[Psa: Weapon Changes (Sniper Rifles & Launchers)]

Yet another STUPID move. It's like you guys don't even like your players.

 

DE, why do you hate fun?

 

I could understand a reduction in maximum ammo to sniper level ammo amounts (~70), but these numbers are ridiculously low.  Worse, it just means they'll refill entirely on one ammo drop, so it does't really even 'solve the problem'.

 

And you also fundamentally misunderstand why snipers are so maligned.  The game has no place where a sniper rifle is useful, except perhaps now in the PvP that's going so swimmingly... yes, my eyes are rolling.

 

I'd like to say this is unexpected, but it's not.  It's like you actively want to drive your player base away.  What do you think people who've forma'd the Penta 4 or 5 times are going to feel?  I'm one of them, and despite the fact that I rarely use the Penta now, even though it's extremely fun to use, I'm pretty pissed off.  Are you going to refund my Forma now that you've ruined the gun?  You didn't do that when you ruined Trinity.

 

I hope this isn't the gamescon announcement.  I suspect it'll be something stupid like 'coming to Xbox one' but ...

 

I don't even know why I bother.  DE isn't interested in feedback.

 

 

[T4 Capture Rewards Rank 0 Rare Fusion Core And Nothing Else]

My clan ran several T4 capture towers last night, and 50% of the runs resulted in no prime part reward, or any other reward, other than credits and a Rank 0 Rare fusion core, which disappears afterward.

 

We all received the same broken reward, and I thought Rank 0 fusion cores were removed from the game.  I suspect a mistake in the reward table.

[Whats Your Kubrow Name]

Tomogachi Dog.

[Theliset.com - U14 Official Hype Site - Updating Daily (It's Here Edition)]

A whole lot of nothing...

[So...machete Bp...]

Rank it to 30 if you didn't have one, then trash it.

 

Like a lot of DE's "gifts" it has no value other than that.

[Anyone Else Not Hyped For Player Ships?]

 Wow, you're seeming incredibly ungrateful with this comment, especially with that last sentence.

 

And "Player ships to slow down transit, possibly with fuel costs? Nope." Wow. Okay. Nobody ever said anything about fuel costs. Why would they add that? What would be the point? Your problem is that instead of maybe trying to see the good in the update (which is the majority of it), you just make up worst-case scenario's to complain about. And you describe everything as if it's lame new useless thing coming to the game. Instead of just the usual 7 sentinels in the game, now we'll have those and a large variety of Kubrows running and flying around in game. It will be great. 

I've given them plenty of cash, played over 800 hours, and given them tons of useful feedback (they may have ignored most of it, as usual).  I don't owe them anything other than civility, which I've always given.

 

Transit costs were mentioned by Steve in one of the first livestreams where they talked about player ships.  They were going to use resources for fuel.  Depending on what it was and how much, those of us with over 1 million Nanospores probably wouldn't care much, but new players unable to leave Mercury for Mars or Venus because they have to farm up some resource to make fuel would.  Thankfully it looks like they ditched that idea, for now.

 

There's nothing in this update I'm interested in.  My clan feels the same.  We're all around rank 15 or 16, we've got hundreds or some over a thousand hours in.  None of them have been interested since before the Trinity changes, and they all report that every subsequent change has only made that worse.  There's not enough 'oh shiny' to make up for the massive grind for nothing, and not even Loki Prime, the Bo Prime, or the Wyrm Prime did much for that.  And here's a major update with a long list of things they again have no interest in.  Why am I supposed to be excited again?  Because of something they've been talking about for half a year and is going to be another source of grind?

 

No thanks.

[Anyone Else Not Hyped For Player Ships?]

I don't think there's anything they've discussed about the coming update that myself or anyone in my clan is interested in.  Tomogachi dog?  Nope.  Player ships to slow down transit, possibly with fuel costs?  Nope.  PvP Dark Sectors?  Nope. Player quests with rewards to get the things we already have, like foundries and market access?  Nope.  Well Ok, maybe a bit.  I would like them if they advance the story but that's not the feeling I get, and even if they do, that will be very short lived (I expect most players in my clan still playing will be done with the quests if they're not grind fests on the first night, and if they are grind fests, still perhaps done with them the first night via quitting playing all together).  The new warframe?  Maybe but we know so little about it and Steve doesn't want Scott to talk about it, when Scott obviously wanted to do so in the livestream.

 

They've been talking about all the stuff they talked about in the last livestream for several livestreams, and nothing seems to get better.  Oh boy, I can put a tint on my player ship, and it will finally actually pull me into the ship instead of leaving me outside in the vacuum despite my warframe's apparent need for oxygen, except when I walk outside the ship in some missions where lacking oxygen just drains my shields...

 

Update 14 looks like another lame duck.  Melee 2.0 got ruined by the absurdity of obtaining some of the melee stance mods (Glaive still stanceless?  Me too.  I guess Rare RNG behind Rare RNG, behind Uncommon RNG is a bit too rare).

 

The Focus system?  Who knows when that'll be, but I'm guessing 2015.  Warframe feels dead.

 

So player ships?  Bah.  My clan was more excited about the player hubs, which now appear to have been ditched.  Who cares about cosmetics if I can't show them off while doing a /dance in front of 100 fellow tenno?

[Thank You For Watching Devstream #32!]

Re: Mod system

 

In reference to the statement and responses below it, it's plain to me that DE either fundamentally misunderstands or is misrepresenting the issue.  Simplified, the issue is that progression in Warframe is dependent on mod drops, which means RNG, rather than time invested, which is not skill but effort.

 

Players tend to prefer a system where progression is effort or skill dependant because they feel it is something they can control.  Progression based on RNG is outside their control, and while effort can increase the chances in RNG system, effort and progression are not, strictly speaking, tied together. Particularly worse, RNG based systems get progressively worse as the player progresses because they're rewarded with progression less and less frequently (this is fairly common in effort-based progression systems as well).

 

My issues are many, but the first is that the developers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what's being discussed with that 'question', as did Rebecca as the community representative, and so they don't address the question at all. Sheldon comes closest, but not really.

 

This is what that question seems to really boil down to, the way I read it.

 

 

 

Ignoring warframes for the moment, weapons don't fundamentally progress as your rank them, except with your ability to add mods. The gun never does more damage or becomes more accurate, gains more ammo or magazine capacity, etc unless you have the mods that allow that. So the issue then becomes 'did you get the drops to get the mods'. This fundamentally changes the nature of 'progression' from one based on effort, i.e. ranking frames and weapons to one based on random luck, i.e. mod drops of the appropriate type.

 

 

 

We can consider that probability means you can 'grind out' mod drops, or potentially buy them in trade, and grind out fusion cores to rank them, but progression isn't fundamentally tied to warframe rank, weapon rank, or even mastery rank (with a few exceptions, mostly around the relatively low level of mastery rank requirements on some weapons). Mods and their ranking IS the real progression in the game, and it's fundamental to the nature of the way the mod system works, and it's entirely based on RNG.

 

 

 

Sheldon partially addresses this in the 'tiered mods' idea, in that lower ranked, weaker versions of 'required' mods will be more readily available. This is, by and large, a gigantic mistake that actually makes things worse rather than better, but that's a slightly different discussion. By tiering some mods to make weaker versions more available, progression is less locked to the ranking of those 'required' mods because weaker versions will, supposedly, be common enough that worries regarding RNG on say, serration or redirection are moot. You'll have something. But they aren't moot. Your progression will still be AS limited as before, because you'll get to the max rank of the weaker version of those mods and then have to grind out the RNG for the bigger tier mods anyway. Only now they're even less likely to drop because the tables have to accommodate weaker tier versions.

 

 

 

Steve side-steps the question entirely; either intentionally or unintentionally misunderstanding it. He focuses on 'skill replacement' but that's not the question. The fundamental question has to do with progression being tied to effort, or tied to luck. The mod system makes it tied to luck, even if you can apply effort to theoretically increase that luck (good luck with that on say, a melee stance mod for your glaive?). No amount of new mods will ever change that (in fact, more makes it worse rather than better), though changes in the nature of the drop table, or perhaps guaranteeing mods as quest rewards would (but not if it's tiered).

 

 

 

There's nothing, imo, fundamentally wrong with the choice to make progression RNG based rather than entirely effort, or 'skill' based, but Steve is deceptive in arguing that mods don't replace skill, if skill is used as a replacement for effort, the way the questioner uses it.

 

 

 

As an aside, I think the word 'skill' is misused here. Skill, to me, would be things like the ability to aim, lead a target, make good use of limited ammunition, proper timing of power use, etc. Skill would even including understanding and building your frame and weapon to best suit whatever content you intend to contest against. Skill is not just doing more damage, killing more enemies, or in the way it's used in the question, playing more often. Skill and Effort are not interchangable, but that's how the questioner uses it, and it allows Steve to sidestep the question with 'misunderstanding' or 'misdirection', depending on what you believe he's doing.

 

 

 

Rebecca just sort of plays along with Steve, and I think that's because she doesn't understand the nature of the statement from the player, either.

 

 

 

Then Steve side-steps again to talking about a tree system vs a mod system, without seeming to understand that the only real difference between a 'tree system' and a 'mod system' is that in the tree system, presumably your options aren't limited based on RNG. The branch exists, and can interact with other branches, and can even be adjusted, potentially on the fly (Diablo 3?), but progression on it isn't determined by what you were lucky enough to obtain. Total progression in the game might. Diablo 3, as an example, is very gear dependent, which is RNG introduced into progression (it's also both what makes the game tick for longevity and the aspect that most people get irritated by the most, because when the RNG isn't favorable, which it generally isn't, you don't get progression past a certain point). Warframe fundamentally limits progression entirely based on RNG, both in drops for mods and drops for components, blueprints, etc. That's a design choice, and one that often irritates players because the drops are sometimes so limited or seem so unfair as to cause mounting frustration, particularly as you get toward the limit of available content and the things that are dropping lose all value because they duplicate things the player has in abundance (a rare 5 core doesn't excite someone who has 1000 of them, even though it's very useful still).

 

 

 

Scott's points don't address the statement either, though they seem to when he states that there are commonly required mods. These are essential stat changes that could easily be integrated as things that increase with weapon and frame rank (one fundamental change between warframes that didn't exist but was changed early on BECAUSE of the rarity of Redirection, in particular, was that stats increased on warframes as they rank. More health, shields, and energy availability with higher ranks. This is something that could occur on weapons but does not). And I'm sure players with rank 10 serration and redirection mods would be happy if 1) the value increases as weapons and frames ranked were mathematically equivalent and 2) they were compensated with a 'super fusion core' that could rank up some other mod from rank 0 to rank 10, something DE has done before with other mods. None of this is without precedence.

 

 

 

 

I happen to agree with Steve that the corrupted mod trade-off is some of the most interesting things they've done with mods, rather than scraping the bottom of the barrel, but the channeling mods I don't agree. They're just not very good. The corrupted mods are interesting because they have large changes to one stat at a significant, those lesser, change in another that lean a player toward a particular playstyle. The channeling mods are neither strong enough nor do they lead to a fundamental change in playstyle; to use them you must channel AND melee. I do find it funny that the stats on helmets were essentially the first use of the trade-off mechanic in something the player could control, and the developers nixed it, and yet feel that corrupted mods and trade offs are important to player diversity and build choice. It's not ironic, just incoherent. Yes I understand that players wanted to wear a helmet for cosmetic reasons without stat changes, but that was easily fixed with a toggle to turn off the stat changes. Instead DE felt the need to remove the stat changes all together, even though it fit with the trade-off paradigm that they seem to think is so important for player diversity and enjoyment. Left hand, meet right hand. Do the same thing, please.

 

SKILL TREE vs. MOD SYSTEM

TheGreatZamboni: Abridged points: The current Mod Card system is not a sustainable one. Meaning, you cannot continually release mods and use them as a crutch for content. The Corrupted Mods were already scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of ideas. But to think you can keep the system interesting with a flawed foundation is foolish . . .

Having 300 Warframes and 1000 weapons cannot make up for bad design. Especially when said Warframes and weapons fall victim to the very problem at the core of the game: The Mod Card system. Because the effectiveness of your Warframe and Weapon are not tied to your skill or interaction with said items but to the mods you have equipped, the game becomes one of drops. You play to max Serration, Redirection, Focus, Primed Chamber.

R: What do you think mods offer to the base of the game? And are there any plans to go back and revisit the entire system?

Sheldon: Isn't that what we're doing with different tiers of mods? You'll have a graduated approach to what mods you're using, where the quality will increase. Just from a new player perspective, this is a good thing.

Steve: I think it's laughable to say we have a game about progression, where the progression has no bearing on the outcome. And the idea that mods replace skill in the game is simply untrue. Since the original roleplaying games, there has been an intersection between the value of items you acquire and your ability to use them in the right situations. The variety of builds available in Warframe tells me that there is skill in both play, as well as the design of your build. Through the mod system, you can make any build you want, and the choices offered to players will only grow. There are years of ideas in our backlog, and the time required to make things is all that holds us back. I think a big part of his issue is the required mods, which the new update will address. There are a lot of false assertions in that post.

Rebecca: I think our players are asking for something that will never be in the game, and some people may not like the mod system, but we think we can work with it and make the game fun

Steve: We could do that skill tree with a thousand different options, but the mods are what gives Warframe it’s depth. It’s different than the trees that people expect. We went through this already in U7. The possibilities for energy and slot balance is orders of magnitude higher than any tree system.

Rebecca: I suppose the frustration is what more mods can we make? We get complaints about mods like Handspring and Warm Coat...

Steve: I agree and hear that those are bandaid mods, but those are few and far between. I think there's a lot more interesting things done with mods, like tradeoffs or channeling efficiency.

Scott: If you go to the forums to find your best build for anything, there's often a giant thread of people comparing and contrasting. There are those common mods that you feel like you have to have, though.

Steve: The biggest flaw is the lack of tradeoff for buffing up mods other than increased capacity. The kind of thing we did with corrupted mods or channeling stances is something we could work on over time.

[Malicious Raptor Rarity And Can't Be Traded]

Why wouldn't it be something you can trade?  What other mod are you not allowed to trade?

 

Sounds like a bug.

[Why All This Hate?]

Because people can't be content to play the way they want and let others play the way they want.  The complainers want to control the other players and make them play in a manner that's deemed "ok" to them.

 

The complainers should have no voice.  They don't offer any useful insight into the game, they just ruin everything they talk about when DE listens.

 

And DE listens far too much.

[Am I The Only One Who Don't Really Want Kubrows?]

I don't need a tomogachi in Warframe.  There's already enough boring crap to wade through for fun things without having to 'train' it.

 

Whatever.

[Why Are Accessories So Useless?]

Please, never design a game.  You really lack a core understanding of game balance.

 

Most Arcane helmet stats, the ones with worthwhile boosts of course, not counting the junk ones, had stats that were worth two or more ranks of comparable mods.  Whilst having literally no downside of any merit.  Additionally, they can at times allow the user to fully circumvent utilizing a whole mod slot to get a to a point others need to use two slots to reach.  We're hard capped in the number of mods slots available, so having the ability to save an entire slot is a massive advantage.

 

DE themselves noticed how much of an issue the stat helms caused and removed them, though sadly leaving them in for those already owning them as a gesture of kindness.

 

Just because a game is PVE, doesn't mean balance is pointless.  Nerfs are also quite necessary as are buffs, so of course people who care about the longevity of a game will ask for both when warranted.  The people who shouldn't be tolerated are the ones are the ones who don't understand game balance, yet still provide feedback regardless of that fact.

No, he has the situation 100% right, and you're the one who's wrong.

 

There's no balance.  There is just you, whining about how you're not as good as them, and making them come down to your level instead of letting them play the way they want.  You're actively killing the game.

[Why Are Accessories So Useless?]

We had that.  Player whining ruined it.  Now only old-timers like myself still have stat helms, and as time goes on their value will keep going up and up until no one can afford them anymore.

 

So why not? Because reasons.  What's the point of putting on armor plates that don't increase armor?  Reasons.

 

They're not attractive and they cost too much for the 'value' they bring, but if you're floating in plat with nothing to do with it, like many are, that's good enough.

 

The real reason?  Some of the stats on helms people liked were on helms they thought were ugly.  Rather than do without, they whined so they could feel good about themselves making it worse for players who didn't care how it looked but liked the stat changes.  Now we all suffer so they can make you play their way.

 

Same with the nerf to powers.  It's all about controlling how you play to appease a vocal minority who harass the developers into making everything weak, bland, and boring.

 

And the players are leaving.

[Void Vor And Kudos]

I'm not one to praise DE unnecessarily, but everyone who did work on Corrupted Vor deserve a hearty pat on the back and a Huzzah!

 

He felt challenging while not impossible, unique compared to his base character but familiar, and it felt like we needed to use teamwork, and that certain weapons (AoE weapons to be precise) weren't effective at all.

 

So Bravo DE, 'you dun gud'.

[Loot Tables Put Out By De Are A Lie!]

Random is as random does. If there is a 5% chance of you getting Whine Prime, there is a 5% chance every single time. Your chance of getting it are no better of the 7000th run than the 1st. Multiple runs give you more opportunities but your chance of getting it never changes.

The chance on any single mission is the same.  Cumulatively the chance increases as the number of missions sampled increases.

 

The entire point of a 5% chance on a truly random table is that after about 20 runs, you're extremely unlikely to not have had it drop once. 

 

So no, while your next run has the same chance as the run before it, the total cumulative chance is higher as you continue to run.

 

BTW, if Whine Prime is a part you want, chances are it's drop chance is set below 1%.  This is just based on experience with DE.  Back when we could still find the drop chances from the actual game, they were often set at .01% and lower.  You think about that and DE's continued 'promise' of less grind, and tell me you don't think they are lying.

[Rhino And Trinity Idea]

Itd be worse than it is now

 

DR scales with enemy level and fixed amounts dont

 

Thats why trinity is tankier than rhino

You keep talking and you keep being wrong.

[Amprex Woes.]

Perhaps it's been buffed since I leveled it, but when I used it the AoE damage was negligible and putting Metal Auger or another penetration mod didn't make it better.  In fact the overall opinion of the people in my Clan who built it was that it was pretty terrible for much more than killing infested.

[De. You Can't Ignore This Any More. (Penta, Ogris And Angstrum Feedback)]

What difference does the ammo make?  These aren't rocket firing chainguns.  You have to charge them or some other dual-fire mechanism.  

 

Ammo is relatively plentiful, and even low ammo count sniper weapons are fixed with an ammo mutator.

 

Why do you hate fun so much?

[So Who Decided Not To Buy Prime Access After Seeing The Patch?]

So is the working theory that DE did this to make it more difficult to get the new Prime material?

 

I have to say, I generally am suspicious and I come down on DE a lot for their decisions, but I wasn't really bothered by this. To me, it's increasing the chances at getting some of that other prime gear.

 

Of course, some of the items, like Frost prime, are such common drops in the void that including them in additional places likely is to decrease your chances of getting something of value, but more Boltor prime and Rhino Prime access is a good thing, IMO.  Those pieces were entirely too rare.

 

A better fix would just be to make the chances of all the pieces equal rather than favoring some things much more than others, but I suppose that'd be too much to ask.

[I Think It's Time Boltor Prime Stops Rendering ~130 Weapons Obsolete]

I disagree.  If anything, other weapons need buffed.

[Why Is The Issue Of "nerfs" Met With Such Hostility Here?]

How can a reduction of player choice possibly be used to argue against nerfs when you can't even join a T3 survival without someone insisting that someone runs a Nekros or a Trinity?

 

If anything, the idea of balance (which includes both buffs and nerfs) is to give players more real choices apart from "Well, do I want to support my team and actually be useful, or do I want to be half as effective and actually have fun playing a frame I like?" or "Well, I can put in this bonus to puncture damage mod and get 100 more dps, or I can put in this elemental type mod that will remove my favorite status effect, create a damage type that is supposed to scale worse against these enemies, but still increase my overall DPS by 2000."

 

When some things are so stupidly powerful that they defeat the purpose of having other options, even though the other options were intended to be better in certain areas, it eliminates player choice and leaves you with a right answer, and a wrong answer.

 

When was the last time you even saw someone playing a banshee anyway? In fact, I'm pretty sure 90% of the warframes I've seen in the past 3 days have been a Rhino, Nyx, or Loki, but don't worry, they won't get nerfed, because that would limit player choice.

Well, I don't play much anymore now that it's nerfframe, as all 40+ of my clanmates have all stopped playing as well, but before that I used to frequently see Banshee.  Ash?  Not so much.

 

The problems you're talking about are all different.

 

Nekros doubles loot, and specifically increases the drop rate of Ox tanks.  Why?  More RNG rolls on the corpses, flat out.  He's not required, but it sure helps.  Trinity?  Doesn't even get taken anymore really, but prior to that it was only needed if you were going to stay a long time.  My clan would often run a 30 or 40 minute survival with plans to exit at that time no matter what, and we wouldn't bother with Trinity.

 

This is the issue; once things reach a state where they're powerful enough for the content you're trying to do, you have choice.  It doesn't matter if you could do 2000 extra dps if you still kill it in a few shots without that 2000 dps.  But if you have to have that 2000 dps to kill it?  Then the other isn't viable.  It needs buffed, not the 2000 dps weapon nerfed.

 

The Burston is a crap weapon.  No matter how you mod it, it's going to be a crap weapon.  It's not viable.  That doesn't mean we nerf all the other weapons until they're equally useless.

 

The Boltor Prime is AWESOME.  It has some issues, but it's a great, all around fun weapon.  But you can do the content with other weapons without much trouble.  The Boltor prime may do a lot more damage than say, the Latron Prime, but the Latron Prime is more than good enough, properly modded.

 

That's choice.  I can choose to take a semi-automatic rifle with pinpoint accuracy and great crit damage, or I can take a fully automatic rifle with a need to lead targets and accept  misses at longer ranges due to a firing cone.  Or I can take a rocket launcher, or a grenade launcher, or a bow with great puncture damage.  I can take a shotgun pistol I have to be close enough to make out with the target to use, but get super high damage per shot, or I can take a pistol with a delayed explosion that fires a glob in an arc and requires more careful planning, but does full damage no matter the range at which it hits.  Choices.

 

But if you nerf a weapon, it drops out of the 'viable' category and now it's not a choice anymore.  See Acrid.  You CAN'T USE the Acrid in high-level content anymore, because people cried and cried until it got nerfed.  Now it's useless.

 

Say what you want.  Reality bares my argument out, over and over.  I dare say it's almost empirical in nature, how closely what I say will happen and what actually happens.  That comes from paying close attention since closed beta.

[Would You Care About Pvp If It Was Balanced?]

No.  I don't want to play this PvP.  There are a ton of PvP games that are 'balanced'.  I want to play a PvE game where it's unbalanced, so I can feel like the badass space ninja and not the wimpy cargo worker with a gun.

[Why Is The Issue Of "nerfs" Met With Such Hostility Here?]

Agreed.

 

I'll further add to my previous post. If someone spent plat to buy a specific weapon or Frame because of its power and then spent several days putting formas into it and leveling it up multiple times to make it as powerful as possible, of course they're going to be very upset when topics arise about nerfing their item. Most of the time, the topic creators wanting a nerf are not affected at all by it. In fact they're usually the ones benefiting because they don't use said item, making their gear better in comparison.

 

What it usually comes down to is no one likes having their money or time wasted. I could care less about the weapon or frame nerfs that happened before I started playing or achieved that content.

 

For example, the Frost nerf didn't affect me at all because I had not acquired him or spent any time formaing him. And really, DE don't always balance things fairly. The content in question usually gets nerfed into the ground until enough uproar is raised from the community to change it.

 

I actually tried Frost and from what I can see, they didn't make any of his other skills viable enough to really use. Even Avalanche just doesn't do enough damage or utility to justify using it.

That's an ongoing problem.  Another example is trinity.  After her nerf, the nerfers went around claiming she actually got buffed because of the changes to her other skills, like Energy Vampire.  The problem is that in a game where energy is relatively abundant (nekros, energy siphon, efficiency mods), Energy Vampire is largely unnecessary.  No one is really energy starved in this game.

 

The nerfers' solution?  Nerf energy drops to make Energy Vampire more necessary.

 

Every nerf's problem is evidently fixed by further nerfing players and making their experience collectively worse.  It's a fundamental idiology that you make challenge by making players have to work harder to do the same thing they're already doing, rather than making them adapt and play differently. It's what makes bullet sponges rather than interesting enemies, because challenge created by having to shoot them more is easier to implement than having them behave in such a way that you have to behave differently to succeed.  And the natural response to that is min/maxing, to make sure you remove the tedium as much as possible.

 

That's right, the natural response from players to nerfing is to further focus in on narrow options in order to become as powerful as possible and reduce the boring gameplay as much as possible.

 

This is the basis for my arguement.

 

1) Nerfing reduces player choice, via the above demonstrated phenomena.  

2) Player choice == fun.  We have more fun when we have more 'agency' in what happens while playing.  Having the option to shoot an enemy, cut off it's head, or burn it to death is more fun than just having the option to cut off it's head.

3) Therefore, nerfing reduces fun because it reduces choice.

 

For an example of how to make Energy Vampire a viable choice vs say, Blessing, you need to look at how the game actually plays, and make EV useful IN THAT reality.  If EV say, removed energy for special moves from enemies (i.e. they couldn't chuck grenades, do their ground slams, boost other enemies shields, spawn shield or attack drones, etc) It'd be a much more viable skill.  The energy bonus would be just that, a bonus, but the utility would be something universally useful.  It would create a viable option for players while playing.  Instead, it just gives energy, something they already have an abundance of, but now it gives it 'better', even though that's effectively no better because it's still entirely unnecessary.  I suppose you could try using it to substitute for Nekros and/or Energy Siphon, allowing you to use different mods, but most players who forma their frames forma the Aura slot to match Energy Siphon first, so they're not going to change anyway, and the bonus loot caused by having Nekros pop corpses is too important to ignore in favor of energy vampire.

 

The same goes for Avalanche.  It's damage is static, so it doesn't scale, and it's CC is so short that the skill isn't useful for that.  Freeze is a single-target skill that's under powered in every way, and Ice Wave wasn't even touched and is generally considered useless except when the enemy must come down a specific path, AND if the enemy is so weak that you do significant damage to it with the wave, which means low level stuff you're better off just mowing down with even crap guns.  So Snow Globe, despite being weaker, is still the only good skill on Frost.  At least with the damage scaling health it's now viable; it's initial nerf made it useless and Frost entirely useless.

 

This is just going to be a repeated pattern.  I've had this argument with many people, and unfortunately reality always proves me right.

 

Nerfing in warframe always turns out badly, at least at first.  If we could skip the 'OMG this sucks and has no use phase' and get to the 'Well, at least this can be used even if it's weaker and irritating', we could have a genuine discussion about nerfs without hostility, but that's not what plays out.

[Why Is The Issue Of "nerfs" Met With Such Hostility Here?]

Those enmies are not different, they re the same enemies with more HP and more damage to give the "simulation" of a challenge that is desperately lacked in this game, then again, i have nothing against you for suggesting it, at best it'd be a ncie bandaid fix till enemies become more of a threat without the threat of killing us in one hit.

 

 

From what i've seen on both players and the Wiki, the Brakk is still easily the best secondary in the game and better than some primaries. So i'm pretty certain the brakk isn't as bad as you're making it out to be. However it is true that due to the fall off nerf and other changes, shotguns are grossly inferior to rifles at this point, the but that can be solved, the issue is when.

The Brakk has a steep damage drop off; you need to be in melee range to get it's listed damage.  It's not actually a very useful weapon (I've had one since the event, back when it WAS useful).

 

But you'll still see it used as an example of something that needs nerfed.  Why?  It's already hard to use well.  But you obviously didn't understand what's wrong with it, and still use it as a 'nerf needed' example.

 

And that tends to be the big problem.  Nerfers don't really understand the game, they just don't like something, and rather than just play how they want to play and avoid it, they get mad because someone else is using it (or perhaps because someone else has this supposedly uber Brakk and they don't, so they want the Brakk to be worthless so they don't feel bad).

 

And DE almost ALWAYS handles the nerfs badly.  They may or may not get fixed later, but they screw the pooch on every single one.  Ok, I admit the latest Nova nerf isn't bad (perhaps for once someone at DE thought maybe they ought to see if they could change it without making it useless like they did to Blessing?).

 

This is a PvE game.  Every nerf request is essentially 'I want the game to be more tediously difficult, for the sake of tedium'.  You're not asking for more challenge, or to make something more useful, but to make something weaker for the sole purpose of making players have a harder time achieving victory than they did before.  

 

Trust me, if you don't think endless defense and survival, and their ever increasing health, damage, and armor amount to 'more fun', then forcing that scale downward by nerfing the player abilities and weapons isn't going to be fun.  You're not making the game more interesting or fun, you're just making everyone weaker.

 

And that's tedium.  Shield Lancers are fun because they require different tactics than unloading on them (unless you're prepared for them) than regular lancers.  But nerfs don't make more enemies like shield lancers; they just make you have to empty more shots into the same enemies or wait more often for your shields to restore.  Pointless tedium.

 

So yes, they're met with hostility, and justifiably so.  More to the point, the nerfers never seem to have an actual plan for how to 'balance' it other than to just make it weaker, usually to the point of uselessness.  Is it any wonder we get the nerfs we get, like the original snowglobe nerf, with the sort of nerf threads that DE uses to justify weakening the players?

 

And why does DE want the players weaker?  Because it supposedly increases longevity and makes you more likely to buy/use platinum instead. More Tedium == more plat to get around tedium, either via trading, or in catalysts and reactors, or forma purchased, or key packs, or even just giving up on the tedious RNG and buying the thing you want via a prime pack.

 

And you mindlessly play along.  You call your cries for nerfs 'balancing', as if they were equivalent.  Sorry, but I'm not fooled.

[Why Do People Feel The Game Should Be Balanced To Endless Missions?]

I think that, like many others, I come in and out of this game in phases.  

 

For a long while, I found survival and defense missions to be the ONLY reason for playing.  When dark sectors came out, another reason for playing arose.  

 

I no longer do defense or survival missions for the difficulty, I do it for the rewards.  I've been harvesting and burning through all of my tower keys (finally) with my favorite weapons and my favorite Warframe.  I farm for credits and rewards to trade with clan-mates.  

 

CLANS and DARK SECTORS are my new reason for playing.  They give a nice alternative and allow players to get heavily involved in clan activity.  

 

You may say that individual players do not matter for this, but you are wrong.  I have farmed 200k within two days by joining void missions in recruiting and selling rewards.  These credits go towards solar rail conflict battle pay.

 

Why conquer a survival mission for an hour when you can hold a solar rail for a week.

 

I thank DE for their addition of solar rails and clans.  I don't give a damn about endless missions anymore. (although survival is somewhat useful depending on the rewards you get.  not worthwhile after 30 minutes however).

Most don't give a crap about Solar Rails.  There's no real value to them, except for putting your alliance's name up 'in lights' for a bit.  An alliance you can't show other's you're part of, which means nothing.  Or you could try to hold it as a clan.

 

There's no value in the credits or materials it returns in taxes except as battle pay, and nothing in the Dojo to use it on if you could get it out of the alliance.  There's no progression.

 

It's mind-numbingly boring.  I'd rather play survival for 2 hours than run Solar Rails, except for the experience.  Particularly conflict rails.

 

And the PvP idea for it?  Yeah, that looks pretty bad.  DE is grasping at straws, and for many of their players, they've been going in the wrong direction for months.