[Warbros Prime's True Event Score Denied by DE]

31 minutes ago, ChuckMaverick said:

Maybe I'm missing something here, but how would the 1108 points 'rollback' bridge the 5820 point gap?

not quite right; it was a total of 6932 points' difference, spread across five members

[Warbros Prime's True Event Score Denied by DE]

warbros #1

and respect to dicht no matter the outcome for some damn nice (and clean-looking) runs and strong competition

but the crux of the issue must be considered: just imagine not simply our 6932 points lost to this sort of poorly-communicated and inconsistent behavior but also those of any other clans who had runs going before the timer ended (under assumptions based on reliable past behavior) and were also greeted with the same disappointment of their last-minute efforts being shown to them and recorded only to be yanked away (and this is entirely disregarding the numerous long runs comprising thousands of points lost to network issues)

[Coming Soon: Devstream #80!]

Here's my question: Given the somewhat stagnant nature and apparent breadth to depth ratio of content, player progression, and opportunities for choice in growth (ie the modding system, equipment acquisition, and to an extent even the core gameplay loop), is it on the table to rework the overall reward structure and redistribute the elements that actually comprise meaningful player progression (obvious cases like the mandatory damage/multishot mods for weapons, along with grinding for the fusion points to rank them up) across different facets of the game (a positive example being the relatively recent changes to mod capacity relating to mastery rank, or in a less transparent case the scaling of melee finisher damage and stealth bonus affinity with weapon rank) and give the player more actual choice and incentive along with a tangible sense of progression? The damage type interaction system, enemy scaling, the modding system, and the reward structure are the primary issues I see at hand.

tl;dr The following is a long-winded set of reflections and thought exercises pertaining to this question and the impact that its potential answers might have, intended as open constructive feedback and support for the above question through a critical perspective formed from personal opinion based on subjective experience and observation, which may be better suited to a feedback thread and probably won't be worth reading for most people.

 

Spoiler

Statistically and effectively through the playerbase there will probably always be a mathematically best build for a certain application or a set of "best in slot" options (just as there will always be a loot cave or a Draco et al and there will always be players absolutely minmaxing their efforts to grind), but as it stands now there is a stiflingly limited set of comparatively "good" choices one can make without mandatory mods occupying the majority of at least one of two extremely finite resources (mod slots being the more static and crucial one here, with capacity being a limiting factor though less absolute given the ability to polarize slots), and the acquisition and growth of these components almost always comes down to simply killing as many enemies as possible as quickly as possible or as efficiently as possible sitting through timed rounds of endless missions. Though some efforts have obviously been made to start down the path of moving away from this trend (with unique rewards for newly added mission types, the arcane enhancement rewards from raids, sorties and their season rewards, etc), there has been much discussion over the years but little impactful change effected to the core aspects of the game that suffer these issues.

For example, it seems that damage 3.0/multishot nerf/the nuclear bomb has been indefinitely postponed - but as one of the core systems of the game and the way players interact with it (second perhaps only to parkour and general mobility in the environment, the speed and idiosyncrasies of which uniquely define the game for many, even with the loss of treasured mechanical interactions like coptering), the damage system is utterly critical to many other aspects of the game and how they tie together and has been acknowledged as (at the very least) in need of being "looked at." There are many degrees of possible change which could result in simply shifting the imbalance around and not accomplishing much in terms of the overall balance or sense of progression or difficulty/minimum requisite time to attain certain goals, as in the case of the recent blowing up of the void (a huge set of changes to the nature of acquiring primed equipment on a scale that seemed appropriate and necessary yet with questionable results) wherein time spent grinding was in part shifted away from the actual "endpoint" missions (with a 5-10 minute fissure mission arguably being much more interesting, varied, and tolerable than sitting through a 20-minute or 20-wave AABC rotation, yet robbing the void of much of any meaning and relegating it to the homogeneity of the rest of the star chart while further cementing the dependency on alert-like mission availability) and requiring players to spend time on any of a more varied set of missions on the star chart to obtain new relics in the first place (a move which makes sense from a blunt monetary standpoint, but reeks of some other underlying issues). If the mod system were to be overhauled, for example by "baking in" core stats like base damage to the weapon's rank (making "mods" become actual auxiliary modifications which change the behavior or flavor of the weapon rather than simply its raw power, which could still be potentially meaningful or even crucial, for example if elemental mods changed a portion of the weapon's damage output to a given type rather than simply being removed or adding to the total damage), it would need to be hand in hand with a reworking of the damage system, or we would have perhaps a less exaggerated version of the previous issue but still have effectively just shifted the problem to a different set of mandatory non-choices that players are forced to make in order to successfully progress through the game. This means that the damage system needs to be redesigned with these dependencies in mind and with support for both extant and possible new mechanics that may come to interact with it in some way.

Similarly, from a defensive standpoint, the damage system and the way that enemy scaling seems to so drastically skew the balance results in players having many available choices that are simply not viable on their frames (or are competing too directly for the mod slot resource with other aspects of the frame) to prolong their lives outside of reaching extreme levels of damage reduction or outright invulnerability through potential combinations of weapons, frames, mods, and abilities (the mechanics of which are an interesting point to the game like most other less than obvious or apparently unintentional combinations and can greatly add to its technical enjoyability with their discovery, construction, and implementation, but are often seemingly unsupported or looked down upon by the developers yet are not challenged by the incredibly weak options otherwise available). Forcing the player to make choices is good, but forcing the player to make the same choice every time is suffocating. This in particular is a symptom of no single thing, but a combination of the damage system, enemy scaling, and mod system as a whole. Thanks to the relatively low base values on stats like armor for frames and the fact that they cap out at 30 with non-linear bursts of growth along the way (or none whatsoever from rank 0 to 30 as in the case of armor), combined with the exponential scaling of enemies' offensive and defensive stats directly with level, effective player survivability from mods drops off insanely fast beyond the lower levels of content (say in the 1-30 range with 10-20 feeling like some of the most balanced play without fully upgraded weapons and mods); this effect is exacerbated by the general (but not completely consistent) tendency for scaling mods to be the only option for most moddable stats and mechanics meaning that, relatively speaking, the lower the base value, the less effective it is to mod the stat in any way. The option to instead choose a flat bonus value could alleviate the problem in many situations, at least under the assumption that the actual values used for existing scaling mods, base values, and new flat mods are rebalanced with these interactions in mind; this in effect means that the enemy scaling system needs to be addressed in order to bring both their offensive and defensive stats in line with certain bounds of intended play difficulty and how challenging it is to overcome that effect through choices made when modding. Having no definite limit, or a very high upper limit, offers the chance for players to test themselves and their wealth of armaments against greater challenges, and things like the daily sorties are a great step toward that with players being able to jump right in to a higher level of mission to play for better rewards - but in these cases, especially sorties, the demand for balance and addressing the huge disparity between killing power and ability to mitigate or absorb huge amounts of damage relative to players and how the resulting interactions feel is even more urgent (and the nature of the rewards and their availability also needs to be addressed).

Not all of these thought exercises or the potential changes or new systems that might arise from them are compatible, and not all of them are necessarily ideal or even good; there is no magic bullet that will fix these systems and the emergent symptoms in conjunction with each other. But entirely divergent approaches to facets of these systems might be advantageous in allowing player choice and game balance respective to the desired amount of time and effort necessary to accomplish a given task (something that really only the developers can decide upon and establish as a basis) relative to their time investment and accrued "material" wealth, especially in the case of the mod system. If we consider the case of easily identified "mandatory mods" simply vanishing and the resultant power gap being adusted for by integrating natural growth with weapon rank or other measures of progress or adjusting the numbers and interactions of enemies to account for the discrepancy, then the possibility arises that players also lose a dimension of customization and choice in their builds and approaches to the game - this is especially true if instead of simply identifying mandatory mods based on statistical usage and effectiveness we look "lower" and more fundamentally at the nature of stats and mechanics within reach of the player through installing mods. Looking solely at basic frame and weapon stats, we might be able to identify those that directly translate to effective damage output over time (firerate, clip size, damage, power strength, power range, etc), or survivability over time (health, shield, armor), or some other metrics that measure objective relative performance, and we might consider that these stats should be exempt from being modded for the sake of balance and choice except by mods that change the behavior of interactions with that stat or offer a compromise (corrupted mods, mods for potential alternate fire or movement modes, etc, things that are truly modifications and not simply an objective improvement). However, the ability to make tradeoffs on these core stats is a positive thing that lets players specialize and adapt for given situations or goals, and the loss of this ability entirely would likely do more damage than leaving it in its current state of competition for mod slots and effective non-choices - so a possible solution lies in implementing another degree of customization along in tandem with equipment's growth.

In addition to mod drain capacity, having equipment's core stats grow with rank (either all or a select few as appropriate, with determinations being made for a given weapon/frame/companion/archwing's desired relative tier of effectiveness and availability with careful thought put into the base and growth formulas and values that comprise its effective stats, something that would in itself require a lot of work as a complete balance overhaul to the entire available arsenal) would partially alleviate the need for mods like serration, but additionally having a pool of stat mod points that the player could allocate to these stats would offer even further flexibility and customization. This might be accomplished with any one of many means of relative balance between limited weight of each point and limited number of points or some other means, but it might be most effective if each point allocated simply comes at a cost; the cost and bonus of improving base damage on a weapon, for instance, might be proportional yet relatively different from other stats, and have different effective costs for different target "sacrificial" stats, based on the mathematical relationship between these stats' base, growth, current, and/or maximum effective values for each piece of equipment. Diminishing returns or scaling costs might put effective caps on the potential for this system, or it might simply be limited by the availability of points to allocate, however might make sense in this hypothetical new context. There is the danger of these relationships becoming unnecessarily convoluted and through intent or accident obfuscating apparent relative effect and value of player choices, so the specifics of implementing anything like this would require deep study and ensurance that investment into this system is both meaningful and reversible or configurable on demand (with something like the current iteration of the focus system and its trees being an example of many choices which have overtly negative effects on the ability as a whole through increased cooldown for relatively little gain to simply pick and choose the few clearly superior choices, and little transparency resulting in easily wasted investment).

Ultimately these systems all facilitate a gameplay loop in which the players complete a task in the hopes of receiving a reward, ostensibly to be able to do so again more effectively and at different levels of difficulty and for different or better rewards. Player fatigue resulting from doing this over and over in the same setting and completing the same tasks was cited as one of the biggest reasons for the void rework, introducing the relic and fissure system that we have now - in many ways this is a direct improvement in terms of giving the player better granularity and choice (through limited assortment of rewards for each relic, somewhat counteracting the previously bloated void and derelict drop tables, and through being able to variably skew rarity group rates using traces to refine relics) when looking for any given piece of equipment or a single part, and encourages somewhat less repetitive gameplay when attempting to acquire primed equipment, but it is still lacking in some areas (entirely dependent on limited alert system, at once ensuring more player collision and ease of entry/participation for single players and groups into "pugs" but trading one dimension of player choice away) and somewhat obtusely spreads the minimum time investment for these goals across multiple sequential tasks (grind for relics, grind for traces as necessary, grind fissures with relics and traces as necessary) while reducing one of the relative advantage of veterans (stockpiled keys converted into relics and stockpiling of current relics have no direct value for new and upcoming prime parts, generally perceived as a bad thing) and reducing the overall flow of "extra" parts into the player economy (though it is debatable as to whether this is a good or bad thing for the health of the game, it has the connotation and appearance of being a strictly negative change).

Perhaps more importantly, one of the strongest positive things lost with this rework was the incentive framework (minimal and in need of improvement though it was) for players to push further against the scaling enemies and continue playing in endless T4 missions for several complete rotations, sometimes for hours at a time. This offered a kind of challenge, to a certain point, and even if it was eventually met with methods trivializing the process or "cheesing" the goal, the search for combinations of actions and effects to do this presented its own game and set of challenges (the simplest and most obviously directly supported of which might be the use of four corrosive projection auras to outright remove enemy armor, as its scaling is so extreme that past a certain threshold enemies become almost unkillable except by special means and the only way to reasonably continue playing against these enemies with the general toolset available and used in the rest of the game is to bypass the armor damage reduction mechanic entirely). The need for challenging content, especially if the game were to be rebalanced around a wide range of levels and with a fundamental restructuring of the interactions between players and enemies in missions for rewards, remains - sorties are, as discussed above, a good step in the right direction, and so are things like nightmare alerts (but where are the normal nightmare nodes now? previously a fringe reward for completing a planet's nodes on the star chart, they offered an elective increase in difficulty as a variant for a mission in exchange for unique rewards, one of few instances in the game), but now more than ever with the removal of what was previously regarded as a stand-in for "endgame" even after the introduction of raids and sorties there is a very apparent lack of content aimed at or balanced around such high levels. The redistribution of rewards previously accessed through this method of play using void keys was in ways a positive step, but in that aspect too there is an apparent need for further improvement. The new star chart offers a more structured path of progression for players, and the junctions and their sets of challenges and rewards demonstrate something of an improved paradigm for relating tasks and specific rewards, though the specific choices for some are questionable and the individual rewards often seem inappropriate for the challenge (especially when it comes to weapons, as there is only the smallest semblance of an apparent structure for progression or relative stepping for weapon effectiveness and level of player progression or content faced).

The aforementioned arsenal-wide balance overhaul would help to populate a list of potentially meaningful and immediately useful rewards for a given level of difficulty and progression, but beyond that there are some other potential solutions, especially when it comes to endless missions: scaling the quantity of rewards (or number of rolls for any reward from a given pool) or increasing the quality of the rewards (for instance by, assuming that rarity is tied to meaningful value, skewing the rarity group rates in a similar way to relic refinement), or even adding special or final rotations with unique pools of rewards at appropriate levels (the fabled "rotation D"), for successive rotations in endless missions could, if structured appropriately (and in conjunction with reworked scaling, damage, and modding systems), offer the incentive for players to continue pushing against upper limits and challenging themselves for higher rewards. Going beyond the issue of endless missions and scaling relative to rewards, the framework for choosing a mission to play based on parameters and desired rewards (along with changes to matchmaking and the ability to specify wildcards and simply jump into any public mission of a given type or other criteria) would likely help to address the way that many star chart nodes are still generally unpopulated at any given time and that outside of certain hot spots and alerts, the sol system has a "ghost town" feel to it (something improved in some ways by the star chart rework). To go even further beyond, elective modifiers for parameter-based mission selection (or even just the star chart nodes currently in the game) for unique rewards could offer another degree of enhanced flexibility and choice for the players; this could be done in several ways, such as the nightmare mission modifiers already seen in alerts (and previously in nightmare mission nodes, which seemingly behaved as something of a longer-form unannounced alert), or picking from a list of mission/enemy/player modifiers (extending the idea of dragon keys), or even imposing a set of restrictions on certain actions or set of specific goals geared toward representing certain styles of play or objectives within the mission.

Very important to any of these approaches is associating challenges with appropriate rewards, whether they simply be of higher relative value for higher degrees of challenge, or offer some kind of gameplay reward or even just a cosmetic item demonstrating having performed certain feats (perhaps even specific to that method of play, ie completing a mission with a short timer condition might offer something which could boost a player's speed or progress toward a cosmetic indicating their ability in that regard). If we consider the existing "challenge" system (random selection of a side task to complete for a very small affinity reward, with no apparent rules ensuring they are even possible for a given mission) and how it might be improved, as well as the mission stats currently tracked and displayed at the end of a mission, there is a potential opportunity to further explore the idea of associative rewards while expanding explicit support for various playstyles and clarifying the relationship between the questions of "what can I do?" and "what do I want to do?" as a player in the game: replacing the challenge system with a per-mission categorical rating system and create exclusive categorization for how a mission is played. As a rough idea, average movement speed, distance traveled, time spent in air vs on the ground, and total time taken to complete a mission might all be tracked, then displayed in a stats breakdown at the end of the mission at which point a player might be rated in an overall "speed" category and given a reward if meeting certain criteria, and further have an overall determination for whatever archetypical playstyle was used in the mission and whether the player qualifies for a specific reward or something as simple as tracking the number of missions completed in certain ways in their profile or earning progress towards something as simple as a unique syandana. Some other examples of these categories might include carnage (enemies killed, damage dealt, types of damage dealt, time taken to kill, consecutive kill chains, etc), exploration (tiles visited and shown on map, lockers opened, scans, obtained all syndicate medallions or caches, etc), or stealth (enemies stealth killed, most damage done, longest stealth chain, time and number of times enemies were suspicious or alerted, alarms, passively non-lethal stealth, etc), and it may be the case that archetypical categorization for how a mission is played might comprise multiple categories or a hybridization of those stats.

A potential pitfall to these types of reward structure is that certain rewards might become entirely ubiquitous and seen as "filler," or on the other hand become so niche and specific as to only have application for those specific styles of gameplay or endeavor, or be otherwise inaccessible (wherein specialization might not be necessarily bad, but for example earning rewards from the Conclave that cannot be used in the main game creates a disincentive and disconnect); further concern might be had that certain undesirable, unsupported, or simply meaningless and unrelated tasks or envisioned styles of play could end up becoming mandatory in order to obtain certain rewards, going against the idea of supporting gameplay styles without forcing them. There is also the obvious caveat that, despite however good or thorough any proposed ideas for how to implement new systems or fix existing ones in the game might be, there is a set of literal costs for time that the developers would hypothetically have to expend to actually implement and test any of them, and that in some cases it simply isn't worthwhile from a business standpoint or in terms of actual benefit for the majority of the playerbase.

Stealth gameplay specifically in this kind of game (with procedurally generated levels stitching tiles together, the current enemy spawning system, and the somewhat incompatible enemy behavior/alertness oddities) is its own entire set of problems and dependencies, and while I personally find it to be a very enjoyable approach to playing any game that supports it and try to engage in it in the context of this game as a course of habit and preferred playstyle, there are some serious deficiencies which should be addressed before it is considered as something more core to the game or as a gameplay style worth more actively supporting. There obviously have been long standing efforts at support and incremental improvements to stealth play (notably the addition of stealth kill bonuses along with spy and rescue missions and their stealth completion rewards, if of debatable relative worth, as well as enemy facing and awareness indicators on the minimap, weapon noise level being displayed in the arsenal, silencing mods, and the ability to reset mission alarms), but several crucial problems remain, ranging from technical or design oversight to the consequences of heavy-handed reactions to perceived abuse of systems. Perhaps most problematic is the enemy spawning system, something prone to many iterations and often undocumented reactionary changes over time, but which still seems to be something very poorly communicated to the player and allows for annoyingly inconsistent behavior with freshly spawned enemies not being eligible for stealth bonus and without warning breaking stealth chains, and enemies being able to spawn directly in sight of or even in close proximity to players and becoming suspicious or fully alerted or being killed unintentionally. Inconsistently, in following with the problems stemming from unusual or unexpected spawning patterns, enemies will often not appropriately react to or communicate their state of awareness to players (enemies audibly and visibly becoming alert for a split second and then continuing on their path with no apparent change in alertness or indicator on the map, or behaving visually as though unalert yet having the full range of reactions and awareness range and indicator on the map as being alert, rollers having an apparently unlimited FOV, etc), especially if they have previously been fully alerted and then allowed to "cool down" (enemies ducking in a row in cover behind a railing while perfectly eligible for stealth kills), or if they are of certain unit types apparently tied to "factions" not communicating alertness information between each other (drahk, hyekka, and their handlers, specifically). Further, enemies have little consistency in terms of predictable pathing and patrol routes, and will infamously get stuck walking in circles (making a close-range stealth kill almost impossible) or erraticaly turn and face unexpected directions. Other issues plague the experience, such as certain enemy and weapon types not having a matching finisher animation and thus being incompatible, enemies being resized and displaced to perform the finisher animation, unexpected delays or multiple instances of damage being applied which can remove stealth eligbility, poor communication of information to the player regarding the stealth bonus (wherein the displayed bonus indicator is not consistent with what the player receives and the actual value depends on weapon type and rank), and melee finisher damage scaling (inconsistently with other aspects of the game) with weapon rank.

Some of these ideas deserve their own dedicated discussions, and some are arguably of less overall importance to the health of the game and affect less of the player base than others (or possibly than other ideas entirely unmentioned here). Most of these concerns, and likely similar propositions, have all been stated many times before, more eloquently and succinctly or with more useful specific sets of ideas (theGreatZamboni and some others come to mind), but it seems to still be a set of issues doggedly haunting the core of the game across large amounts of time and new content (though content may be a misnomer for the majority of it as simply additions to the pool of available weapons and frames, fun or useful though some may be, in another apparent instance of breadth vs depth) and has the potential to undermine or already have undermined the health and future of the game, particularly when it seems that the general tendency is to effect changes through "band-aid fixes" which lean toward addressing the symptom and not the underlying issue or simply slowing down players' ability to grind and nerfing the most favored of toolsets and choices available rather than rebalancing or buffing the other options or the context from which these outliers emerge. These are just some things that I would like to see seriously considered and hopefully changed as a player.