SDGDen

Oh boy, SDGDen coming in with another controversial long-read! Lets tango yall. So, this isn't a new problem by ANY stretch of the imagination. but the recent "dante" issue really shows the problem quite well. Before anyone makes this entire post about dante, im just using the recent situation as an example, this post is NOT specifically about him or his nerf. I will not be going into whether the nerf was deserved or not and I will not be picking a side on what DE should do/should have done or shouldnt do/shouldnt have done. the posts on both the forums and reddit discussing the dante nerf generally fall into one of two categories: >the emotional reaction >the backseat dev quick word on the emotional reaction: these are posts that mostly just lament the nerf, which is normal and expected. People do not like it when something they enjoy gets nerfed. That's a simple fact and that dislike is entirely fine. Having an emotional reaction to the nerf, being upset, grieving even, that's simply par for the course and not what i'm here to discuss today. the second group, the backseat developers, are who i'd like to talk about. the players that like to claim that DE did something wrong and that actually, they should have done X or Y because of Z reason. This is the group that is trying to argue DE is a bad development company because of a "logical" reason. One thing that frequently bothers me is that these people.... don't have a clue about game design. It's a great example of "a user isn't a developer and doesn't think the same way or have the same goals". you can explain that in a pretty simple way: in ANY gaming community. not just warframe, ANY gaming community. the PLAYERS like strong things and want more and stronger things. however almost every single game, the DEVELOPERS do NOT want to constantly pump out stronger things because they're concerned about balance. something the players are not concerned about at all (as long as it's unbalanced in their favour) this difference in mentality is also where a very common idea that the community has comes in: "buff, don't nerf.", the idea that balance SHOULD be achieved but ONLY through buffing what is underpowered. From a player perspective this makes sense, because players like strong things. However, actually implementing balance in this way has some issues. before I explain *What* the problem is, lets set up a little concept: different types of power (or rather, different types of OverPowered) in warframe (and most other games) the player can be overpowered in 3 broad categories: >mechanically >numerically >globally mechanically overpowered means the mechanic itself is doing the heavy lifting, and would need to be changed to change the power of the item. numerically overpowered means that some of the numbers are too high or too low, and if you were to tweak those (without changing the item mechanically) it'd be balanced globally overpowered means that the item itself is fine, but due to its interaction with a global system, it ends up being much stronger than desired. at face value, "buff dont nerf" works fine, as long as you're purely talking *numerical*. after all, if you have a gun that deals 100 damage and you buff it to deal 200 damage instead, you can always just buff enemy health to compensate resulting in balance being kept. the problem is that this doesn't work with mechanical power. a good warframe example of this is revenant. revenant's mesmer skin is mechanically overpowered. it doesn't matter how much you tweak the numbers or how much damage the enemies deal, as long as the revenant player can re-cast mesmer skin once it runs out, they will never die. this is actually a combination of mechanical and global power because the fact that we can practically always cast our abilities is a form of global power (and so is shieldgate preventing you from dying during the recast window) warframe is not a purely numerical game, that'd be really boring. so we will have to deal with the mechanical and global factors in balancing the game, as a result. "buff dont nerf" will simply result in the players getting mechanically and globally more powerful over time in ways that cannot be resolved by making stronger enemies. this problem is part of why in current time warframe, the most endgame mode (EDA) makes use of modifiers that require randomizing your loadout among other things, to push down those global and mechanical factors. so how *do* you balance? well, there's one theory i like to call the "pivot" theory. Its a universal game balancing theory specifically for groups of items that are supposed to be balanced against eachother, but it can also work on items that need to scale up in power as you progress by putting those items into tiers and balancing each tier separately. lets pretend for a second we are rebalancing warframes, as in. all warframes. for this, i'm going to make some decisions on my own that are not necessarily what DE should do or what DE IS doing. step 1: choose a pivot. the pivot is the item that you find to be the best balanced within the group. the holy grail. I will pick excalibur because i personally think excal (as well as excal umbra and prime) are in a good spot right now, not to mention they're the posterboy. DE may choose a different frame. step 2: choose a margin of error. this margin can be quite wide for warframe because of the casual nature, the more important balance is, the tighter this margin should be. an esports title would be within 5% but since warframe is casual PVE, we're picking 25%. this CAN be even higher (for example, some of yall may argue that 50% is fine). this is just an example. step 3: put all the items on a scale from left to right, with the pivot in the center, warframes should be placed on the scale based on how much stronger or weaker they are compared to the pivot. step 4: for mental exercise purposes, we are gonna be giving every warframe a sticker. green for all warframes that are less than 25% weaker than excal as well as less than 25% stronger, red for frames that are more than 25% stronger than excal and blue for frames that are more than 25% weaker than excal. step 5: we're going to take the frames that have a blue sticker and evaluate them. *why* are they more than 25% weaker? if the issue can be fixed numerically, that's the first step because numerical changes are way easier to pull off. if a frame can't get within that range (like pre-rework inaros) then they'll get mechanical changes instead. if things are REALLY bad global changes could be considered. step 6: now, we're going to do the same but to red sticker frames. we'll evaluate, figure out why they're so much stronger, and look at whether they can be made less strong with just numerical changes. if that's not possible (like with our mesmer skin example from before), mechanical changes are made and if those dont help then global changes are made instead. global changes being made in step 5 and 6 are quite intense, because they affect the whole roster, you basically shouldnt do a global change unless you run into the same issue with many different items. and while doing steps 5 and 6, you do have to keep your other development goals at hand: the item should be balanced, yes. but it should also be fun, it should work smoothly, it should be intuitive and (in the case of warframe) it should FEEL powerful. in the "it should FEEL powerful", the "feel" part is actually doing A LOT of heavy lifting, and this is a design key in power fantasy. for a power fantasy game, you DONT actually need the player to be numerically or mechanically overpowered, In fact, balance helps a power fantasy because it sells the idea that the player and their skill are part of the power equation, what IS needed for a power fantasy is for items to look cool, sound powerful and feel amazing to use. style over substance. a 1 million damage nuke that has no VFX and just goes "plop" when launched doesn't feel nearly as powerful as a 100K nuke that has crazy VFX and bassy audio that makes your chair vibrate as your character strikes an epic pose. now, before anyone gets mad at me. the specifics picked (excal as the pivot, the 25% margin) are JUST per example, i don't know what the pivot should be, i don't work at DE. I merely spent a year studying game design, a study that (full disclosure) i didn't finish because i started a job in a different sector. Balance is still important, even in a game like warframe. but it's important in a way that the devs understand and act upon much more than the players. This is why the devs don't always listen to what the community says. it's not like they didn't hear you. it's that they heard what you said and took it to heart, but decided that for the good of the game, the course they took was right. whether they're right in making that decision, i can't tell you. of course, sometimes devs genuinely get it wrong. no dev team is immune to screwing up. but plenty of times, the devs are right but the players wont be able to see why because they look at the game from a fundamentally different angle. this is also why previously mentioned backseat devs are a problem. they think like users and act like users but want to discuss about the game design like they are developers. so the next time DE nerfs something, and you get into that backseat, think for a bit: are they genuinely in the wrong, or are their goals just beyond my understanding? or better yet: spend some time carefully thinking about *why* DE would do the nerf you're mad about. try to put yourself in their shoes. If you're gonna armchair dev, then inform yourself and think like one. Anyways, now that i've thoroughly called out and likely pissed off the masses while simultaneously giving them a shiny new piece of knowledge to entirely ignore, I'm going to go hide in the bunker next to where pablo is hiding from all the post-nerf vitriol. See yall next time!

the problem is that the game hasn't had the balancing effort it really needs for a really long time, in large part because this community LOVES to backseat dev without knowing how game design or game balance actually works. the devs keep trying their best to find ways to make the game more challenging without stepping on the toes of the community, the same community who will literally yell like DE personally shot their puppy whenever the word "nerf" gets uttered. so instead of proper, game-wide balance, we get uh... *this*. whatever *this* is. and the worst part? we asked for it. we pushed for this direction. DE didn't ruin warframe, the players did.

lemme just check my notes on what happens.... oh right. your account gets banned for negative plat. by all means. go do this guys! really stick it to them! show them the warframe community is not to be messed with and that the community knows better than the devs!

ya know, it kinda does say something when someone makes the statement "nerf crowd is dominating the forums" and the first ten reactions to their post are all people who fully agree. if the nerf crowd WAS dominating the forums, you'd expect to see someone immediately make the claim that either they aren't or that it's a good thing. anyways, hi. its me. i'm the nerf crowd. and uh, unpopular opinion but: warframe doesn't have an endgame BECAUSE DE listened to the "please dont nerf my OP gear" crowd. yes, that's you. congrats, you've made it onto the blame show. DE has listened to the community as a whole for YEARS, and the community as a whole apparently thinks nerfs are bad and buffs are good (Which is an emotional reaction because buffs feel good and nerfs simply don't) that same community has NO CLUE how game design works, why even in a power fantasy PVE game you need balance and why nerfs are an important part of game balance. the game is boring in the endgame because literally one player with one of MANY builds can take every last drop of challenge out of the game. if you want challenge you literally have to play solo and explicitly use severely underpowered setups (effectively nerfing yourself back down to early-mid game. then what did you do all that grind for to get to endgame?) the game is so easy that there's been multiple points in time where a monkey could have successfully completed end-game content. the solution to this is system-wide nerfs. nerfs to the ammo economy, nerfs to AOEs, nerfs to the energy economy, nerfs to survivability, a full enemy rebalance. we need these things to put the game back in a place where it can provide an endgame.

have been having this issue constantly, but both ways. when i WANT to do steel path (steel path capable gear equipped etc) i get normal mode. but AS SOON as i decide "alright fine, im gonna play normal mode and level my new weapons" i get put into steel path every single time. genuinely frustrating.

the bounties from fibbonacci are currently bugged and the queues are NOT separated. if you load into normal mode, you have a chance of getting SP, if you load into SP, you have a chance of getting normal. you likely selected normal, got loaded into a SP node and then the game went "wait a second you dont have SP" and kicked you out.

no, no it would not. the primes are already easier to get than the normal frames, if anything they should really be weaker than the normal variant, not stronger. or, hear me out on this one: prime parts require the normal part to build.

i mean, it was by the community's wishes that powercreep got to the point where any frame can do level cap now. so yeah. the game isn't hard. at all. it's piss easy. honestly, to me, it's easy to the point of being boring. granted, i used to teach raids in destiny 2 so my standard for difficulty is "carrying 5 newbies through a proper endgame activity". but still, it's (imho) way too easy. i hope deep archimedea will provide some challenge, or otherwise 1999.

god. nail on the head with this one. honestly, part of the issue (in my personal opinion) is the *scale* of the powerfantasy. there's no more "to do a mission most effectively you should build a team of 4 with specific roles", every. single. mission. has a couple of builds that you can run that are SO EFFECTIVE there is literally zero worth in running with a team. we've gotten so powerful that there's simply no point in building for a specific purpose when you can just build your frame to do everything and ignore the entire concept of team play. maaan, i miss the old days sometimes. in all honesty... that's why for a while, i stopped playing warframe and started playing destiny 2 instead, it's still power fantasy but because it's balanced-ish there's a massive reason to play in groups and even to teach newbies (which is what i mostly did). sadly i can't play d2 anymore due to it being involved in a piece of personal trauma, so i went back to warframe with some of my old crew. yet that "group play" social factor is still entirely absent. wasted potential honestly.

honestly, to me the beep is not loud enough when playing even with in-game music. i can almost instantly figure out where the demolyst is through directional audio, but i *have* to turn off my own music, and i dont play with ingame music. those two things instantly make the mode a lot less enjoyable for me since i mostly play the game with background music or while watching a podcast or something. i'd like for there to be some kind of non-audio indicator, not just for accessibility, but also because of how restrictive the audio-only solution is even for people with good hearing (such as myself).

those 10 being the following 10, as shown on the devstream: axios javelineers: styanax axios javelin augment, when case, a pair of specters spawn to throw javelins that create their own vortexes (so basically you now throw a spread of 3 javelins on cast), if the spear impales an enemy the vortex lasts 5 seconds longer damage decoy: loki decoy augment, when enemies attack the decoy, they receive 3 random status effects and reflected damage is increased by 350%, not written here but shown in the stream is this augment making an ENEMY into the decoy, i dont remember if this was a base ability change or an augment feature divine retribution: nezha divine spears augment, when a speared enemy suffers a status effect, all other speared enemies suffer the same effect. spear explosions deal 10x status damage elusive retribution: baruuk elude augment, every attack baruuk eludes boost his attack speed and melee crit chance by 5% up to 30%. stacks last 4s. from the phrasing here i'm assuming this is a flat buff and it decays per-stack. guardian armor: chroma vex armor augment, chroma's health takes 50% of the damage taken by allies, squad kills restore 5% of his health and increase vex armor duration by 1 second. loyal merulina: yareli merulina augment, no longer ride merulina, but instead merulina follows you and casts sea snares on a 2s cooldown, potentially even with sea snares subsumed off? parasitic vitality: nidus parasitic link augment, you and linked allies gain 4% max health per mutation stack (which can go up to 1200% with the passive augment). iirc this doesnt stack with vitality though. recrystalize: citrine crystalize augment, enemies killed by the crystal growths stagger and spread those growths to enemies within 20 meters valence bond: lavos passive augment, ability casts grant 250% elemental damage, the element lingers as a status effect on your weapons for 20s. speculation but: what i *think* this means is that your weapons will always have 250% extra damage of the last element you cast, and will effectively do the status effects of all elements you cast in the last 20 seconds. wrath of ukko: kullervo storm of ukko augment, wrathful advance moves the storm to the teleport location AND increases its duration by 6 seconds. obviously, a decent chunk of these are pretty damn good, we're likely to see loyal merulina, valence bond and recrystalize become a common augment on their respective frames. but which of these has the most meme potential? out of these, only damage decoy is for a subsumed ability, so that may have uses on other frames especially with the "3 random status effects" thing, i can see it potentially having use on lavos and voruna but those aren't really *funny*. parasitic vitality sounds like it could have some potential for insanely high HP amounts. think 10K hp inaros. divine retribution could also result in some status spreading shenanigans, personally i'm most excited to tinker with this one (although i am putting guardian armor, loyal merulina and valence bond on my frames IMMEDIATELY). so, which augment do *you* think has the most meme potential? what's the funniest, silliest or most "this shouldnt work" build you can think up with one of these augments?

tbh this keyglyph is EASILY the worst one. just because it blocks your shots and spawns on your location.

https://forums.warframe.com/guidelines/

this amount of powercreep only happened in the first place because DE allows community sentiment to steer the ship. a while ago i even got the chance to ask the devs what they thought about the balance VS power fantasy dilemma and according to them, power fantasy is still more important to them than balancing the game.

lets goooo! now lets see if DE actually does anything about the non-issue or general gameplay balance. my bet is: not really.

hey, i don't like the situation either. fact is just: the people who even consider it a problem are only a small chunk of the playerbase. even if they "squared up to the actual problem" there are plenty more players "squaring up" against ANY form of nerf. when saryn got nerfed DE received actual death threats, and it hasnt really gotten any better. should it? no. absolutely not. but is it right now? YES. absolutely. this is what warframe is now. most people *are* cool with this. just look at all the replies you've received. they're mostly complacent with the current situation. im well aware of that, but the overal community doesnt understand the idea of "PVE games still need balance". you're yelling at a brick wall when you're arguing that nerfs are good. also, you're kinda preaching to the choir here. i've been a massive advocate for sweeping game-wide nerfs to fix these kinds of issues. there already are a fair few anti-invis mechanics nowadays, some enemies can even bypass invis in that they still see you, and there's a lot more AOE-based enemies now than there used to be when loki was meta.

imho, they need to remove the "1 second full invulnerability" from mesmer skin, maybe give it more charges to compensate or give it a relatively high maximum cap of charges since his other abilities can restore charges. the biggest issue is that thralls will usually instant-die due to teammates, fix that and his kit should already work *a lot* better. as for the rest of the thread. yes revenant is a crutch, but he's far from the only one. warframe simply isn't balanced. period. and because of the kinds of responses showcased in this thread and DE listening to those responses, warframe won't BE balanced. if you're looking for a game where you can actually enjoy the gameplay on public missions, you should go somewhere else. in warframe you'll run into largely two groups of people: those built for full-group carries (who will not leave you with even a crumb of the action) and those who've stacked fully into taking advantage of those carries (which is where most revenant players end up). ironically this issue prevents MOST of the build expression that people tend to tout as being a core selling point from being effective. until DE takes the nerf sledgehammer to *most* of the game, your only real option for a balanced game that allows you to play whichever loadout you enjoy with reasonable effectiveness and without being screwed over by randoms is to play solo or quit and go play something else.

i actually use this build! i find it personally a lot better than razorwing blitz because you can finetune it to the exact speed that you want (meaning it wont end up being much too fast to fly through tiles efficiently with) and with regenerative molt, it also gives you quite a good survivability method.

i dont disagree that the current system is terrible and leads to the stupidly inflated prices we see on the player market, but arguing that this is a "fix" to the RNG mechanic when it's a bypass is disingenuous. same for claiming this doesn't affect the RNG mechanic. imho, the more rolls a weapon has, the higher your chances should be for the more popular stats (so at that point your chances of increased IPS, zoom, magazine size, reload speed etc should be much lower). i could also see the concept of rolling multiple different versions at the same time and picking between 3 or 4 rolls rather than just picking "keep current" or "keep new". another interesting thing DE COULD do is have a consumable resource that affects the chances of specific stats, and put that resource in the various end-game activities. then you'll have a massive incentive to go play all the various endgame things so you can "finetune" your riven much more easily.

"make riven RNG better by simply giving the players a way to avoid the RNG" that's not making the RNG system better, at that point you may as well suggest the ability to reroll individual stats or even just... have a flat cost of kuva to set specific stats. all your suggestion does is allow the player to not deal with the RNG.

i mean, yes? but enemies as a whole are unproductive to wfs gameplay, all they (and reloading) do is slow down how quickly you can finish missions and get your loot.

yes DE, show some consistency. by nerfing nourish, roar and other overtuned helminth abilities by 85% too. anyways, this change still nerfs the helminth version but keeps the power on mirages own version, im still of the opinion they really should remove eclipse from helminth and give it a range-nerfed version of her 2 instead but oh well. this'll work.

our experience isnt the same, precisely. i come from an era where mid-game you didn't even *think* about formaing your frames i come from an era where level 80 non-SP grineer were considered so difficult you *Had* to have a full squad of corrosive projection. i come from an era where trinity and loki were meta picks. i started playing warframe in 2014, long before 5 or 6 forma builds became meta. people would run 1 or 2 forma when they reached endgame and *that was it*. there were no archon shards, practically no primed mods, no exilus mod slot, no umbra mods, no archon mods. the only expensive mods were corrupted mods and those were frequently not even maxed so you could counter their downside with a single regular mod. not to mention: forma was not nearly as plentiful as it is now. the relic system wasnt implemented yet, forma came from the various void missions, where they shared the drop table with prime parts. level 40 content was not considered "super easy" at that time so until you hit the late-game you weren't going to really get many forma. clans spent *weeks* keysharing their various defense and survival keys so they could stock up on forma for their dojo. on top of that, i personally don't enjoy relic missions or re-leveling frames over and over again, especially because for much of my "mid-game" experience, the system where you keep capacity based on your MR wasnt there yet. formaing didn't stop being a massive pain in the clem until i was already an endgame player, and by then, why would i do it? i was doing endgame content without needing any forma. what's the point? our experiences are different, in that i have much more experience with a much wider range of subjects in the game, our expectations are different, because i'm much more aware of the place warframe came from, the design decisions that led to this point, the reasons for those design decisions. the reasoning behind your argument shows nothing but a false sense of superiority.

CC didn't matter long before things like CC immunity and overguard were added, because it was simply easier to nuke the enemies than to CC them. turns out death is the best form of crowd control.

a corner they *could* get out of by doing a significant game-wide balance pass, which would mostly consist of nerfs. also a corner they were kind of forced into by the playerbase not accepting the idea of "nerfs are necessary for balance".