Kilo24
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Posts posted by Kilo24
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There are many complaints about the design of Kuva Lich weapons and Railjack components as an RNG-based long-term loot goal, and there were a few points that I haven't seen discussed by players or the developers. I would argue that many of the issues that are frustrating players have already been handled in a much better fashion by rivens and their related systems; while rivens are far from perfect, it is worth noting how much better they work in providing long-term goals for dedicated players and to discuss why they do so.
-Tradeoffs versus Strict Superiority-
First and foremost, rivens that are strictly superior to other rivens are rare. While no one would consider a +Critical Chance + Critical Damage - Zoom Rubico riven to be worse than a + Zoom + Magazine Capacity Rubico riven, the fact that it benefits different statistics means that there's still a tradeoff involved and that there's something the crappy does that the good riven doesn't. More importantly, the rarity of perfect rolls and the host of potential options actually means that picking between two different rivens or riven rolls is sometimes a very difficult decision; maybe this one's downside can be addressed by modding or lived with, or you can deal with an elemental bonus that's not your first preference because this riven also has +damage, or maybe this other riven is a bit worse but your current weapon is better set up for its polarity. You might even want to have two rivens so that you can swap between them for different situations. And even unusably terrible rivens may hold entertainment value, as a -flight speed on a Drakgoon riven.
Contrast that with kuva lich weapons: the two traits they have are elemental damage type (differing damage types aren't balanced enough to make for substantially interesting decisions, and players have enough control over to kneecap many of the potential tradeoffs at play), and the damage bonus amount which, as a flat power boost, provides no possibility for interesting tradeoffs. Contrast that with Railjack components: while the random bonuses attached to Mk. 3 non-weapon components do have some significant potential, the sheer variability in the core statistics of the components means that those tend to be overwhelmed by strictly superior numerical comparisons. These limitations are in no small part because there are so many fewer options available for these components as compared to rivens, but I would argue that the current system is so limited that - speaking both from player reception and technical design/implementation perspectives - it's a worse foundation for building off of than a system without those random components at all.
-The Impact of a Bad Roll-
When you get a riven with bad statistics, it's still a good thing - you can spend kuva to reroll into a good riven. That kuva rerolling system is designed to be an endgame resource sink quite effectively: rerolling a bad riven has a high chance of improving it but rerolling a good riven has a much lower chance, riven rerolls cost more up until after the 9th reroll, and the rarity and value of good rivens means that there's demand for it. If you don't care to spend kuva, you can sell it to another player or transmute it. And rivens are hard enough to acquire that they still retain their value. Even though it takes up limited riven space, a riven is still worth something, and still can be immediately used to see if you like it.
When you get a railjack component with bad statistics, it's barely noticeable. If you're in a clan and have a better component already researched, or if it's not worth the very heavy repair cost to make, it's just another dirac drop that you need to fiddle with your inventory to redeem.
When you get a bad roll on a kuva lich weapon, you'll need to spend a few hours of murmur grinding to clean up the mess. And if you don't do it right away, you're going to be constantly pelted by resource theft and a lich badmouthing you to remind you he's still there. Sure, you can convert the lich - but the currently negligible utility of a converted lich and the work required for a person receiving a traded lich to make use of it means it's worth very little. Since weapons are the bulk of the lich rewards, bad rolls are a strong disincentive to engage with the lich grinding system.
-Tradeability-
Suppose you hate the RNG-based gambling of rivens, but you'd still like to have good rivens. Easy - just get platinum and buy it from another player. If you get riven drops, you can just sell them veiled for a decent chunk of platinum. Maybe you like the whole gambling aspect, but don't care too much about actually using your rivens - you can just roll and sell them for platinum. The riven system is set up in a way that players can engage with the parts of it that appeal to them and bypass the parts that they don't like. This is implemented in such a way it motivates activities like riven trading, kuva farming, riven unveiling, and playing sorties - and all of those can easily be long-term gameplay for people who enjoy them.
The fact that rivens are easily tradeable also means that they retain their value. I can buy a riven to see if I like it, try it out, and resell it for a comparable value if I don't. Or sell it if I get tired of it, or the weapon gets nerfed, or I just want some quick platinum. The fact that they keep their value in the future has a positive impact on their current value, which makes it a more appealing system to engage with.
Unlike rivens, railjack components are not tradeable and have significantly less value for keeping multiple components for the same slot: when an indisputably better component drops, the old one is only worth what you can break it down for. As such, people who enjoy the gameplay involved in grinding for components quickly exhaust the rewards for doing so, and players who dislike the grind but want the rewards have no way to bypass what to them is a slog. The lack of tradeability means this system is far worse at motivating long-term play than rivens do.
The limited tradeability of Kuva Liches is, on the whole, a decent compromise between many different considerations. They were never intended as interchangeable commodities, and too much tradeability would hurt that significantly. Moreover, there is a certain minimum value for every lich no matter how bad the weapon/element/damage bonus is because a guaranteed weapon of that type is worth something to someone who wants the MR from it and doesn't want to grind liches until they get it themselves. However, the hours spent by the receiving player in order to get the weapon are essentially a trade tax that, as time goes on and more and more converted liches hit the market, makes liches below a certain quality not worth trading at all. Thus, bad lich weapon rolls burden the player with a white elephant stealing their resources as punishment for engaging with the system. (This is, I think, more a conflict between the concept of liches being distinct personalized characters and the reward structure for liches only significantly rewarding you for permanently removing them - I think the trading limitations can be perfectly fine if the reward structure is addressed.)
-Power Level Impact-
If you don't want to deal with or can't afford rivens, that's one extra mod slot and a decent amount of extra capacity you have to work with. There's a power level that the developers can target that's independent of riven RNG, and the mod slot and capacity expense means that, while the actual rivens may vary wildly, there's always an opportunity cost to use them. Rivens have two or three slots for positive modifiers and may have a drawback; they compensate for having just two bonuses and/or a drawback with higher stats, and any modifier that they have - positive or negative - takes the place of another potential modifier. And while rivens differ wildly from eachother in platinum value, the actual gameplay impact between a good riven and a fantastic riven is far less than their platinum value difference and the difficulty of acquiring them. With the way kuva rerolling works, getting a good roll is vastly easier than getting a fantastic roll, but they're close enough from a gameplay perspective that the developers can just treat them as the same power level. So DE can target two power levels for weapons: with a riven and without a riven, and not have to worry too much about what specific riven is in play.
On top of that, riven disposition provides DE with a powerful tool for keeping the impact of rivens on power level from running wild. If there's a riven that makes a weapon vastly more effective (such as the Kohm being able to hit 100% SC), they have the system in place to cripple those rivens if they feel it's warranted. The lowest disposition for riven mods makes even the best riven a hard choice between it and a normal mod; Tigris Prime's widespread use and fantastic stats but terrible rivens help to limit the impact of riven RNG on the ultimate power level of the weapon. Meanwhile, low-powered weapons' high dispositions throw around massive numbers with glee and reward players who want to get use out of non-meta weapons; if those start to become degenerate, enough players will start using them to warrant a disposition nerf. It's a system that gives them a lot of control over the power level impact of rivens, and it really helps to mitigate many of the downsides of that RNG loot design without sacrificing the benefits.
Non-weapon railjack components are far less carefully implemented. The sole tool for limiting RNG impact is the clan research for components, and it does so by guaranteeing a certain component quality level for far fewer resources; the current design of the clan research invalidates half of the drops outright as they roll worse on key statistics and, once you consider the repair costs, tosses even more of them out of the window. The sheer degree of variability in the key statistics is rather disturbing; when a lower tier component is strictly superior to a higher tier, or when a house who supposedly sacrifices one statistic for another nevertheless rolls better on that "sacrificed" statistic than a comparable piece of equipment house who has that stat as its strength, the game is telling the player that luck washes out every other attribute that the game tells you about that component. Moreover, that variability demonstrates that there is not a unique definition of what the capabilities of a given component are; this severely muddies the feeling of component tier progression and the tradeoffs that manufacturing houses make. If rivens took a similar approach of independently rolling for each statistic instead of filling limited slots with bonuses/drawbacks, we'd end up with +damage +CC +CD +flight speed +toxin rivens competing with +zoom rivens - that sheer variability of rivens would make it impossible to balance, and blow through the controls constructed around the system. I think that, at a minimum, all the ranges of railjack components should be significantly restricted such it is impossible for one component to have identical statistics to another component of a different tier or house.
The special ability attached to Mk 3 wreckage is exactly the type of thing that the system needs: that bonus might not be what you are looking for, but it provides an interesting tradeoff instead of a strictly superior power boost. I would say that if it pulled from a much longer list of potential bonuses, and you could get either one bonus or two bonuses and a random drawback on any piece of equipment, that would be all the randomization that the system needs.
On the less bad side, Mk 3 railjack wreckage weapons and kuva lich weapons are in a similar state to eachother from a power level perspective: they don't have enough randomized options to toss around to make for interesting decisionmaking, which means that it's an uninteresting grind for higher numbers that provides no additional depth to the game, and the main thing that saves the system from being far, far worse is that the impact and range of potential values is small. It may be nice to have a +60% elemental damage weapon instead of a +25%, but in the grand scheme of things it doesn't change a heck of a lot. Elemental damage type is more important, but you have a substantial amount of control over that. In their current state, I don't feel that the systems do enough to merit their inclusion. If those systems are to be expanded, I think they will make for a worse foundation than just starting from scratch.
Conclusion
I don't think that there's any disagreement that Empyrean launched in a pretty rough state, or that it will take a lot of work to get it to greatness, or that DE will be working long and hard over the coming months to improve it. The same can be said of the Kuva Lich system. I am, as always, sincerely impressed by the work and abilities demonstrated by DE - while there's absolutely a heck of a lot of bugs, that's a consequence of releasing at an earlier stage of development than most studios do, and you guys make very good use of that atypically quick development to rapidly iterate on feedback.
Rivens have had a lot of work poured into them, and I am comparing an already well-established system with much newer systems that will see big changes in the coming weeks. It's unreasonable to assume that they should be every bit as good as the riven system.
Nevertheless, it does worry me that there's a lot of careful design considerations in the riven system that do not seem to be mirrored in the more recent systems also designed as RNG-heavy long term goals. The loosening grasp on where the power level of a player should be is another concern: while power creep through additional options is an inevitability, keeping players within a certain range of power means that content can be more effectively designed to be a consistently fun and challenging experience. Systems like the Kuva lich damage bonuses, the heavy RNG influence in Empyrean component design, Mk tiers for Empyrean components, Umbral Forma, and the capacity boost for polarizing Kuva weapons have all struck me as bringing in flat power gains without careful attention paid to the long-term impact of doing so. A big part of why I love Warframe is that, unlike most loot-shooters and MMORPGs, it doesn't set the player on a leveling treadmill that's designed to be endless; there's a band of power that it targets, and, while power creep still happens, it's a far cry from the constant stream of obsoleted content that leveling-focused games are engineered to create. Systems designed around rewarding players with flat power boosts are easy to design and implement, but in the long run they cannibalize their own appeal and cannot sustain themselves without a lot of outside help. Seeing these pop up in the game makes me worry that, in the pursuit of long-term rewards for veteran players to seek, that Warframe will lose its already tenuous grasp on where players are at power-wise and compromise the inherently rewarding gameplay that keeps everybody playing.
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Steve was saying in the devstream that having the liches kill you upon a failed parazon mod sequence was because it's interesting to have someone that beats you up. Actually, I agree with that. It's an interesting inversion of the power dynamic that is everywhere throughout the rest of the game, it helps to solidify the personal antagonist status of the lich, and it makes it all the sweeter to eventually kill them. It'd be great to have antagonists that can outright overpower us in direct combat.
The problem is not that they shouldn't be a threat, nor that they kill us, it's that they bypass all the combat mechanics in order to kill us in a cutscene. Elsewhere (and as in most games), death is a negative consequence for failing in combat; for kuva liches it's a virtually guaranteed consequence for engaging with the system in the way you are expected to and rewarded for. The issue here is that, in terms of game mechanics, we're actually not getting beaten up - we're jumping from failed parazon attempt to instant death with no gameplay in between. For a game built around combat, that's a massive missed opportunity.
My suggestion is that, after you fail a parazon attempt, don't go to an unavoidable instant kill but give the Kuva Lich 30 seconds of Super Saiyan mode where they turn into combat gods single-mindedly focused on killing their target (and vanish like they currently do upon success or their time limit expiring). Don't have them target anyone else and be careful about throwing in AoE attacks (trolling could otherwise be a problem), but, aside from that, go nuts. Dial up all their powers to 11. Supercharge their movement capabilities to ensure that their target can't escape. Keep the instant kill attacks (just telegraph them). Instakill the Tenno if they go into operator mode. Show the trail of energy being sucked out of the Tenno to supercharge the lich and dispel invisibility or other warframe defenses. (Heck, you could even use effects to show them stealing the upcoming "Devil Trigger" mode that will be replacing channeling.) Cheat like hell - but to make them incredible in combat, not to leap to the consequence of failing combat. Keep death almost inevitable, but make sure it comes through already established combat mechanics and not a cutscene.
This way, death remains an avoidable consequence from combat, Kuva Liches can be stupidly and unfairly powerful nemeses temporarily, and players who have few challenges left for them in the game can be in panic mode for 30 seconds as they try to survive. Don't reward the player with anything more than avoiding death and an achievement for surviving or defeating the lich in that state (so that players don't start to consider it mandatory), but dangling the remote possibility of survival will do far more than a cutscene instakill to make liches intimidating. The current system pulls control away from the player just so Kuva Liches can "beat us up" in a cutscene; it would be far more psychologically effective to show them beating us using stupidly powerful versions of already established gameplay mechanics instead.
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In Devstream #126, the popularity of Itzal was brought up as a topic of discussion. Nearly everyone with the means uses Itzal in the open world because it is the fastest archwing; Blink and the fastest movement speed are why. If there is to be greater parity between archwing usage, then there are several routes available:
-Archwing combat needs to be a bigger part of the open world, so that the non-speed differences between archwings become relevant to it. (This would involve major design changes to the open world content.)
-Itzal's speed and Blink would have to be nerfed. (This erodes the value of Itzal substantially, and is widely unpopular amongst the fanbase.)
-Other archwings must get their own individual travel abilities/mechanics to compete with Itzal's Blink. (Coming up with unique mechanics for each archwing's mobility is going to be expensive from a developer effort perspective, and will also increase the design effort required for all future archwing designs.)
-All archwings get access to some open world speed-buffing mechanic that is comparably fast or faster than Itzal's movement. (I believe this is the best option.)
Therefore let me suggest that past a certain height (perhaps 100m), the atmosphere becomes thinner and boosting archwings in the open world get a significant increase to speed. This might increase their speed to perhaps 4x normal; enough so that all archwings become fast enough to get to most objectives on in the open world very quickly. The Itzal will still be the fastest archwing (and still shave off a lot of time in normal atmospheric travel), but because the average archwing trip's time is reduced to 1/4 or so of its prior value the actual number of seconds gained for picking it would be substantially smaller. A lot more people would pick other archwings if Itzal saved only 2 seconds off the average 10-second archwing trip to the next objective instead of 10 seconds off the average 50-second trip.
If the increased player speed causes any significant loading issues, many of them can be masked since the player is far enough away to reduce the level of detail shown or to not load the assets/enemies at all until they get closer.
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Uninstalling Razer Synapse as this thread indicated fixed the problem. I don't know why the issue suddenly started in 24.4.2, however.
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Since hotfix 24.4.2, I've been getting a crash without any prompt for reporting several seconds after I log in. The view on the orbiter pans around, then the game crashes. I was playing several hours before the hotfix without any hitches, and my system was handling the game very well before this point.
Two other things that happened in that time were a windows system update and optimizing the download cache.
I've tried running it on DirectX10 instead of 11, verifying the download cache, reinstalling the game, rebooting my computer and turning off multithreaded rendering, but have had no luck in fixing the issue thus far.
EDIT: Updating the NVIDIA graphics drivers for the GTX 1080 fails to work. But I can log in on my laptop.
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What would happen?
One, there would be a lot of technical overhead. Presumably, the server would have to eat the increased cost of the CPU calculations, which would bog it down without good optimization. The netcode may also be slowed as more complicated behaviors screw up the prediction algorithms that work well for a simple AI model collapse for a more complicated one. Not only would the game be be slowed, we'd be facing a load of bugs as a result.
Two, we'd be dealing with enemies that were trying to win instead of enemies that threw themselves mindlessly at you. In other words, expect enemies in extermination/defense to hide all over the map, including the occasional ones stuck in walls. Expect vomvalysts to run in the opposite direction of players instead of allowing tridolons to be killed. Expect every nullifier to pile on top of eachother under a zone-out plane. For the vast majority of games, the AI is not dealt a hand that is capable of winning, and Warframe is no exception - smart AI therefore drags out the defeat as long as possible.
Three, because of dealing with the two aforementioned issues, the dev team would be focused on rebalancing/bugfixing that instead of new content.
AI improvements could be worth a lot in this game, but OpenAI-style AI that was focused on winning would be very bad without some major game redesign. When it comes down to it, most players want more interesting behaviors out of enemies, not smart AI. And interesting behaviors are much easier to implement and telegraph via additional enemy abilities instead of smarter AI.
RNG Loot As a Longterm Goal: What Rivens Have That Liches And Empyrean Components Lack
in General
Posted
Honestly? I agree with you. I personally dislike the multiple layers of gambling, the economy that preys on new players, and the effect that it has on the power level between players. I'm not trying to convince anyone that the riven system is a wholly wonderful thing because I don't believe that myself.
What I am arguing is that it is actually designed fairly well so that, for people like you and me, it can be a tiny part of the game. It is designed in such a way that players can opt into the parts of the system that they like and opt out of other parts: it provides a steady income of value-retaining loot drops from sorties and gift of the lotus alerts, unveiling rivens supplies players with a variety of challenges, it provides a consistent reason to keep acquiring kuva (which makes it pretty much the only resource dropped ingame that maintains its value for longterm players), it provides players looking for an endgame power a nigh-eternal eternal quest of finding the perfect riven, and it empowers low-powered weapons. Because of the system's design and the trading economy around it, a player can buy rivens to unveil and resell without rolling, sell their rivens veiled, turn their kuva farm into plat by rerolling rivens for resale, or buy the rivens that they're looking for from other players and not need to deal with any random elements themselves. If you can't afford or completely despise rivens wholesale, the slot and capacity you've now freed up on your weapon is actually a pretty good consolation prize. I will make no claim that the system is perfect (it's the poster-child for exploiting uninformed players), but I do think that it succeeds in its goals at a variety of levels and effectively mitigates many of the downsides.
I do not see that careful design reflected in the kuva lich weapons or the railjack components. If I want to have a railjack reactor with higher than +50 avionics, then I need to grind a 2% drop chance for each Veil Proxima mission, hope that said reactor rolls higher than than 50, and spend either 50 platinum or a ludicrous amount of resources to repair it. If I choose not to, that's a potential +50 avionics capacity that I'm throwing away - and while there are nominally tradeoffs involved for picking a different house manufacturer, avionics capacity is so much more important than everything else that they're negligible in the vast majority of situations. The avionics capacity is by far the most egregious statistic of these systems (it's something like saying "This weapon has a rare untradeable blueprint version that comes with an Orokin Catalyst preinstalled on it, but you can't install an Orokin Catalyst on any version of this weapon yourself"), but it's only because that's the statistic with the greatest range of power level impact. If kuva lich weapon damage bonuses ranged from +10% to +500%, it would be the same problem. Randomized elements can absolutely bring a sense of personalization and break up the monotony of boilerplate endgame builds, but strictly superior attribute rolls - while easy to design and implement - are much less able to provide that than a system that reliably presents randomized tradeoffs that actually are tradeoffs.
It doesn't matter if you love or loathe the riven system: I have no interest in persuading you that that RNG-based endgame loot mentality is good or bad as a whole. What I am arguing is that the Empyrean wreckage and the Kuva Lich weapons are significantly worse systems along a number of dimensions, and that many of the design considerations for rivens that limit their downsides and support their upsides do not appear to be present in these.