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@de: Why I Give Up On Balancing Warframe's Components


Volt_Cruelerz
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Preamble

Balance is critical to Warframe's success.  I've fought long and hard for balance in Warframe.  I've fought to improve the game.  I've tried to diagnose problems with mechanics.  I've posted my findings.  Here though.  Here is where I make my stand.  Upon this is what I stake everything.  The content of this thread I believe is the most important work I've ever done as a beta tester for Warframe.  More than a year of membership, hundreds of hours playing, and thousands of hours on the forums.  Everything has led to this.

 

 

 

 

I want balance in this game.  I want it so badly...  I've evaluated every Warframe in the game.  I've created a spreadsheet that contains the DPS of every weapon in the game.  I've made over three thousand posts on these forums with most of them focused on balance.  I ran into a snag recently though.  It was a revelation, an epiphany.  But a terrible one...

 

Warframe is unbalanceable in its current state.  See the original post for a full explanation.  In short, the growth of player power is unpredictable and does not match the progression of the player through the game, leading to difficulty balancing the beginning, middle, and end of the game.  We have several options (current system, weapon leveling, Mastery, or no player growth).  Ultimately, what we want to do is maximize the playability of the game which also corresponds to profit for DE.  Here's a little diagram.

 

0tZ4LnS.png

 

At first this thread contained the suggestion of removing damage mods and enemy leveling altogether, but I believe that limiting player access to them until proper times will serve to allow balanced beginning, middle, and end, allowance for player skill to be noticable, allow some extra grinding to make the game a bit easier for those who are less skilled, and allow players who wish to do so to go back to lower levels to play against easier content for the purpose of mopping the floor with the faces of enemies.

 

Here is a brief summary of what I intend to do to Mastery to allow it to absorb the power growth that is currently a result of mods.

 

Tree Diagram

Osgbv0K.png



You have a [progression] tree that is organized according to a logical hierarchy (more explicit skills at the bottom, broader skills at the top).  To increase the ranks of these nodes, you must get a piece of equipment to rank 30, but the farther up the tree a node is, the more time it takes to rank up.  As you rank up nodes, they will confer benefits to the player.  A branch of the tree will also give the benefits of its ancestor's rank if its ancestor's rank exceeds its own.

See https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/181670-de-why-i-give-up-on-warframes-balance/page-2#entry2123407'>this post for a full explanation of my current views.

See this post for my responses to criticism.

 

 

 

Original Post

Definitions

TTK: "Time To Kill" which refers to the amount of time it takes to kill an enemy (or in some contexts, a group of enemies).  Lower TTK is better.  While DPS is the major measuring tool for automatic weapons, TTK is a dominant form of comparison between high-damage, low-rate weapons such as burst rifles, snipers, bows, and semi-automatics.  TTK also reflects the fact that while  one enemy may have 32 health while another has 30 health, your 31 damage gun can only kill the latter in one shot.  The former takes twice as long to kill despite having only marginally more health.

Scaling Damage: the fact that in the game, the percentage of enemy health that is removed upon damage from a certain game object scales based upon enemy level and the mods that apply to the game object.

 

 

To say that I've long argued for balance in Warframe would be an understatement.  The vast majority of my nearly 3k posts were in the feedback sections, discussing balance.  I'm mastery 12.  I've been here for more than a year.  I've posted countless megathreads on the subject.  I've made a thread that systematically explores every frame's balance and another that seeks to rectify any issues identified by the other.  I've commented on mods, weapons, enemy AI, the damage system, and everything else.  My questions (usually about balance) have been mentioned in livestreams on several occasions.

 

After all this, then, why do I give up?  Because I came to a simple realization: to ultimately fix balance would require fixing the fundamentals and the most basic of those is obliterating the scaling of damage which the devs have outright said will not happen in the latest livestream.

 

You can't fix the weapon niche problem without making TTK static which can only happen without scaling damage.

 

You can't fix damaging abilities until you define which enemies should die from what which can't happen until you stop damage scaling.

 

You can't fix support abilities without knowing how much damage enemies are going to deal which of course requires them dealing a set amount of damage or making them egregiously OP (Blessing).

 

You can't fix defensive abilities (Iron Skin, Snow Globe) without knowing how much damage they are going to take in a given situation over a given time period.

 

You can't fix difficulty without making TTK static by eliminating scaling damage.

 

You can't have build diversification until after damage scaling is killed because damage mods are inherently better.  Lower TTK > all.  Heavy Caliber is not an exception to this as it is simply used on those weapons which are minimally harmed by its detriment.  (Trade-offs would work in theory, but it must always produce an equivalent detrimental effect, regardless of the weapon in question.)

 

 

I could go on if I wanted to and most of these imply other balance issues (for example, without balanced difficulty, you can't properly balance rewards).  The fact is, damage scaling is the primary thing holding every single one of those things in that non-exhaustive list back.  To put it another way, you can't have the following:

 

1. Diverse weapon roles

2. Diverse weapon builds

3. Balanced abilities

4. Balanced warframes

5. Balanced difficulty

 

So if you don't have appropriate weapon diversity, can't balance frames, and can't balance difficulty (which is of course part of the core of fun and thus player retention), what can you balance?  Nothing.

 

Anticipated Rebuttal (read if unconvinced of the above)

It is likely that someone may respond by saying, "But Volt!  We could just balance everything so that it works on the level 35 enemies (or some other arbitrary level number) as intended."  And you'd be right... for level 35.  Is all of the game level 35?  No.  Everything that isn't is going to suffer bizarre fluctuations in power as players grow around it.  Mods are dropped by RNG, so it's not like you can expect every player on Mars to have a rank 6 Serration.

 

"But what if we reduced the effectiveness of over-leveled mods on lower-level worlds so that everyone using Serration on Mars can't have one higher than rank 6?" you say.  Then you've just recreated in effect that I'm putting forward in this thread, albeit in a less intuitive manner.

 

The point is, you can balance around one given level.  Any higher or lower and things start breaking due to TTK differences.  The only way to prevent these TTK rifts is by putting everything on one playing field.

 

Serration, Split Chamber, and their ilk must die.  I don't care what compensation would have to be thought up to replace them now that players have paid platinum for these mods or spent millions of credits fusing it up themselves.  That is beyond the scope of this thread.

 

The fact is, nuking scaling damage from orbit is the prerequisite for balance in this game.  It is the the broken mechanic upon which all else rests.  Remove this one tumor and the patient can begin recovery.  It is the root of the weed.  It is the poison dart.  It is the necrotic flesh.  You want balance?  Scaling damage must die.  All of it.  Every last trace of it must be eradicated (which must be done in one fell swoop, else balance will temporarily crash and burn like it has never before; it will be worse than when Volt was Zeus).

 

That is why I give up on trying to balance Warframe.  It cannot be done.  As long as scaling damage remains, anything beyond the coarsest of balance (which is mere common sense) is outside the range of possibility.  It is for this reason that I post this thread, directed at you, DE.  The canker, the ulcer that is damage scaling must be removed.  I understand that the tumor has grown tendrils into nearly every system of the game.  I know removal will be difficult, but I also know that you've made major overhauls before (damage 2.0 and mods 2.0 come to mind immediately).  

 

I assert (and I hope that I have been convincing) that you have elected to go with the easy route which will not lead to balance.  I implore you to reconsider this.  If you hold fast to your statement that scaling damage will remain, then ultimately, difficulty cannot be balanced.  If difficulty cannot be balanced, challenge cannot be controlled.  If challenge cannot be controlled, fun diminishes.  If fun diminishes, player retention and willingness of players to fork over money also diminish.  I don't think I need to carry the chain any further.  I'll let the reader consider the further implications.

 

 

 

Conclusion

I give up on Warframe's balance (guns, blades, frames, enemies, etc) because it is impossible to fix at the moment.  This is a temporary state and will be resolved once we fix its, for lack of a better term, meta-balance.  We must fix power growth before any other balance changes become truly meaningful.  At the moment, we are just wasting our time.  Flooring the gas pedal does nothing if your car is jacked up.  Let us lower the car back to the ground.  Then, and only then, will we be able to embark on our journey towards balance.

Edited by Volt_Cruelerz
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I think the problem isnt utterly damage scaling, but ENDLESS damage scaling...

 

In any case you are right on almost everything, form my point of view, have my +1

If you are referring to endless scaling in Survival and Endless Defense, that is a corner case that I don't think can ever be properly balanced, regardless of whether or not scaling is fixed for the rest of the game because if you prevented enemy leveling on those missions, after you've converted the entire Corpus army into nothing but a couple hundred Railgun MOAs at wave 200, there's no more difficulty that can be added (because to add more enemies would cause major performance losses).

Edited by Volt_Cruelerz
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If you are referring to endless scaling in Survival and Endless Defense, that is a corner case that I don't think can ever be properly balanced, regardless of whether or not scaling is fixed for the rest of the game because if you prevented enemy leveling on those missions, after you've converted the entire Corpus army into nothing but a couple hundred Railgun MOAs at wave 200, there's no more difficulty that can be added (because to add more enemies would cause major performance losses).

 

Endless damage scaling makes healing classes obsolete, makes defense maps and survival maps require certain frames over others, not because they are better, but because one or two abilities trivialize content making the endless damage scaling the core problem. Mainly stuff like Trinity and her 30 second Blessing, Frosts Snowglobe pre-nerf, and so forth. You would need those because those would keep the pod safe, or the players safe over the never ending damage scaling.

 

Oberon has no place in the game because his 200 health heal is useless when mobs start one-hitting you, and his other abilities all are damaging abilities that have no real use once enemies are so high in health. But thats part of scaling, and i agree that mobs should endlessly gain health/armor/shields on survivals and defense, but the damage scaling they have makes it less of a challenge, and more of a use this and this frame, hit 4 all the time, and kill while you arent bored enough.

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I'm not for the entire removal of scaling. But it needs to be greatly reduced from my perspective.
 

 

Endless damage scaling makes healing classes obsolete, makes defense maps and survival maps require certain frames over others, not because they are better, but because one or two abilities trivialize content making the endless damage scaling the core problem. Mainly stuff like Trinity and her 30 second Blessing, Frosts Snowglobe pre-nerf, and so forth. You would need those because those would keep the pod safe, or the players safe over the never ending damage scaling.

 

Oberon has no place in the game because his 200 health heal is useless when mobs start one-hitting you, and his other abilities all are damaging abilities that have no real use once enemies are so high in health. But thats part of scaling, and i agree that mobs should endlessly gain health/armor/shields on survivals and defense, but the damage scaling they have makes it less of a challenge, and more of a use this and this frame, hit 4 all the time, and kill while you arent bored enough.

Not necessarily, enemy scaling is just off in general and these cases you talk about can happen within non-infinite levels of enemies(Basing the cut off around level 50). Nevermind infinite. 


You seem kind of stressed out Volt. Getting tired of this thorn in Warframe's side eh? 

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I understand this, but in response and in part to play devils advocate, what is the alternative to damage scaling?

 

I'd say a reduction of dependency on mods, and knowing where the limits are for everything: Damage players deal, damage players take, highest health available to players, etc.

 

Then, you'll be able to cater for all of it.

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You seem kind of stressed out Volt. Getting tired of this thorn in Warframe's side eh? 

Very tired of it.  Balance has always been my "thing" when it comes to discussing games.  When possible, I'll mod games to rebalance them.  Clearly I can't with Warframe which is what has led to my "determination" to balance the game.

 

I understand this, but in response and in part to play devils advocate, what is the alternative to damage scaling?

Flatten it all.  Fixing the Fundamentals (see link in OP) is about "rewarding the player for the right reasons in the right ways at the right times" and covers a good chunk of what should happen to difficulty and mods.  It doesn't cover individual Warframe abilities or the balance between weapon classes, but it does explain a lot and should provide enough of a guideline so the reader can know how to proceed in the regards that are not explained in such detail as others.

 

Agreed entirely. I think this is tied quite closely to Zamboni's rework, as well, and his suggestions would overlap with your agendas.

I was in the process of writing Fixing the Fundamentals when Zamboni posted his thread and it helped illuminate a couple things in my mind.  I disagreed with certain characteristics about his implementation and identification of some core problems which is why I haven't been active in that thread (let alone the fact that it's however many pages long and I don't want to wade through that).  The name "Fixing the Fundamentals" was actually originally going to be "Fixing the Foundation," but after Zamboni's publication, I figured I ought to select a different name for my megathread to differentiate it.

Edited by Volt_Cruelerz
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I dearly hope this is top of the list in their agendas. With the slate of 2.0s, one of the next key issues will be Scales 2.0.

 

Unlike the scales of Justice, we're always severely tipping at one end or another so bad that we spin three times in the air before crashing into stained glass.

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I dearly hope this is top of the list in their agendas. With the slate of 2.0s, one of the next key issues will be Scales 2.0.

 

Unlike the scales of Justice, we're always severely tipping at one end or another so bad that we spin three times in the air before crashing into stained glass.

AFAIK, they're still joking about removing serration, hopefully they're using the joke as a way of testing the waters to see if people would be ok with it.

 

I do hope they remove serration, that's probably the only way they'll get real balance for all of the solar system, not just levels x - y.

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Sadly, I've also given up almost all hope that Warframe will find any semblance of balance (among other things).  I'm going to finish writing one last list of suggestions, and then I'll be done with the game for the foreseeable future. 

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Completely agree. Right now the damage increasing mods —and I don't mean just the Serration/pure damage and multishot mods, but elemental damage increases as well— are breaking the game. As it currently is you can have 2 different players start at the exact same time, both can complete Mercury, both can even get in a lucky Apollodorus run that gets them to Scorpions, except only 1 of them gets lucky and gets a Serration and the other gets tons of Fast Hands; immediately the 2 players have begun to diverge wildly in terms of strength. Depending on luck the power gap between the 2 may increase or decrease, but given the way the game is balanced it is more likely the gap will increase because the unlucky player is going to hit brick walls more often.

 

And that is the problem, these mods create a power gap that is so wide a person would have better luck jumping the Grand Canyon on a tricycle than trying to jump the power gap between a lucky and unlucky player in Warframe. A lucky player can one shot everything and anything between Mercury and Pluto, only having to spend ammo when they get to a T3, while an unlucky player is having to mag dump into enemies on Earth.

 

You know, when Damage 2.0 was first coming out I was kind of excited. It sounded great, elements would change the weapon, be affected by resistances, and their benefit would primarily be through procs? Rainbow builds would be eliminated as a consequence opening up more utility mods being used? Sounds awesome! Then we actually got Damage 2.0 and it turned out elements were still just slightly weaker versions of Serration, but now had a pathetic proc chance and were affected by a spreadsheet of resistances. Rainbow builds are still a problem, and damage stacking is still the one true king of the hill.

 

That people actually think this system is good and adds variety actually boggles my mind. The current system is interesting? Really? Stack every mod that has a +X% damage on it is interesting? Oh, sure, in a few cases instead of elements the player can stack crit and crit chance, woo, I cannot contain my bowels from the excitement such variety presents; I will just ignore that stacking crit and crit chance just means fewer +X% elements are stacked on the weapon and that it is still effectively just stacking a more effective version of +X% damage.

 

At least the old Damage 1.0 system had some constant utility benefits to stacking elements apart from the damage increases.

 

Combined with the horrible RNG and the system just gets worse. And, no, eliminating the RNG by giving every new player a free Serration and/or Multishot will not solve the problem, it will only delay the fickle, venomous bite of the RNG serpent. Even if players are given an entire suite of damage increasing, crit increasing, and elemental mods (but I am being redundant there) it still does not get rid of the problem that there is only 1 type of viable build for each weapon, and therefore a host of mods that are utterly pointless and useless.

 

Just decreasing the damage increases these mods give will also not solve the problem unless the mods are nerfed so badly they become a waste of points to slot into a weapon. It is always more beneficial to stack damage. Always. This goes doubly true if the multiplicative increases when stacking damage mods remain in place. The unlucky players still have a progression halting system they will hit, and build variety remains nowhere to be found.

 

The problem is DE has to balance around these mods. DE has to assume that at least some of these mods have been obtained by a player, because for a significant portion of the player base the RNG will have rewarded them with some or all of these mods sometime in the past or immediate future. This puts DE in a bad position, because if they do not balance around the assumption these mods have been obtained they risk making the content trivial for the large portion that has these mods, and if they do balance around the assumption that the player has these mods they make the content nigh on impossible for anyone without them. DE can't take the middle road because the way the damage and scaling system currently works means there is no difference between balancing around the extreme and middle cases for the unlucky players; the unlucky players hit a road block to progression regardless, because the damage scaling is that badly out of balance.

 

In theory it is safer for DE to ignore the plight of these unlucky players, because in theory the RNG should make them as rare as the very lucky players. But then you throw in Loot 2.0, and the picture changes. Now damage mods (and I am including elemental and crit mods there, because they are the same thing with a different name) drop from systems and enemies that are farther along the progression chain. Often a player cannot even obtain a certain damage mod, or even just a new weapon, without actually advancing past the first planetary system where it is actually needed.

 

Now the broken system is royally borked, because the number of unlucky new players are not the rare outlier, they are the common occurrence because they do not even have the opportunity to gamble with the RNG until after they have run face first into a wall that is halting their progression.

 

And yet, there is one simple way to fix this. Remove damage mods. Make elements purely work by playing off resistances and proc chance only, but not directly multiplying off and then adding to the base damage. Remove Serration and the other pure damage increases. Remove multishot mods. If the game absolutely requires weapons becoming more powerful then bake damage increases into the weapons leveling up process. Rebalance all the enemies around the new, blessedly narrowed, power gap. Turn that grand canyon of power levels between the lucky and unlucky players into a trench that can be hopped across.

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You make excellent points. I'll review your other threads; perhaps we can discuss these ideas further.

 

I think that balancing weapons and enemies properly cannot occur without reworking the mod system. The problems with the mod system are, I believe, the heart of the matter, but may be slightly out of the scope of this thread.

 

I think scaling and progression should be much more linear than they are right now. I'm not saying that random drops need to be taken out, of course, but that they need to mix up the player's style by giving them a variety of options spaced apart, rather than being luck needed to progress. This is the point that Psroij hits upon very well. Multiple builds should always be viable, and no rare mod should be indispensable.

 

I believe that base damage increase should be innate in weapons (which of course ties back into mod again). I don't advocate for no base damage increase at all, since players enjoy feeling a sense of progression as they level something, and mod capacity isn't something that can be felt very well. It also encourages players to come back to lower-level planets periodically to level their new gear. However, TTK definitely needs to be better balanced among different weapons and families of weapons, as you elaborated upon extensively in your other thread.

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I disagree that (dynamic) scaling is the problem and makes the balance completely impossible. Oh and sorry Iv no time for discussion now (its almost morning here) but there are hundreds of rpgs and mmos as a proof that scaling is not the evil.

 

But I gave up on balance in WF because to ultimately fix balance would require... starting to actually balance things. But I see that some of the worst obvious imbalances are completely untouched for months, not even tweaked... but hopefully it will get better in future. 

 

EDIT: btw DE is clearly toning down the scaling as you can see in void defence difficulty nerfs. 

Edited by Monolake
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I disagree that (dynamic) scaling is the problem and makes the balance completely impossible. Oh and sorry Iv no time for discussion now (its almost morning here) but there are hundreds of rpgs and mmos as a proof that scaling is not the evil.

When you get the time to discuss this, I'd like to hear what you have to say on the subject.

 

Most RPGs have a tendency for growth as you progress through the story.  There is no story in Warframe and your real progression is related to your mod collection.  Beyond that, stories terminate while Warframe does not seem to want to be a game that people play through the star chart once and drop it for some other game.

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the shrinking of the power divide canyon shrinks the design of possible weapons. The real problem with that is weapons make DE believe that it is doing something every week instead of prioritizing fixing the real problems that we complain and they know about. Not that they are not of course, but somehow finding warframe shifting from extrinsic motivation to intrinsic motivation should be the next lofty goal after balancing the systems.

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Part of the problem cuts to DE's mentality when it comes to core gameplay.

 

It took me a long time to realize it but......DE believes this is a casual game. And because they believe that, the whole game is built around farming without restrictions. The damage scaling model flows from that. They need a system where someone can play 1 hour a week and still feel like they're accomplishing something, while also providing something approaching a challenge for their most hardcore players.

 

And it's very hard to balance a game according to those rules. The lack of regimented progression in WF is why we have a very sloppy damage scale. If it was too refined, new players would find themselves needing to farm for mods just to be able to reasonably advance through content. And DE doesn't want that because they'll lose a lot of casual players who don't want to grind progression. (Even though we're already grinding for mats, chaff mods for fusion, affinity....)

 

My hope is that the end-game is where they finally draw the line between casual players and people who want to put a lot of time into WF and be challenged. My hope is that they start taking a measured approach to balance in later game areas. It won't solve the early game being a total mess of "do as you will, we won't tell you no." I mean, see this thread: https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/176923-the-amount-of-noobness-is-too-high/

 

It's basically articulating the balance problem from another direction. But at least drawing a distinction between levels of progression in WF would start making veteran players feel like someone is taking their gameplay seriously, instead of trying to apply the same general formula that is in play during the early game, and just increasing some numbers.

 

As long as DE says "we're totally ok with a game based around OP warframes farming lower level content", balance won't ever be solid. It will continue to be sloppy right around Levels 30 to 40, because DE hasn't thought far enough ahead or takes higher level gameplay seriously enough to alter game balance toward it. Instead, they pay attention to game balance sub-30 because that's what everyone is doing. And the assumption is, if you're playing above level 30, you're entitled to as much broken balance as you can stomach.

 

And that's what's really killing the game for me, the sense that challenge is completely arbitrary. DE is treading water on this issue by giving us new things to spend on time on in the current dynamic, and revamping systems unrelated to level scaling like Melee 2.0. But the sense that no one is really steering the ship when it comes to high level gameplay is, I think, costing them veteran players. There is almost no sweet spot between "way too freaking easy" and "completely broken difficulty." It's somewhere around Level 35 for a maxed out WF....but the only instances you ever hit those levels are a) alerts and b) a few minutes during Endless Defense or Survival.

 

Unfortunately, this will never change unless DE drastically overhauls their ideas about how people spend their time in this game. As long as new weapons and warframes are the carrot, and that carrot can only be found by grinding low-level challenges, they can't enforce any kind of strict level-restrictions because they'd be locking players out of content. (Either high level frames can't farm low-level challenges for new gear...or low-level players can't access higher level areas to do the same.)

 

They've basically put game balance between a rock and a hard place when it comes to keeping players engaged. And unfortunately they've cultivated a culture among their playerbase through their design where new weapons and warframes are considered core content by most players. (See: The Detron stupidity, and I mean that both in relation to DE's design and how the forums reacted to it.)

 

I don't really know how they go about changing this, because they'll have to strip away all the parts of the game that are inhibiting their ability to balance it.....but those are also the only things keeping the game alive at this point.

Edited by Nenjin
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That is why I give up on trying to balance Warframe.

 

+

 

Sadly, I've also given up almost all hope that Warframe will find any semblance of balance (among other things).  I'm going to finish writing one last list of suggestions, and then I'll be done with the game for the foreseeable future. 

 

Warframe will never be balanced overall. We can see that in DE's choices (and choices by omission...looking @ you MP). But it can be saved from horribly funneling us into choices and builds...with the efforts of some of the veterans and 'new guard' posting in this thread.

 

With enough viable choices and sufficient challenge (and sustainable content generation), it's possible that we can thoroughly explore and enjoy an unbalanced game for an indefinite period of time.

 

 

EDIT:

 

My hope is that the end-game is where they finally draw the line between casual players and people who want to put a lot of time into WF and be challenged. My hope is that they start taking a measured approach to balance in later game areas. It won't solve the early game being a total mess of "do as you will, we won't tell you no."

 

Who is this ^ guy? Somebody get him a chair or something!

 

Volt, I know you already counter-argued against this in the OP. However, this is why balance doesn't have to occur across the entire level spectrum. There is an soft upper bound on player power, written by mod slots, MPs and somas.

 

As I have previously argued, the process of getting TO that "Endgame" power cap is so enthralling for many players that they get sucked in only to be wholly disappointed upon reaching it.

 

Even if that pre-Endgame process is never fixed (with the exception of a better new-player experience), players can and will overlook the lack of balance and fall in love with WF. We did.

 

However, by establishing a rough balance at Endgame, DE can prevent that love from souring as challenge and progression go out the window once players reach that quasi static, soft-upper bound point.

 

TL;DR - Volt and Ganpot are not allowed to give up yet. We're not done.

Edited by notionphil
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As I have previously argued, the process of getting TO that "Endgame" power cap is so enthralling for many players that they get sucked in only to be wholly disappointed upon reaching it.

 

Really it's that the grinding and the leveling and the modding feels like it's prepping you for something really epic and players are more than happy to do that......but then the game never advances beyond those activities. The numbers get fiddled and you get one-shot. Not much of a climax to hundreds of hours of play. The nature of the challenges don't really change either. You're still doing exactly what you were doing as a newbie. Part of the reason the mission format system contributes to the sense of "this isn't going anywhere, is it?" Because they recycle ideas several times over throughout gameplay.

 

Maybe that's a positive step they could take, to combat the sheer amounts of bottomfeeding that goes on in this game. By moving some mission types to only higher level areas. It won't help veteran players but at least new players would get the illusion of some kind of progression in challenge. It's the reason I can't really bring myself to play non-Survival missions at higher levels. The difficulty beyond being one shotted simply isn't there.

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Really it's that the grinding and the leveling and the modding feels like it's prepping you for something really epic and players are more than happy to do that......but then the game never advances beyond those activities.

 

Exactly.

 

I don't post links to memes etc but this quick direct TV commercial perfectly illustrates the moment when you can finally get your first decent loadout going with no missing mods, a sold frame and a soma.

 

 

"you have reached the end of Warframe, please go back"

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