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A Bit Of Operation Gate Crash Feedback, With Links To More


Vastaren
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I have managed to not find a feedback megathread on this, but if there is, I'm perfectly happy for my posts to be merged into one.

I know I usually type a crapload of text, so I've split it up into sections and spoilers, and personal constructive suggestions (cause I'm not completely negative) are marked with asterisks (*). There's a lot, I find, to talk about, but don't get me wrong - if I sound harsher than I should be, I probably am, and I don't pretend to or expect to represent any significant portion of the playerbase.

Abstract

So... I've just taken a break from Warframe for tonight. 12 consecutive Operation Gate Crash missions is, evidently, more than I can comfortably handle for one night, but this is really the first time I'm having second thoughts on pushing the extra 3 missions for a free weapon.

DE, what happened? We were going great with progress on the Excavation missions! I personally found the Cryotic Front event a big step forwards in terms of promoting teamwork and communication, focussing players on objectives which were made thematically relevant, and rewarding players for effort spent participating rather than effort spent grinding. It was fun without forcing players to alter gear, challenging without it being contrived, and overall a great experience for me because I wanted to do well in each and every mission I went on.

Operation Gate Crash is, in my honest opinion, a sad step back from all that good stuff.



Event Structure

So, probably the most standout drawback to this event is the fact that you're not really rewarded for participating in the mission. You're rewarded for being there. Yes, you get the other rewards if you open the caches, vaults, etc, but those were never the intention of the event. To officially have it recognised as one point either way doesn't encourage active participation in the event at all. In Operation Cryotic Front, teamwork of a scale rarely seen outside clan squads was actively encouraged, in no small part due to the nature of the reward. Not so here. Being rewarded points based not on effort, but on number of times you can click into a mission and rush through is a poor substitute for player engagement.

Another large factor in why I personally wasn't impressed was the attempt at substituting enemy scaling for player limiting. Okay. Others might find it challenging in a fun sort of way to have powers and survivability reduced without knowing by how much, or necessarily how to compensate, and I'll admit, I was surprised in a surprised sort of way. It quickly grew tiring, though, because it again essentially boiled down to a gear check near the end. People were taking weapons not necessarily because they wanted to, but because the mission demanded it due to negation of abilities and lowered survivability. I see it as a new direction, which might work in some instances, but here, it's just another take on numerical scaling. Like the Tactical Alerts, but giving players less of a choice to that extent.

*
I'd like to see a return to working on more engaging ways to 'score' and reward players rather than keep track of the number of missions run. Excavation from Cryotic Front was a great advance, and I would hate for it to be the exception rather than the rule. Maybe we could try small steps like what we had with Rescue 2.0, even, with the number of reward caches located contributing to an overall mission score.



Mission Structure

The mission structure itself was - I found - fairly disorganised and poorly related to. Sure, there were waypoints and objectives, just like any other mission, but the explanation and the way we were meant to interpret it in the context of the mission itself left a lot to be desired. 'Go here. Hack generators twice (why twice? It seems a bit redundant gameplay-wise). Head through the portal. Kill two absolutely random pseudo-bosses. Pick up a key. Destroy the "torsion beam generator" with the key. Head to extraction'. It just all seems very convoluted for the (too?) brief explanations we're given. Is there really any reason to have this number of steps you needed to walk us through? Half the time I was with other players on Phobos, they still had no idea what they were doing or more importantly, why. Maybe reconsidering how complicated these missions should be (especially with the resource cache bar at the top contributing nothing to mission progress) would help alleviate some of the ambiguity and confusion. It just seemed like a disjointed amalgamation of the defining traits of Mobile Defense, Exterminate, and Assassination, but with little of the cohesion.

The resource caches were presented more of a distraction than anything relevant to the mission itself. While yes, it would encourage a reasonable amount of exploration, it just didn't make sense in the context of the mission itself, and largely served - in my experience - to prolong the amount of time spent in a mission on a 'side-quest' which was unrelated to the combat-heavy objective itself. Many times the squad I was with would split up, half going for caches, and the other half going for the objective, but sending half the squad on a goose-chase all over the map while the other half try and get through seems counterproductive to encouraging teamwork.

*
At least with Cryotic Front, splitting the team was done strategically, for the benefit of efficiency when one person stays at the scanner, and the other three defend the excavators. Maybe making the caches more relevant to the mission would help in terms of proportionate group contributions, if that was really the intended purpose of having them there.



Lore

I was at uni when I looked up the forums in some spare time I had. I must have let out a squeak or a gasp as I read about Vay Hek's latest nefarious scheme, cause people around me looked at me funny for a second. He's always been one of the most developed villains in my imagination. He's developed enough for me to dislike and respect at the same time as the personification of Grineer transhumanism. So I was left hanging when I didn't see him make an appearance at all during the event. No mention was given to him outside the first message the Lotus gives us. The event, from a lore standpoint, is fairly shallow and unfulfilling. What's the real story here, and why do I feel a bit left out of it?

I then discovered the two Grineer females. And I was stunned and somewhat jealous of their beauty, poise, and how jarring their inclusion kinda seemed. What information is given on them? Why do they have the void key we're supposed to take? Why are they here? Their appearance wasn't exactly a 'WTF' moment, but it was one thing that really knocked the immersion out of me. No Codex lore on them makes them a bit of a sore thumb to be honest - an addition for the sake of addition, and with health/armor scaling to go with it. I'm a bit divided on their abilities (that pseudo-Slash-Dash thing, their weird invulnerability phases, their jetpacking), which seem pretty poorly synergistic when you think about it, but make for an interesting encounter nonetheless.

*
Maybe we should flesh out the lore a bit more before adding in seeming non-sequiturs and hand-wave parts of it to keep it 'mysterious', which I actually just find pointlessly vague. I would love to see something as simple as updated Codex entries, which would make a ton of difference for these two ladies.



Rewards

Then we get to the rewards. The badge I have no qualms with, simply because it's... a badge. No hard feelings, but you're in a category of your own to me, buddy.

But the mods... Oh wow. Is more % min-maxing what we need from a mod system already revolving and stagnating around that? What happened to considering this, or this, or this? Were there too many options to choose from that we had to fall back on good old Physical Damage to follow up on the Elemental Dual Stat mods? Do we need more damage to keep up with enemy scaling to keep up with damage, which is the routine that dominates a lot of the progression in Warframe? I'm just not convinced these mods - even given how situational they are - are the best idea we could have gone with for developing an integral part of the game, but that's not my call to make.

*
Perhaps diversifying our combat system be introducing a few tamer suggestions from the links above would do more for a greater part of the community than min-maxers? I'd like to see more options become viable for players looking not for higher damage numbers, but a more dynamic combat experience.

I don't have the Sheev yet, but feel free to leave opinions below and tell me to go for it for the sake of its stats and gameplay, or not.



A Ray of Light?

Despite all that, I really do appreciate the commitment of the devs and the staff team to providing us content to keep us interested. Despite my criticism, I do see the value in releasing an event to keep the community engaged, and while this does it in a manner sub-par to most other events I've participated in, it's certainly delivered with no less enthusiasm and suspense as others. It's a great way to hype up players for an upcoming Archwing U15, even if the connection isn't all that solid, and if it were meant as a filler, it has certainly fulfilled its purpose, releasing new mods and a weapon reward.

Also of note is that I honestly think that the multitude of concepts presented in this event could work quite well independently of each other. Having reward caches stashed around maps is a great way to encourage exploration and level appreciation, as well as shifting the focus somewhat from a rush to a journey. Having mini-bosses as a repetition-breaker is a good-ish way to encourage teamwork and combat adaptation. But together, and presented in the format it has been?



Conclusion
(tl;dr)

Any DE event is always worth the login and the involvement, and this one is, while a bit disappointing compared to previous ones, no exception. Don't get me wrong, I'd recommend it if only for the sake of the experience once or twice to remind ourselves that missions can be slightly different to survival/defense. Doing this event with friends and clanmates certainly helps the boredom if you have someone named Vastaren on the squad ready to talk about inconsequential, vaguely funny things, but to focus on the event itself requires a high level of dedication to get through and remain happy with the end result.

The presentation of the event and its potential, however, are overshadowed by flaws in design - in particular, how the event's rewards system is structured which favors grind over active participation, how the missions themselves are structured in an often needlessly complicated way, how the lore is a bit thin and ambiguous as to how it all ties in, and how the rewards leave a lot to be desired in terms of innovation and utility.

I'm sorry, DE. I hate being an overall negative on these forums, but I felt I should let you know.



Edit:
This should be linked. Goes into a bit more detail about specifics too.
A bit more relevant feedback on the grind aspect. Don't think I'm only posting views that align with my own here, but it's what I can find.
More detailed feedback on objectives and relevance, and the use of hard-limiting players.
Expanding on the potential of Grineer Resource Caches.
More on nerfing frames and frame powers in regards to the event.
Feedback detailing how someone feels the event has also been a disappointment.
Specifically on the event scaling system.
Feedback on the capped difficulty of Gate Crash and what it means for the leaderboards.
An easy-to-read take on the mod rewards.
Concise points about several aspects of the event.
zennok's take on it, with a Breeding Grounds comparison.
A suggestion on alleviating the gate camping issue.
A few more brief thoughts on the current event.
An event pseudo-megathread.
Three points of feedback on why the event was bad.

More detailed feedback on why the event was not enjoyable, with a couple suggestions for improvement.

A brief rant on grinding.

Why someone thinks the event wasn't worth the time nor effort.

A very brief overall feedback thread.

 

Okay... so the forum population have made a fair number of threads detailing an overall negative outlook on Operation Gate Crash. I don't know how much of the sentiment extends to the overall population, but I think it's fair to assume the outspoken on the forums account for a majority of the playerbase statistically. I started linking these threads with the disclaimer that I wasn't cherry-picking threads to support my views, but the number of them that actually provide genuine, personal feedback that is overall negative is staggering. I really hope you read these, DE, and take into account suggestions posed by rationally dissatisfied players.

A large oversight and consideration on my part when analysing the event structure brought up by Variatas, and my take on the consequences of such a thing:

[...] With Cryotic Front, which I really enjoyed, I spent far more time re-running the mission to help other people than it took me to earn it myself. I'm sitting on like 100,000 Cryo, after contributing tens of thousands to my Clan's research.


My experience was that by 13 or 14 exposure, all of my frame's abilities were so nerfed in range, duration, and strength that there was simply no point to using them. [...] I basically could have unslotted them all and stuffed as much anything else I could in instead, except there really wasn't anything that would have helped. With health and shields so restricted, I didn't see any point to trying another frame that didn't have a giant Armor value to stretch things further; without any abilities to support them, they'd just die even faster.
So with Exposure nerfing my frame so hard, I simply cannot run the event mission to help other people out; because I've already run it so many times, I'd just be hammered by the penalties.

Having thought about it, I... find this to be a really backwards way of doing an event. Warframe gameplay is in no small part founded on cooperation, and as you point out, this actively discourages players from helping each other through it if they've already completed the event. Sure, the difficulty stops scaling after exposure 15, but by then abilities are severely impeded across the board. While in Breeding Grounds, higher enemy scaling was counteracted by a higher score, there is no benefit to running a mission with someone with 20+ exposure points over someone fresh with 0.



We are now a thing on the latest Community Hot Topics thread! Personal feelings aside, I hope people don't feel put off by my first post, and continue to keep honest feedback coming so that DE can work to improve on their stuff!

Edited by Vastaren
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Personally this has been my favorite event so far. To me it's clear, straightforward, different, and fun. I can solo it. I get to fight the infested, grineer, and orokin all in the same mission, meaning I have to equip my weapons smartly. One of my favorite tilesets, the derelicts, are getting some love from this and I don't have to craft keys in order to get in to them.

Edited by mrecentric
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I'm throwing mine in here too so i don't add more clutter.

--------

I don't like this difficulty system DE has in this event. I build awesome mod layouts to push the boundaries, then have my abilities tested, not have them removed.
By stripping away power range/duration/shielding/etc, it makes me feel weak. I like a challenge, but I like to fight enemies who are stronger than me, not make myself useless so I can't even fight the low levels and make my abilities lose all functionality
 
tumblr_nc3swcK6z91slc1e9o1_500.jpg
Like Nyx's little butt bubble. No range, no point.
I played other events constantly after I had finished them because they were fun and challenging. These are long, boring, and tiresome. With no lore to keep me interested. No teasing of new content like the moldy salad ship boss (is that even coming?)
 
I like how DE is testing the waters with these events, so I'm simply throwing in my part to say I don't want this type, and prefer the other events greatly.
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Personally this has been my favorite event so far. To me it's clear, easy, different, and fun. I can solo it. I get to fight the infested, grineer, and orokin all in the same mission, meaning I have to equip my weapons smartly. One of my favorite tilesets, the derelicts, are getting some love from this and I don't have to craft keys in order to get in to them.

Oh for sure, one the things I forgot to touch on was the diversity of enemies we face in the event. That's not an original idea, but certainly not a bad thing either. I liked having to adapt to these changes - fighting the Infestation is a far cry from fighting the Grineer, and it certainly presents a challenge in that sense.

 

As for the rest of my sad feelings, they still unfortunately stand. The direction and design of this event seems a bit backwards to the progress I consider we were making in Cryotic Front, and while I understand your point of view - yeah, it's a pretty 'easy' event if we follow the instructions, I don't find that fulfilling like Cryotic Front was. I appreciate your counterpoint though, I'll add it in :)

 

- snip -

I know where you're coming from. Innovation is always something I love seeing from DE, and I don't begrudge them this experiment at all. But feedback is feedback, and I completely agree with your points on abilities, the extent to which they challenge players by hard-limiting them, and the emptiness of this new event. It's certainly not what I wanted to build up from Cryotic Front. I don't want my frame's abilities being negated for the sake of an event, and my 1-metre Tail Wind was funny for the first few times I realised what was happening :P

 

You raise a good point too about 'testing the waters'. I hadn't thought of this particular situation in those explicit terms, and it's an interesting perspective to consider about the changes DE makes.

Edited by Vastaren
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My only real gripe with this event was that the Derelict tileset was the same the whole time. The layout is still random, obviously, but there weren't any new tiles or anything fancy except for the portal room. At least with the planets, which you needed to change every 5 runs, the tiles were "new" after going through the portal.

 

P.S. I honestly didn't read any of the spoilers (I'm not in a reading mood), I'm just posting this here to bundle it with related feedback.

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I think that's a good summary of the event. 

 

I found the first run a bit frustrating. What do the caches look like? Do we need keys to get to some of them? Why are these people here? etc. It seems odd that an event with an introduction would also require a trip to the wiki. "I want you to find something. I don't know where it is, or what it looks like, but there might be 3 of them."

 

As for new antagonists, hooray. It's too bad they can't be scanned and added to the codex for the lore component, yet?

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One person's progress is another person's impediment. I didn't like Cryotic front at all.

No, it wasn't perfect, but I guess we'll have to agree to disagree on our preferred directions that DE takes on developing the game. I appreciate your opinion though, it's good food for thought to try and consider it from another perspective, and I can definitely see where my criticism is largely subjective :)

 

- snip -

Repetition - dangit - was another thing I missed out on. You raise a good point about the fact that the tileset (and in general, the content used) was nothing new or exciting. Just pretty samey all the way.

 

And it's okay, I don't expect people to read (God forbid!) my stuff, it's just there. I only take offense if it's someone I have a crush on, and I appreciate your feedback, though I don't speak for most.

 

- snip -

Yeah, I could have expanded on the lack of information that was given. There's a small FAQ segment on the Operation Gate Crash official thread if anyone's still wondering, but you're right, the information wasn't communicated well. Most of it relied on word-of-mouth rather than the flashy message the Lotus sent or any other available official ingame source of information, which is an oversight of no small proportion now that I see it. It should very rarely be incumbent upon the players to seek out information proactively to this extent.

 

I'm also intrigued by the two females too, waiting til their lore - hopefully - gets updated to corroborate with existing canon. They can be scanned, but nothing will come up apart from their names and elemental resistances. Not even a phone number.

Edited by Vastaren
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Gotta agree with your main points here. I ended up doing the entire event solo because it just worked out easier and smoother for me. Sure the free gear is nice, but that's only a small part of it. Cryotic Front gave me a reason to use teamwork and I very much enjoyed doing high score runs with my friends, so this new event being better done solo was rather disappointing to me. 

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Regarding Lore, something that hit me as soon as I read it:

We have reviewed Baro Ki’ Teer’s Archwing Datamass

I ... err ... what? Did I miss that memo? When did this happen? Is this our mysterious associate from the cryotic event?

 

 

their weird invulnerability phases

As far as I could find out, those two are only vulnerable via their jetpacks - similar to Lech Kril, but at least he stands still for a moment and doesn't buzz around all the time. Best way to deal with them so far was to tag them with Venom and just let that finish them off, while I run for cover.

 

It's too bad they can't be scanned and added to the codex for the lore component, yet?

I brought Helios and let it do the scanning. Three runs and you got them. Alas, as Vastaren mentioned, they don't provide any additional information in the codex despite their damage resistances (which are more or less the same as for any heavy Grineer).

 

I've only done six or seven missions so far (and intentionally failed one to see what happens, if you're on the wrong side of the gate when it closes - comparable to Little Boy, I'd say), but seeing how gimped down our frames will be at the end ... I'll probably do my fifteen runs to get that knife and show it off in my private quarters in the dojo one day, but not a single one more. Cryotic was fun and encouraged me to do more than I needed, this event goes in the opposite direction.

I'm not against restricting myself on purpose. The Hyena event was quite fun, to try and get the maximum damage / survivability with minimum conclave rating. Same with Dragon Keys, when I can pick my frame and weapons to counter one specific effect. But I want to choose how I impair myself, don't have it forced on me. And seeing that Nyx' bubble isn't even big enough for her to fit in it - I'd make some hardcore bondage joke here, but seeing that this forum isn't moderated as M but rather EC, I'll leave it be.

Edited by Bibliothekar
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- snip -

Oh, thanks heaps for the clarification! Was wondering and no-one else in my squads seemed to be doing anything in particular such as aim :P

I also totally get you on the player choice thing, I think you've explained it far more eloquently than I tried to!

And yes, the weird name-drop was a bit out of the blue too, I was browsing the forums for a full 10 minutes trying to work out whether I'd missed something. Warframe's lore is in an unenviable position right now, made abundantly clear by the number of times while I was reading official texts or ingame where I stopped and reread sentences to make sure I wasn't seeing things.

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OP, I got to say, your Lore spoiler makes you look really really silly. Obviously, those two have been assigned to lead the excavation, and took the key when polarity started to reverse to try and save it.

 

Besides that, splitting the team to fulfill different objectives IS teamwork, and a good example of it, too. I can't imagine you needed more than two people for the bosses, either way, their backpacks explode near-instantly.

 

I do agree that the whole limiting system is pretty S#&$ty, but the mission structure itself is a great step forward for the lore/quest missions. In fact, it's a great step forward from the usual "deploy - do this - extract" missions that we have right now. The problem is that having a meaningful sequence of actions to take pales quite a bit when you have to do it fifteen times in a row.

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I must have gotten really lucky with the event then because I had absolutely no trouble with it at all and the power limiting never really got to me. And I mean that seriously, because when I did it, there were never more than two squads on Ceres, so you're clearly not alone in not wanting to finish.

 

My experience with the event was extremely positive. It felt like one of the most lore driven events I've ever done (I liked the Hive event, but it was more "do this mission type a bunch" while this was "destroy these very specific attempts to invade the Void"). I didn't really notice the grind, perhaps due to the aforementioned feel of importance the mission gave me, which was assisted by the awesome merging of tilesets, enemy groups, and new situations into a narrative package.

 

I was worried about the power limiting when I first read the news. Sounded like another bandage, but one that would feel even worse than the Conclave Rating due to it being forced rather than under our control. It turned out far superior in my experience though. I honestly never felt like I was having an artificial restriction forced upon me to keep things fair, it just felt like things were getting harder in a way that made me think, rather than a way that forced me to only take one ridiculously overpowered weapon. I felt like I was unable to drop my guard, but that it was fair as long as I stayed vigilant.

 

The only real problem I had with the event was that the caches were left unexplained. It wasn't until Ceres that a group member explained to the rest of us what they looked like, and I completed the whole event without seeing one. Perhaps due to that, there were only a handful of missions where anyone bothered to go looking for them, so I really missed out there. I saw a bunch of Vaults for the first time, but the one time someone brought a key was one time we didn't find one.

 

This event really had me wishing for more variety in mission types, and more narrative weight to missions. I was thinking this would make a great Alert-exclusive mission type; something that's not a constant threat from our enemies, but one that the Lotus is going to warn us about specifically if it comes up.

 

I honestly prefer this 15 mission grind over, say, the Hive event, which seemed luck based in whether or not you'd get enough points (I had to do that one way more than 15 times), and even Cryotic could be hard to reach that final tier depending on certain uncontrollable factors. Perhaps a compromise could be introduced, where each tier of an event can be rewarded by reaching some point threshold or by doing it enough.

 

After reading the responses in this thread, though, I'm going to reiterate that I might just have gotten really lucky. The only time I ever died was when a group insisted on rushing back so fast they shut an elevator in my face and didn't come back when I was immediately downed by enemies that were following behind a lot closer than I thought (which ended up not giving me an Exposure point for that mission for some reason, even though I could have revived, I didn't see it was worth it when we were so close to the end), but that doesn't mean things weren't a lot less smooth for everyone else.

 

So far there isn't a lot I disagree about in this thread about things that could use looking at, though.

Edited by Jokubas
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- snip -

When you say that the inclusion of the two bosses was 'obviously' due to them being assigned to lead the excavation, that would be speculation and an example of us filling in the whys for DE. I just didn't want to jump to conclusions because that's the only way we figured it out on that point. The narrative of the mission was lacking - in my opinion - and I honestly don't see how the connection was made to the extent that there was no other possible reason I could be feeling a bit confused than just being silly. Their inclusion was pretty jarring to me, they just came out of nowhere, with no lore, and the story behind the mission wasn't strong enough to support that theory.

 

Splitting the team is potentially great teamwork, I totally agree, but only if the objectives were all relevant to mission progress. I'll reiterate - the difference between splitting the team here and splitting the team on Cryotic Front was that no one in the split Cryotic Front was off looking for randomly-generated lootboxes which don't affect mission progression. If the caches were made relevant to the mission, then I would have no problem with it.

 

I can see where you're coming from about the mission structure's length being good for lore and quest. The multiple objectives made a very interesting run the first few times, but I honestly didn't feel that DE capitalised on this with the lore and relevance side of things. It just became more about running through than appreciating the reasons behind it, many of which we were not privy to.

 

I appreciate your feedback though, I can definitely see where my criticism is contentious and subjective :)

 

- snip -

Interesting, I get what you mean about the missions being lore-driven, it was very clearly pushed as one rather than having players focus on gameplay over story. I just didn't feel that they pulled it off in this instance, hence why I felt it didn't live up to my expectations. If they did flesh out the lore more - in my opinion - then it would have been way better for what the event was promoted as.

 

I would have to disagree about the limiting part, though. For me, it boiled down to a contrived, forced gear check on weaponry when frame powers - a large part of what defines how I play the game - were made useless. I feel it pushed more people towards that one 'overpowered' weapon as they were forced to rely on it more and more over what their frames could do. I'm not sure this is commendable progress in any sense, sorry, but I do understand how limiting players in any way can be constituted as challenge - maybe I just have a different taste for it.

 

It seems like you have a very developed and valid point of view on the event, though, and I guess my experience with it was let down by very high expectations. I totally agree with you that this event has a lot of potential lore-wise and gameplay-wise to expand on in terms of variety and continuing the arc in the form of special alert-type missions, but as an event, I was disappointed. I really appreciate your feedback though, glad to see you enjoyed it regardless :)

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Well, the lore part is pretty subjective, I guess. I liked the idea of us only getting the information we actually need, with the rest just being there for you to discover. Also, if you listen to the radio chatter, Hek does threaten us with his "most vicious clones" so there's that.

 

And I totally agree that a long, complicated and interestingly arranged missions should not be the one to be repeated fifteen times in a row.

 

The caches were a nice addition, but they should just be added into the game, as opposed to being a side-quest on a mission you just want to be through with. I would absolutely support having ability to find such stuff in hard-to-reach locations of usual maps, I know at least three on the grineer mining base and at least one on the corpus ship that you can't just throw a look at without spending some time getting there. This game is long overdue on rewarding map exploration as opposed to just rushing all the missions.

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The caches were a nice addition, but they should just be added into the game, as opposed to being a side-quest on a mission you just want to be through with. I would absolutely support having ability to find such stuff in hard-to-reach locations of usual maps, I know at least three on the grineer mining base and at least one on the corpus ship that you can't just throw a look at without spending some time getting there. This game is long overdue on rewarding map exploration as opposed to just rushing all the missions.

Good thread on it here. https://forums.warframe.com/index.php?/topic/312371-those-grineer-resources-caches-and-how-they-can-spice-up-gameplay-in-general/

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I didn't mind the structure of the mission, though I agree it was lacking in the "Why are we doing this, who are these people, what is going on?" department.  Unlike Cryotic Front, this mission didn't do nearly as good a job of presentation.

What I did mind is the power limiting, but I feel like I should explain why in more detail.

With Cryotic Front, which I really enjoyed, I spent far more time re-running the mission to help other people than it took me to earn it myself.  I'm sitting on like 100,000 Cryo, after contributing tens of thousands to my Clan's research.

My experience was that by 13 or 14 exposure, all of my frame's abilities were so nerfed in range, duration, and strength that there was simply no point to using them.  A Ripline that reaches maybe 2-3m is not worth anything; Warcry and Hysteria were down from about 30s and 50s to something like 4 and 8, so similarly pointless.  I basically could have unslotted them all and stuffed as much anything else I could in instead, except there really wasn't anything that would have helped.  With health and shields so restricted, I didn't see any point to trying another frame that didn't have a giant Armor value to stretch things further; without any abilities to support them, they'd just die even faster.

So with Exposure nerfing my frame so hard, I simply cannot run the event mission to help other people out; because I've already run it so many times, I'd just be hammered by the penalties.  

I get that they want to have a challenge goal for really competitive people to pursue, but it's really not fun for it to be implemented in such a way that it becomes a hard-lock out of the content for everyone else.

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That's a very interesting consequence to the system, and having run through the event with others in my clan and stopping at 16 (I had to try out the endurance node, which turned out to be nothing new) I didn't really give it much thought. I definitely noticed that by exposure 12, my frame abilities were nigh-useless, leading to a reliance on weapons to deal out damage faster than I could take it.

 

The extended consequences of this system, that it would have severely limited the extent to which I could have - had my clan been larger and I had chosen to - helped other members was lost on me at the time because it was maybe the first time I didn't volunteer to help, so thanks for bringing that up for consideration :)

 

Having thought about it, I... find this to be a really backwards way of doing an event. Warframe gameplay is in no small part founded on cooperation, and as you point out, this actively discourages players from helping each other through if they've already completed the event. Sure, the difficulty stops scaling after exposure 15, but by then abilities are severely impeded across the board. While in Breeding Grounds, higher enemy scaling was counteracted by a higher score, there is no benefit to running a mission with someone with 20+ exposure points over someone fresh with 0.

 

Goodness, this sounds like a terrible way to go about running an event, and really emphasises the disappointing design of Gate Crash overall. I don't know how in practice this worked out for others, but on paper and from my experiences running the event in a group, it's just not something we should look forward to.

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Yeah, I understand - the links were there to be made if I'd looked hard enough, but it clearly passed right over my head, and I don't feel it was explicit enough to the extent that it was wholly due my own stupidity. But now that I've looked for them, I can see the connections now.

 

I can also agree with the point about only getting information that we need, with the rest being for us to discover. The problem I personally have was that in this instance, I think it was taken too far to the 'rest for us to discover' side. I was not alone in feeling confused and left out as to the immediate motivations for completing certain objectives:

What relevance did the resource caches have?

Add to that the more obvious disconnects like:

Why are there two generators?

Why does the world destruct if the torsion beam generator (which maintains the portal) is destroyed?

None of which are answered, it made for a pretty poor grounding in lore, which was what the event was promoted as - a narrative-focussed leadup to the release of Archwing. Having lost this particular shine, the 15-mission grind was a pretty sub-par experience, topped off with all the other points in my OP and others' feedback.

 

But yeah, I can definitely see that the resource caches are an interesting concept in their own right, and I would love to see them implemented better than they have been. Spobbles' link is a pretty decent suggestion, as well as ideas from here.

Edited by Vastaren
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Well, the real answer is "those aren't disconnects", those are just things you learn more through observation than through it being explained by lotus.

 

There are two generators because orokin designed the place to have two generators. Maybe one of them is supposed to be backup but the gate needs both to overpower the torsion beam, or the reactors degraded and you needed two to make the same work one was designed for.

 

The resource caches are irrelevant to the mission itself, it's just lotus noting that grineer somehow scouted the area and gathered their findings in sneaky places and telling us about it, being so ever helpful.

 

The world doesn't destruct, just the beam device and key explode, possibly with enough power to take out anyone still on that side of the portal. We don't know what kind of power the keys posess, or what kind of power the torsion beam needs to open the gate. Seeing how they melt down rapidly, I'd wager there's enough for a violent explosion.

 

I could certainly see DE extrapolating more on the concepts in the future, like explaining how grineer did the scouting and wether or not keys can be used as warheads, but I'd rather not try and force them to explain every little bit on the spot.

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I think this is where we'll have to agree to disagree.

 

Observation is a perfectly fine way to receive information (yes, the radio transmissions mention clones and Vay Hek's possible involvement), but as an objective criticism, I feel that parts of this branch into the realm of speculation ("the orokin designed the place to have two generators" isn't explicitly explained by Lotus, and the purpose of having two of them remains unclear). Furthermore, subjectively, a disproportionate part of the speculation came across less as 'mysterious' as it was 'annoyingly vague'. I think this thread clearly shows what I kinda mean, but I can also see what you're getting at in terms of this point.

 

The distinction between information relevant to the mission and information for the sake of lore is also relevant in this discussion. I can agree that we were told most of what we needed to know to complete the mission, but without supporting observation, speculation made it hard for me to relate to the event. In this case, I think we were told the absolute bare minimum in order to give us orders, but - and this is probably me - at no point in the event did I feel a compulsion to complete it because I didn't understand the reasons, which ties into the first paragraph.

 

On the other end of the spectrum, we were given extraneous information on the resource caches. They were not at all relevant to mission progress, and - this is where the criticism gets opinionated - served more as a distraction than a sub-objective when it was a wild goose chase with a questionable reward, juxtaposed with the urgency with which the Lotus urged us to progress through the actual mission (even if this also fell flat due to reasons in my first paragraph).

 

I'm all for mystery and not coercing every last bit of information out from DE, but the way it was presented drove me to the opinion that even if we'd asked, they wouldn't have much to add anyway, and it fell short of what I'd expected from a lore-driven event, which was what Gate Crash was presented as. I appreciate your opinion though, it did make me realise how much of it is contentious and hopefully the next event will feature a more even balance between both our perspectives on the topic of lore :)

Edited by Vastaren
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So, to conclude this thread, since the event's almost over and numerous other threads have been linked showing an overall negative response to the current event (threads which have gained quite the following and approval from not just a few similarly-minded players), I'd like to summarise on a few main points people have brought up in addition to my own:

So please, DE, consider the feedback we've given you for this event. It's not all negative, there are a few good points on it, and I know I sound like a pretentious wanker at this point, but to be frank, I don't know why this was such a large step back from the high points of Cryotic Front. I appreciate everyone's feedback on my own thread, and I can see that surely there are some lessons to be learned from this encounter.

Edited by Vastaren
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