around you will never get to use them (justs like with the powers).

We all are sitting on passive artifacts and swapping them :D Active are very bad, at least for now.

You can always use such artifacts for upgrades like "loot a cache with a % of drop for army/materials/money", they give very little and not really useful.
But, for example, I would never waste triple/quadruple strike active artifact, their effect is awesome, just that 24h cooldown is very bad (

Almost all passives are great, but some are good materials for other artifacts upgrades! :D Also, because you can't equip two artifacts with the same effect, when you have some higher tier artifact, it is wise to waste lower tiers on upgrading other artifacts!

Edited 11/25/2020 11:44:41