Trylobyte
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Posts posted by Trylobyte
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Being something of a master at using and causing hull breaches (My friends have even nicknamed my pistol 'Hull Breach' because of how many it causes by accident) I can add some insight and some suggestions.
Hull Breach Facts:
1) Shooting out a window will automatically stagger everything in the same room when the breach occurs. I'm not sure if it still staggers people immune to normal stagger effects, such as people swinging Momentum melee weapons.
2) Causing a hull breach instantly locks the room down. Solving the lockdown opens the room up and shuts the breach.
3) Things in the same room as an active breach slowly take damage over time, at a rate that's something like 5 HP per second. This starts with shields.
Hull Breach Suggestions:
1) Make hull breach damage a percentage instead of a flat number. Right now I don't really fear hull breaches because my Excalibur noobsuit has 460 shields, and unless I'm being shot at by half a dozen guys when I'm closing it I'm not really concerned about the breach damage since it won't go through my shields even if I sit there picking off everyone in the room first. Additionally, lighter enemies like Corpus ospreys or Infested leapers should take damage faster than big, slow-moving guys like Grineer heavy gunners or Moas because they're not as securely anchored to the ground.
2) Make regular guys have a chance to panic when a hull breach occurs. Low-ranking guys probably aren't going to keep their heads when all the air in the room is being sucked out into space, but drones, heavy troops, robots, and infected probably aren't gonna care.
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Noticed this a few times, and since my friend is a bit of a rusher it can make him really hard to follow in Infestation missions.
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On the other hand, approaching the game from RPG perspective and you will see upgrade as a more reasonable choice. You invest hours upon hours, Forma after Forma into the game to create dojo with lab and invest a lot more for weapon research - you should get something fabulous in return, not something bland.
Consider that Warframe has been trying to blend two elements together, it's logical that some mechanic like the current theme of laser/poison/fire should be limited to clan-based weapons but overall performance should be a little bit better than purchasable weapons in the market. They should use novel mechanics as a selling point, not a direct upgrade in stat.
I compare this to supercapitals in EVE Online. They take a very long time (Months of real-life time), enormous resources, and the combined work of hundreds of people to build. And unlike weapons in Warframe, they can get blown up. They were the ultimate trump card for a while, since having even one supercapital meant you were someone not to be taken lightly. But the game matured. Things got more stable. And you started seeing alliances that could field five or six at a time. Then ten. Then thirty. There are some out there now that can field 100+ supercapital ships at a time, and groups of 10 are considered normal. The developers now have a big problem to try to fix, where now they have these things intended to be rare and expensive, but over time more were produced than destroyed so now the game is saturated with them and virtually every major group has tons of them. In a game like Warframe, this means you'd either have to balance things for people who have the 'rare' clan dojo weapons (and risk making things too hard for people who don't) or balance them for 'regular' weapons (making things too easy for Dojo weapon users). Either way, someone has a problem.
Moral of the story: Things that are rare and expensive don't stay rare and expensive as the game matures unless they're being removed from the system as fast as they're being added.
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Um, what? Braton is most definitely one of the top 5 endgame primaries. Arguably THE best rifle, sans Boltor vs. high-armor/level enemies.
Skana on the other hand...
Seems I've been misinformed then, since I've always heard it compared negatively to the Gorgon. Looks like I can rest easier on that point then - I like the Braton because I've yet to find a situation it's not at least tolerable in.
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Volt brings up the same points I was going to. Right now, for instance, my Braton is approaching rank 30, but being a good newbie and doing my research I know it's not an 'end game' gun so I'm not going to bother using a forma or catalyst on it. Why would I? I'm just going to replace it soon because there are objectively better weapons out there. The Skana is another fine example. I'm never going to use it once I get the Cronus, which I got the blueprint and materials for within two hours of starting the game and just haven't bothered assembling until now. There's no reason to, the Cronus is better in every measurable way.
The way I would consider doing it is that instead of making 'strictly better' weapons at higher mastery ranks, instead have the weapons get more specialized. Generic weapons are fine for starting out, but as you get more experienced you're going to want weapons that fit your role better. Want to go raw firepower? Want to focus on sniping? Need weapons that give good crowd control? Well, you're now experienced enough to know what you need and you can tailor your weapons accordingly. Like fighting Grineer? Rank up so you can get that rifle with inherent armor pierce. Corpus frustrate you? Here's a gun that has a bonus to shock damage. Think Infested need to die in a fire? Have a flamethrower! If you don't have a 'best' option then players will tend to gravitate towards the item that fits their style the best. As long as there are good options for every role you'll see a healthy variety.
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Generally speaking, you're going to need buffs AND nerfs. If you only buff things, you get a massive case of power creep. Power creep, better than almost anything else, destroys the game experience for new players and that is not where a game wants to land coming out of beta into open release. As a general strategy, I would say this: If you see one or two weapons not being used because they're effectively outclassed by everything (the Skana for instance) then you should consider buffing it. If you have one option that is being used disproportionately often and is far above the average power level (the Hek used to be an example, I believe) then you should consider nerfing it.
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I'm too new to have suffered through the huge grinds that people here are talking about, but I'd like to chip in a thought from a design standpoint: Randomness is inherently a negative thing and a lot of people don't understand how percentage chances work across multiple trials.
Here's an example. Suppose you get a gun for your Warframe. It has 10 shots and a 10% chance to kill anything in the game in one shot. Most people would look at that gun as great! A 10% chance to kill any boss in one pull of the trigger, and 10 shots to boot! What are the odds it won't work before running out of ammo? One in three, actually. Now let's take another example, Borderlands 2. Legendary weapons have random drop chances from bosses. Certain legendary weapons are keyed to certain bosses and have a greater chance of dropping, up to 5%. How many times do you need to kill that boss to get a 50% chance you'll get its gun, assuming a 5% drop chance? A lot of people will say 10. The real answer is about 14. To get a 90% chance, then? 26? Try 45. There are some bosses whose drop chances are sufficiently low that you have to kill them over 1300 times to have a near-certain (~95%) chance of getting their legendary weapon drop.What does this mean? It means that for every person rolling in good mods, there's probably another person not getting any at all. With no way to trade items even among friends or clanmates, this can become an issue when you're That One Guy that never sees the one blueprint he needs despite running a boss 50 times. It becomes grating, hinders advancement, and saps the will to play.
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A simple suggestion that I think would go a long way in improving the Warframe experience, at least for me. Let us move where on the screen the various in-match HUD elements are. Right now they're locked where they are, which can become very inconvenient at times - For my personal case, the light near my computer glares on the top left of my screen, which means I can't actually see the faint lines on the minimap unless the light is off (in which case I usually can't read my keyboard). If I could move it to the unused lower left corner, then I'd actually be able to read it. I could then also choose to move my health/shields/abilities bar to a place right above my weapon and ammunition indicator, so I have all that vital information on one panel instead of spaced out. It wouldn't even need to be fully customizable, but just having options to choose where/which corner things appear in would be lovely.
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Fell through the map today on Aegaeon (Saturn), with the Grineer asteroid base tileset - Called the elevator, got knocked down under it by an exploding barrel a teammate set off in the fighting, and couldn't get back up before it came down and pushed me through the floor, where I fell for over 1000 meters before dying, where I couldn't be revived. Much to the frustration of my teammates, since this was at the start of the level.
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Another spin on Warframe lore, particularly Lotus. Contains minor spoilers.
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So, I picked up this game only a few days ago but spent a lot of time since then bouncing around the wikis, reading up on everything, and checking out the bits of game lore I can find. And from the copious things I've read, discussed, and played out ingame, I've come up with a fairly comprehensive theory of what is going on in ther Warframe world... and it's not a pretty one. Spoliers exist past this point. Don't say I didn't warn you.
Nobody really knows who or what Lotus is, but I think there's enough evidence in the game world to pinpoint it - Lotus is a former Grineer Ruling Sister. Captain Vor helpfully informs us that the Grineer are led by these mysterious Ruling Sisters, women who must have enormous resources at their disposal and are capable of getting pretty much anything they want. The Corpus, in a transmission intercept, warn that Lotus is 'traitorous,' because she is. Lotus was one of these Sisters at one point, but her ambition got too much for even a Ruling Sister and she decided she wanted control of everything personally. No sharing. No splitting. Just her. Obviously the other Sisters wouldn't go along with this, so she needed a plan, and she had the tools available to make one.
Stealing Sargas Ruk's research into cybernetics and bribing the Corpus for their technological acumen, Lotus was able to entirely mechanize herself, becoming a sentient machine or AI, just as Sargas Ruk wants to do. She used the resources she had as a Ruling Sister to buy Sgt. Nef Anyo's Tenno cryopods, knowing that the long cryo-sleep would have affected their memories. She set up shop in Mercury, where she knew the Grineer didn't really patrol too heavily, and began to train her new Tenno army, exploiting their memory loss to paint herself as a mysterious, enigmatic, benevolent figure there to help and guide them when in reality she's just exploiting them for her own ends. This means that, rather than the reasons she gives you, she has a few altogether different motivations for assassinating some people.
* By killing Nef Anyo, she gains access to the rest of his Tenno cryopods without having to pay him. Liberation, indeed.
* Killing Sargas Ruk ensures she won't have anyone else trying to follow her into the realm of the purely technological.
* Tyl Regor's death means the rest of the Grineer will eventually die off as well, removing one whole faction, the largest and most dangerous faction, from the field. The timeframe isn't important, since she's immortal and Tenno keep well.
* Councilor Vay Hek has no military value and she can't really come up with a good reason to kill him, so she cites some vagueness about 'balance.' In reality she wants him dead because, as a senior Grineer politician, he knows too much about her for her to be comfortable leaving him alive.
* Any advanced artificial intelligence has to be destroyed since they will prove to be a threat in the future. Jackal and Hyena fit this description.
This also has a few other effects on the game world that aren't quite as obvious, but make just as much sense.
* The Stalker is a Tenno that has connected all the dots about Lotus and gone partially insane as a result of realizing he's actually serving an enemy leader. He's since gone rogue and attempts, in his maddened way, to stop Lotus's plans by killing her best agents.
* The Orokin Towers aren't 'corrupted' at all. They recognize that the Tenno are being manipulated and want to keep their technology out of enemy hands, that enemy being Lotus.
* Not all the information relayed ingame is entirely accurate, since we view the game through the interface the Tenno see, and Lotus controls that. She may very well be bending things or 'mistranslating' messages to serve her own interests.
** Going along with this, the taunts the bosses throw at you aren't what they're actually saying. The tenno don't understand Grineer or Corpus language, so they have to trust Lotus's translations. How do they know your name? How do they know your clan? How do they know what warframe or gun you're using? They don't - Lotus does, though, and she's 'personalizing' their messages to make them sound more menacing and dangerous.
(Edit: Fixed a typo that was nagging me and added some more pieces to the theory)
What do you all think?
On Clans, Clan Research, And Warframe
in General Discussion
Posted
Standard disclaimer here: I'm pretty much a newbie. I've only been playing for 8-9 days. But I'm opinionated and I like to talk, so these are my thoughts on the subject of DE's pushing the clan system.
Clans are a huge part of many games. Ultima Online had guilds that would help each other farm resources or work together to fight the hardest dungeons (or other players running them), WoW has clans that raid together and help each other through content, EVE Online has its infamous alliances that control whole regions of the game and perform space-politics so complicated and intricate that they put the UN to shame. And these clans can be huge - The largest alliances in EVE Online can exceed ten thousand players at times and coalitions (informal alliances of alliances) can get over 30,000. They offer an outlet to socialize, a place to find people to run content with, and a general gathering point for people to trade gossip or items, discuss goings-on in the game, and plot, scheme, and otherwise think about what's happening. They add a lot to the game.
Warframe isn't structured this way and we need to stop putting so much focus on clans, especially when it comes to tying vital game content (weapons, frames) to the clan system. One of the biggest draws of clans in other games is that you have a large, diverse, reliable group of people to hit the hard content with, content that often requires a dozen or more people to even attempt. In Warframe, where you can have at most four people to do content with, 'large, diverse, reliable group' probably consists of a dozen people but could easily be a group of four friends that all run together and have complementary playstyles. Another draw of clans in other games is the ability to stockpile resources so that the advanced members can help the newer members get things they want and need faster than grinding it out themselves. That can't happen in Warframe since you can't help your clanmates out much with no way to share resources, blueprints, or mods; there's no trading system in place. You can have a large clan that's always active and online, always ready to pounce on alerts, but if the guy that needs Vauban Systems isn't online when the alert pops because he's at work none of that matters. The only things you can cooperatively fund are tied to the clan system itself, which seems like a real cop-out to give people an 'incentive' to use the system.
Tying content to the clan system isn't going to generate the sort of large, dynamic, active clans you want. It's going to generate conglomerations of small groups that are only together because it's easier to pay the exorbitant initial research costs so they can get the super clan-tech weapons. They're not going to socialize much, they're not going to stick together once they have what they need, they're pretty much going to exist solely for the purpose of getting the next shiny bauble or trinket. In short, the only reason right now to join a clan is because the game is bribing you to do so.
I don't think this is what DE wants from their clan system. Clan systems work well in a lot of games, but Warframe lacks the sort of large-scale content that gives people a compelling reason to join them. It's centered around a group of four rather than a 'raid group' of 25 or a hundred-man spaceship blob. This is not a bad thing - I like having a game that I can simply hop in and play a few rounds with a friend or two, where I don't have to get involved in the usual nightmare drama-storm of clan politics. I also don't need to rely on other people in order to do my job, since I know regardless of what happens I'm going to have to get in there and do it myself and so will everyone else. You can certainly have a clan system in and people will still use it, but don't expect to see clans that rival the giant clans in other games because those giant clans have no reason to exist in Warframe except for the sake of vanity. Tying extra content to it, especially high-end content, is just a form of bribing players to use a system that otherwise has no real reason to be used the way the developers intend it.