Terridaks.
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Posts posted by Terridaks.
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7 часов назад, PublikDomain сказал:
Why? Because (old) DE can't into writing. Early Warframe was not very lore-heavy, and with what little lore there was DE did more telling than showing. Early Tenno were written as some sort of shadowy warrior caste, with traditions and architecture and weaponsmiths and a council and clans large and politically powerful enough to sign an armistice agreement, but nowhere but the trailers were other Warframes/Tenno ever actually shown ingame. And this, at least, can be excused by the limits of the game's development. Big story quests like TSD take a lot of time and effort to make, so we only get the next new chunk every year or so. Structurally the game relies a lot on its procedural levels which don't last long and are repeated over and over again, so there just aren't many good places to put things like Tenno NPCs. DE's also historically been limited on things like writers and voice actors, for example relying on on their own employees to voice characters.
I wouldn't say they can still get into writing.
And Gradivus was more of an anomaly. Take the same Tethra operation: Vay Hek threatens the entire system with a fleet of Fomorians, but only Tenno care about it for some reason.
Meanwhile, the Corpus' reaction is "Brah, we don't care."4 часа назад, trst сказал:Because DE hasn't made any.
As for a more lore-esk answer I'd assume it's because there's not much of a reason for them. Since Tenno all take orders from Lotus there's not much of a reason to interact with another Tenno in such a way as you'd both be taking orders from the same source regardless. Plus there's not much of a reason to cooperate with an NPC one either since we can already do that in every single mission with other players.
Then there's the issue with how the story is all from the same perspective with everyone being the main character at the same time. Being the "chosen one" doesn't leave a lot of room to warrant other Tenno when we're already here doing everything in the system on our own. Relegating the few we have seen/heard of to one-off story bits where they fit in. Plus we have no canonical answer as to how many Tenno are even alive with the only real estimate we can make is maybe a minimum of four to eight living Tenno.
I don't think all tenno obey Lotus. Moreover, according to the game lore, tenno don't obey Lotus at all, she only acts as a coordinator. I'm not talking about the moment when Lotus disappeared.
Plus it would be weird if all tenno thought the same way - like we're some kind of ants. With that level of independence, surely there must be renegade groups that would look at things from a different angle. There might even be some who wanted to join the Corpus or the Grineer.
In terms of history, it would be possible to get around that restriction. The Second Dream still seems like a DE mistake to me for many reasons. From the fact that it set the fashion for solo quests in co-op play, to the huge ludonarrative dissonance it caused. Think about it: the player commits 10 war crimes per mission, builds his space fortresses, makes deals worth millions of credits, and then goes on a quest where it turns out he's been an impulsive teenager with mommy issues the whole time. -
Why aren't there any tenno-NPC?
You know what I remember about Gradivus's Dilemma (besides the brutal grind)? How well the developers managed to use all the available lore to make it feel like the tenno are part of the Warframe universe. All sides of the War for Mars behaved quite reasonably in trying to get the Tenno on their side. Except for the fact that Alad was actually trying to get some tenno to sell other tenno for organs and torture Valkyr.
At the time, many thought we were saving the tenno inside Valkyr. I.e. there was almost a tenno-NPC in the lore.
The Second Dream was the turning point. I know a lot of people have warm feelings about this quest. Well, I didn't. It was a turning point for the game when we stopped being "one of the tenno" and became "the tenno". To this day, the only tenno NPC in the game is the now dead Rell. We don't know anything about the attitude of the rest of the tenno towards Duviri, the Entrati family, what they did during the Narmer invasion, etc The player character and his personality issues became the center of the Warframe universe.
It's possible, of course, that this is part of the lore and all the tenno are actually one personality, just existing simultaneously in different versions.-
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If you don't like grind or fashion, quit the game and don't look back. Otherwise it will turn into a second job for you.
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В 24.03.2024 в 21:51, SneakyErvin сказал:
They already confirmed in the pax live stream that dialing it back wont be a thing. Reb clearly stated it will be core WF gameplay and not like Duviri for instance. So what I assume with this is that it will be what people have asked for in the past really, an urban open world, just with a different aestethic than the rest of the game, or an urban version of Z or Labs to give that feel of a modern day city. I expect we wont get to cosplay Spooderman, Venom, Carnage or any of the other spider friends/enemies.
Cyberframewarpunk 1999 maybe?
And I gotta say. I utterly dislike the Arthur and Aio hairdos. They just end up looking like two K-pop rejects or something.
Well, the devs said it would be core warframe, but a little different. Older or more down-to-earth gameplay may well fit the description. But the most reasonable thing to expect, of course, is just another open world.
I don't see a big problem with the hairstyles. Arthur is a cybersamurai inspired by Jetstream Sam, and Aoi is Asian. My only complaint is that they're being a little too pompous. But I guess that's just for the teaser.
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4 часа назад, voidctrl сказал:
I watched a video of Warframe's alpha gameplay and was startled that I had to think of 1999. I think this is intentional.
My speculation would be that DE were thinking of how different today's gameplay is from the original one, that both have their own merits, but there is no way to bring back the original gameplay without completely throwing the last X years (hyper fast movement, room nuke, power fantasy) out of the window. The two systems are just not compatible anymore. And they don't need to be, if they stand side by side.
Given that there's already coexistent ways to play the game, see Duviri, adding "Retro Warframe mode" in parallel isn't far fetched. Only to give it a lore-coherent way to exist, they went beyond turning the dial back just in terms of gameplay, instead shifting the setting. What that might mean for 1999 is that it'll be their attempt for more tactical, slower combat. The kind of pacing one might see or remember in early game footage. I would speculate on conventional mission types like exterminate and defense and so on, just draped in the 1999 style. And I'm completely fine with that idea.
That's exactly what I'm counting on. Stating that 1999 will be something more than a content island like Duviri further fires the imagination. Although, years with DE have taught me not to inflate expectations too much. At least we already have a confirmed course for veteran warframe personification.
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I hardly ever look at the game these days. However, news about 1999 brings my attention back to Warframe every now and then. The more I learn about the update, the more I like what I see.
Theories, artwork, and fanfics from 2013-2016 come to mind, when players were having heated debates about the nature of tenno. I won't hide, I supported the losing side - those who thought warframes were suits or shells for mutated humans.
My headcanon was a theory of my own composition that the tenno had awakened as a "tabula rasa": no memory, no gender. By putting on warframes, they were trying on the physiology and remnants of protowarframes personalities.
Now, of course, this assumption seems absurd and impractical. At the very least, it would require more in-depth work with the lore and personality of each warframe. This is something fans have been doing for a long time. They came up with a "people's canon" and ascribed certain character traits to each warframe. For DE, however, this was clearly not a priority....
Until the annonce of the 1999 update. Yeah, protoframes aren't warframes in the usual sense, but it's nice to see even a loophole like that.
And doubly nice that for once the game is taking a more down-to-earth tone. Maybe this time we won't even have another drama about growing up or abusive relationships.-
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22 минуты назад, TARINunit9 сказал:
Look at the name "frame" again. The Orokin deliberately dehumanized the Warframes, they wanted to erase everything the Warframes used to be when they were human. Wanted the Zariman Children to think of them as nothing more than puppets to be used and discarded. As empty shells that most certainly weren't people with memories and emotions and feelings. Just weapons to be deployed, to be spent.
And clearly, looking at your post, it worked
Do I understand correctly that by calling them "suits of armor", we are getting closer to rehumanizing them?
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12 минут назад, SneakyErvin сказал:
Nope the commoners dont see Warframes as some gods of war, they see the Tenno as gods of war, which means the warframes are their godly armors according to those commoners. Many know about the Tenno, few know what the Tenno actually are.
I'd just like to comment on this too. A compilation doesnt mean it is a canon part of the game as a whole, just that the info obtained in the game is available in the compliation aswell. So breaking the 4th wall by also saying "These files reveal details of events before and durging the game, tread carefully Tenno!" isnt true, since we the playerbase are also refered to as Tenno, just as the caste in the game. Just as the in-game hints refer to game mechanics that would potentially be 4th wall breaking knowledge and phrasing and signed Tenno Counsiler X for instance.
Just as we have very "gamey" references and explainations within the codex for certain game modes that would also break a 4th wall since they all imply we are just playing a game by explaining it the way the codex does.
Except biology references the skin as natural armor. Just as some animals have natural armor that cannot be removed.
I can't agree with that. The people of Mars called Inaros, not his operator. Gauss was Saint of Altra, not his operator. And so on.
Natural armor is a phrase that does not mean literal "suit of armor". The body cannot exist without this "armor".
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16 минут назад, Alguien сказал:
You can take your skin off?
No. That's why my skin is not armor.
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11 минут назад, (PSN)robotwars7 сказал:
by this logic, basically anything can be armor: if I grab a bunch of thick magazines and wrap them around my body with tape so that it protects me from zombie bites, that's armor, because it's protecting my body. would it protect me from everything? no, but it will from something, so the definition fits.
warframes are definitely a form of armor; the operator is protected by the warframe, only when it is destroyed is the operator in any real danger. I suppose a more appropriate word would be "exosuits", since they are also focused on enhancing the operator's abilities and converting their raw void energy into something else. the fact that warframes are humanoid though, and are styled to look like elaborate armor sets, is the reason why they are just referred to as "armor"
If you need clarification, here it is:
"defensive covering for the body
especially : covering (as of metal) used in combat".Anything that can be taken off/on and serves as protection (especialy in combat) is armor.
No, warframes do not function as "suits of armor". I might as well argue that a military drone is armor because it protects its operator. -
26 минут назад, SneakyErvin сказал:
Because it is all accurate considering very few actually know/knew what Tenno and Warframes actually are/were. Which also answers your last question with a "most".
There is no evidence that most people think warframes are specifically suits. Instead, there is only evidence that commoners see warframes as gods of war in their own right.
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50 минут назад, Alguien сказал:
So we are going to completly ignore the part about Operators projecting their bodies into the Frames and using them as extensions of themselves to make this debate, right?
Hell, there are scenes like in The War Within where the Operator walks out of the Frame like in Power Armor. Or Little Duck telling you to "lose the rig" if you want to talk to her.They use them as teleportation points. It's a weird teleportation, and yet the tennos aren't physically in the warframe at the moment of piloting. I'm referring to the same War Within quest. Particularly the moment when the Queen tries to get into the operator's head.
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1 час назад, schilds сказал:
Only if you interpret it literally and pedantically. Maybe the npc who wrote the operator report believes themselves a poet?
That wasn't some kind of test of how quickly/easily you could come up with a handful of names ...
It was a question about the relative number of people in the game's universe who know how warframes work. Look who you named. Orokin, Corpus, Tenno and Grineer elite/leaders. Some of who may have only learned recently. A whole part of Alad V's storyline is him trying to figure what warframes are. Out of how many millions or billions of people?
You made a comment about "unreliable narrators" and asked
Well. The answer is that it's likely that *plenty* of npcs would call it "armour", and DE inventing/introducing someone who uses that word isn't outside the bounds of believability.
The "operator report" is written by someone in the game universe. It really isn't that strange that the author might call warframes "armour". Heck, it isn't even that strange that someone might call them "armour" *even* if they know they are remotely piloted via void powers. You know *how* I know the existence of such an npc is believable? Because there are plenty of *real* people who call frames "armour" even though they know how frames are controlled. The evidence is this thread.
Plenty of npcs we haven't met. It's not like Warframe is a game with massive amounts of npc interaction. It has a curated set of interactions decided on by DE.
In fact, the *very* introduction to an npc that calls them armoured suits *is* the operator report. Like, why is this even a question. It's *right in front of you*. The person who wrote it is probably one of those annoying people who will argue you to death on internet forums and go around justifying sloppy language with all sorts of stupidity. Both you and I know those sorts of people exist.
Why is this a problem? A significant part of the game's mystique comes from guessing the true nature of frames.
First, the DEs themselves claim that this site is a compilation of actual lore to refresh your memory. Secondly it immediately breaks the fourth wall by mentioning the game in the next post: "These files reveal details of events before and during the game, tread carefully Tenno!".
Based on this alone, we can assert that the character on whose behalf the narrative is told is a hero-resonator (a character who speaks from the author's position).
More to the point, this character is just a device:
"It is Albrecht Entrati whom this device serves.
It is Albrecht Entrati who has instructed us to locate the chosen Operator."
It records reports in dry, protocolized language. It would be irrational for him to use any ambiguity.
As for the characters, listing them is important because they are the characters we come in contact with. How do we know someone thinks warframes are costumes if no one talks about it? Without that element, you're making the same mistake as conspiracy theorists who claim that if some scientific theory isn't true, it automatically means magic exists.
We have Leverian, we have Inaros' quest where warframes are described as demigods in their own right, without any suspicion of costumes. -
51 минуту назад, schilds сказал:
Yeah it's fine. Not everything needs to be taken literally.
Besides:
I'd turn that question around. Who in the game's universe knows they're remotely controlled by children with void powers? Probably not that many, though with recent events that number may be growing, most people most likely think it's someone in an an armoured suit.
The problem is that the wording the DEs give directly misleads players about the nature of the game character. And it's not a play on words, no. The DEs themselves invented this substitution of words to cover up the retcon.
"Who in the game's universe knows they're remotely controlled by children with void powers?": Captain Vor, Lotus, Queens, Ballas, Quills, Palladino. Possibly Teshin, Arbiters of Hexis and Nora. These are just the ones I remembered immediately.
Now who claims tenno wear warframes as costumes? -
7 минут назад, CephalonCarnage сказал:
Armour is a reference to any hardened unit. Tanks are called "armour" in military terms.
But not "suits of armor".
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5 часов назад, trst сказал:
But they are armor considering the original frames were regular people mutated until their skin literally became metal.
Excerpt from the Vitruvian:
We took our greatest, volunteers or not, and polluted them with these cultured reagents. They transformed. They became Infested... but only just. Their skin blossomed into sword-steel. Their organs, interlinked with untold resilience. Yet their minds were free of the Infested madness.
Plus they are an indirect defense for the Operator's body by being an extension of them. As Operators need not put themselves into physical danger while piloting a frame. And even when they do pop out into battle they can always hop back into their frame (or anything else they can transfer into).
But even if you don't want to accept that as a reasoning know that the word "armor" can also refer to military vehicles. Which is also how frames function for Operators.
Mutation =/= armor. You can't take off or put on the mutation. The infestation irreversibly changes your body to the core.
"As Operators need not put themselves into physical danger while piloting a frame." - which literally means that operators control the drones from a distance.
The meaning of military vehicle cannot be used here. The phrase "suit of armor" directly contradicts this.
5 часов назад, quxier сказал:Wasn't Mirage described as "wearing frame"?
Idk: "Mirage's sleight of hand complements her might. Her dazzled foes take heavy damage. Doppelgangers, lasers, and traps are elements of her stagecraft."
53 минуты назад, Nobodys-Perfect сказал:It's a callback to Dark Sector for the most part. It's how it was before the operators as a concept coalesced and got fleshed out into what they are today. Warframes being remote controlled golems is similar to how we might've assumed orokin towers aren't made of meat until the plains of eidolon update revealed that.
The 1999 update trailer shows Warframes like excal as battle suits as per their original concept, Whether this is going to be an alternate universe/timeline thing or actually be set in the past of Warframe is up to speculation for now, but you can probably expect it to be explained in the future.
I hope so. I remember DE didn't change the old description of the tenno from the official web page for a long time after the Second Dream. Tenno were also described there as costume wearers, which was outright misinformation.
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Was looking at the lore notes in the Operator Report, and came across the following sentence in "1_Operator.txt":
- The TENNO piloted WARFRAMES, suits of sophisticated battle armor.
Again! Why the armor/suit? Warframes are not armor in any sense. Here's the definition of armor: defensive covering for the body.
Warframes are drones, biomachines, anything, but armor/suits. Operators don't "wear" drones.
You can invoke the unreliable narrator effect. But who in the game's universe believes, and directly says, that warframes are armor?
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Well, Alad calls them crustaceans.
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5 часов назад, chainchompguy3 сказал:
Overall, this is a very nice softer-touch rework for Inaros. Not changing things drastically, but making him more effective. I quite like it. I have a couple of personal hang-ups, were this rework to be added to the game, but I could see it being mostly for the better.
I especially appreciate the attempt to resurrect his "Constantly feed on enemies" playstyle via "Heaven's Mandate" (what a name...). It's how I see his identity as a frame, so any attempt to further solidify it into gameplay is a plus for me. I'm not sure it'll be as effective in this particular goal as I would personally prefer, but it is markedly better than nothing, so I'll take it.
My biggest issues are with the Passive change and Desiccate. I've always rather liked his finisher-passive, and rather liked triggering it without using his Desiccation (update 34 made this even easier, I love it). So merging the effect specifically into Desiccation would be an upheaval for me; but I'd get over it eventually.
I'd be mildly interested in how the economy of Desiccate would actually pan out, as well. Currently, it's so cheap and spammable that it kind of needs its facing-condition to nerf its ability to blind whole maps. With the conversion to 12% max health cost, though, this might heavily reduce its spammability, thus perhaps justifying the removal of the facing-conditional for the blind effect. I'd want to see it in action before I'd make a call.
What's more of an issue is the preservation/resurrection of Devour's biggest flaw: Ally-healing requiring allies to slow down. Devour can currently be "gifted" to allies, but no one uses it because they have to stop and intentionally not kill an enemy, and instead walk up and press "interact" on them. Your Desiccation rework's method of ally-healing would have the exact same flaw. (unless I misinterpreted what you wrote).
...speaking of misinterpreting what you wrote, though, I'm not sure I have this right, but:
...I'm not seeing the synergy here, so much so that I'm under the impression that you mistyped which status effect you meant.
The Status-effect of Puncture-damage is [Affected unit's attacks deal reduced damage]. If you mean to say that Inaros would be intentionally reducing the enemies' ability to deal damage, then that's cool. But that doesn't synergize with his finishers, and it has no effect on Critical Multipliers.
...Anyway, moving on, not too much else to say.
Scarab Swarm becoming more similar to a micro-Saryn-Spore feels a little weird, but it works well enough. Mild concern if it'd be even worth the casting in a Corpus-shielding situation (no armor to corrosive-proc), but it'd still armor-buff, and it's cheap and somewhat set-and-forget, so I can forgive some mild hiccoughs.
Sandstorm changes feel very natural, as if that's how the ability was always meant to be.
Reducing the overall locked-in-animation of his abilities feels more fluid for gameplay, but I do have a bit of a soft-spot for how it helps get the player "in-character".
...So, yeah. Nice work. One of the better Inaros reworks I've seen.
Thanks for your reaction, glad you enjoyed it.
I can answer some of the questions that have arisen.Desiccation consumes 12% of current health, not max health, which makes it a little safer to use. So, Inaros with 1000 hp will spend 120 hp, while Inaros with 500 hp will already only spend 60 points.
"What's more of an issue is the preservation/resurrection of Devour's biggest flaw" - I know, I know, it's more of a compromise than a complete solution. Still, in most cases, if allies can't stop killing enemies, they don't need healing. If emergency help is still needed, finishing off one of the many blinded enemies is much easier, faster, and more effective than standing in the animation of devouring one particular enemy.
Yes, you're right, I mistyped. I meant puncture status effect:
ЦитатаUpdate 33.6 (2023-07-27)
Puncture Changes:Weakened Status Effect Additions:
- Increases Critical Chance threshold on enemy by 5% per Stack, to a maximum of 25% at 5 Stacks. This is additive after mods, not before. Does not apply to Abilities or AOE damage.
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Okay, looks like I should explain my position on Inaros's rework.
In short, it seems to me that the devs were trying to keep up with the theme rather than the gameplay, resulting in a warframe with a set of functionaly overlapping and not very usable abilities.Let's start with the passive ability Undying: due to the lack of scaling, it only performs well at low levels, where there's nothing to die from. Some might argue that at higher levels, allies can resurrect Inaros by killing targets he shoots his beam at. However, in practice, if allies are that close to bleeding Inaros, the vast majority of the time he is resurrected in the standard way.
I suggest adding scaling from both Inaros' health pool and abilities at once.
I don't like Inaros' second current passive ability, as it only combines with his Desiccation out of his entire ability set.
I, on the other hand, suggest a passive ability that directly synergizes with his self-resurrection in the most natural way possible. The Sand Shadows will contribute directly to the resurrection of their master.
3 of Inaros' 4 abilities grant healing. 3 of Inaros's 4 abilities grant control. 4 of Inaros' 4 abilities deal damage over time. 3 of Inaros' 4 abilities temporarily incapacitate him in some way.
I feel it is necessary to diversify his ability set by focusing a bit more on two aspects of his character: helping allies and health manipulation.
Desiccation's essence hasn't changed as much as it may seem. First of all, this ability now uses up health to restore even more health. Using it idly, however, can be detrimental to Inaros. I don't see the need for a true damage, nor do I see the need for a dot. The status effect of piercing, on the other hand, works well in combination with Inaros' other abilities, as well as with finishers. It is also the first time that the image of the king-defender is touched upon here. Inaros sacrifices part of his health to allow his allies to heal in battle.
The disadvantages and inconveniences of Devour have been described many times before and without me. So I will concentrate on the "new" ability. Scarab Swarm is great as an auxiliary close combat tool: it gives a handy armor buff to allies, while at the same time reducing the defense of enemies. Unlike most other warframe abilities, the Swarm benefits from the crit multypliers, including piercing stat effect, allowing it to deal even more damage over time. Maintaining this ability is key to successful resurrection in the event of a critical failure.
Sandstorm in the current version requires a huge energy expenditure, slows down, blocks the use of abilities and weapons, giving in return only awkward control and not the highest periodic damage. I didn't change that much. Self-evident changes: moderate energy consumption and more comfortable control. Of the innovations, defensive-ish mechanic that makes enemies miss targets inside Sandstorm, and a high-risk, high-reward game. Now at low health, the damage of the ability more than justifies the cost. And Inaros gets two tools at once to control his hp.
The current Scarab Swarm penalizes a player for using it's active part. Hitting enemies with scarabs? Stand still for a few seconds, sacrificing health. The Celestial Mandate, on the other hand, offers Inaros to once again play a game of high risk and high reward. The player will have to constantly feed on enemies to maintain invulnerability.
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18 минут назад, lukinu_u сказал:
That's a fair request, but the issue is you can't have good matchmaking without a large enough player base.
Conclave in a niche gamemode that almost no one plays, so you don't have a large enough sample of players to produce a good matchmaking in a reasonable amount of time. It's already hard to find a match at all, so good matchmaking isn't even an option.
Even for big PvP focused games, a good matchmaking isn't granted and there is always that dilemma of good match quality vs decent queue time.I know, I know. DE will definitely have to make a pretty wide spread of player skills at each rank. And I'm guessing the split will only be 3-4 ranks. But they have an advantage that a lot of other PvP-oriented games don't have, namely a gigantic audience that isn't that hard to target. I remember the flood of players when conclave 2.0 first opened. People were playing and trying new things even despite the huge holes in the balance.
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56 минут назад, BoredFinno сказал:
It wouldn't really be as long as possible. The speed of the strip would depend on your power str. To maybe keep him a bit safer, you could make the cc last some time (scaleable with duration) past armor strip. We already have an armor strip that takes some times thx to hydroid's rework and i think it works pretty good. It would still suffer from the problem of "why wait when can kill now", which is why there is a partial refund on non stripped enemies. He is the defender of the weak, part of his kit is providing cc. If allies decided to kill them while still cc'd thats their choice. This would still grant inaros biggest benefit as a weapon's platform. Mind you, the ability still spreads around, so while you are killing that one dude, other dudes are getting stripped. The ability has a strip rate that can be boosted to strip before the duration ends, so depending on your str, it could be 3 seconds, it could be 5, or it could be 20.
I still can't figure out what happens if the ability is used on an enemy without armor.
The whole point of the Hydroid is that he expends energy to deal increased damage with armor removal. The contradictory point of your ability is that Inaros gets a penalty for him or his allies killing an enemy before the swarm removes all armor. That is, he gets a penalty for doing something well. The opposite mechanic would be much more logical - that Scarab Armor is returned in full if an enemy is killed before all of their armor is removed. Well, or the earlier you kill, the more armor is returned.
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I've played Conclave, and I can say that on the one hand the developers did a good job adjusting abilities for PvP. A good question is why no one from the DE thought it was a bad idea to give warframes with basic health abilities that can kill players in one use in the first place? It really messed up the launch of conclave 2.0 back in the day.
Overall the PvP in warframe is pretty well balanced and fun to play with friends, especially if you're at about the same skill level.
And this is where we come to the problem that DE never solved. It's the clash between veterans and newbies. The problem is that newbies entering PvP are immediately wiped out without being able to do anything, which causes them a legitimate sense of helplessness and frustration. They don't understand how abilities work, and they can't understand at what point a casual game about "shoot in that direction and everyone will die" began to require them to be extremely skilled at parkour and aiming.
And while the motto "git good" is a natural part of any PvP, if it takes dozens if not hundreds of hours of practice and thousands of fruitless deaths to start enjoying the game, players simply start looking for more accessible sources of enjoyment. And I remind you that fun is what we play games for.
In other words: just add ranked matchmaking so players can compete against their peers. At first glance, it might seem that this counterintuitive solution would finally do away with Conclave, as matchmaking would become much harder to find. But you have no idea how many players go in, try it out, die 15 times a match, and never think about Warframe PvP again. I've met 6 of them in a week alone, even though I don't play at the most crowded times. If you keep even a third of these people, the conclave will become a much more populated place.
As with any game, you need to give players two things: clear game rules and development horizons achievable within a reasonable time frame.
The second task will be handled by the rating system. To solve the first problem, I would suggest introducing a training mode, where players could test weapons and abilities on combat specters.
This is the required minimum. I would also reconsider the conclave affinity and syndicate rep system. Killing an enemy for a player who has spent the entire game just dying is a task many times more difficult than killing any boss on the Steel Path.
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Since no one is commenting on my rework, I'll comment on someone else's. In any case, the one that seemed to me the most adequate.
I'm fine with your resurrection passive. I don't think it even needs a cd, since you're essentially offering a natural toolkit to enhance the current ability, which is a good thing. Once you get to a certain level of enemies, Inaros can still run into self-resurrection problems. This is especially justified given how risky a position his new ability puts him in.
Yep, nuke Devour.
The new ability gives me conflicting feelings. On the one hand, it's great that you've thought to add damage reduction along with aggro, but on the other hand, if anyone needs this mechanic, it's warframes like Rhino or Nix. Unlike those two, Inaros doesn't directly benefit from enemies focusing on him. Sandbagging enemies has never been a big problem - enemies are facing the player 90% of the time.
Also, the ability suffers from the same disease as many other reworks on this forum - it suffers from a lack of brevity. How many tasks does it accomplish? Let's count: damage debuff, control, heal, minion summoning. Four tasks for one button is a lot.Sandstorm rework is ok.
Your Scarab Swarm could be a direct ability improvement, though it's not entirely clear what happens if you infect an enemy without armor? And why does the ability reward the player for not killing an enemy for as long as possible, while leaving Inaros himself in a more vulnerable position?
Question about balance, AI, grind and everything
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by Terridaks.
After seeing this thread about game balance, decided to post my own.
The topics of difficulty, balance, and improved AI come up periodically in the WF discussion. I've dedicated a thread to it myself, as I too have been dreaming of a shift from grind-dependent to skill-dependent gameplay for years.
However, I realize that in the current state of the game this is impossible.
Changing the fundamentals of the game, like adding more complex AI or overhauling the parkour system would mean serious risks. If you change one system, you'd have to change all the others. It's much more convenient to layer on new ones. Core changes could ruin the game, which I agree with the vast majority of forum members. However, I do not agree that the game in its current form is the result of DE's directed efforts and conscious gamedesign decisions. More to the point, WF is a chronically sick game, and a cure risks killing it, as sickness has been part of its nature from the beginning. And no, I'm not calling to blame DE for this.
I'd like to quote this response to a newbie's question about how to have fun in this game:
And this is a very symptomatic situation that I've encountered more than once and more than twice while trying to sell WF to my friends. They didn't understand why should they play it after the prologue?
We endlessly speed up the grind to skip the grind, but the whole game is one solid grind. So why play it?
Intentional spoiling
WF is a free-to-play cooperative PvE game. And for the free-to-play distribution model to work, you need microtransactions. For players to want to resort to microtransactions, the gameplay must be intentionally spoiled. In our case, the spoilage factor is the grind, which you have to go through in order to get equipment that is interesting to the player or to progress through the story. Grind implies routine, repetitive actions that the player should want to skip. And since the game is still afloat, it means that there are quite a few players who want to skip the grind and pay money for it.
It's a necessary evil for a free-to-play PvE shooter. But can the pill be sweetened? Is it possible to make grind interesting? Yes, of course. It takes one key component of gamedesign: decision making.
Unintentional spoilage
Imbalance
DE have never been good at balance. If in PvE it is still possible to be slippery, giving the result as the original goal, then in PvP everything is much more transparent. Remember the launch of Conclave 2.0 It received a lot of attention at the time, and players flooded into the previously unpopular mode. The imbalance of the first patches in such conditions is always expected. If in the case of weapons miscalculations can be understood, the situation with abilities resembled both a massacre and a circus. Wasn't it obvious to anyone that leaving AOE abilities with 1000 damage in a mode where all players have 300 EHP is a terrible idea?
The same problems with misunderstanding abilities have always been inherent in PvE. Calculating that Rhino will run around in invulnerable Iron Skin indefinitely is not a difficult task either.
And that's just one example.
False decision making
Do you ever get the feeling that despite such a greater variety of warframes, their archetypes and abilities, it's as if they're all the same?
If the answer is yes, then you're not wrong. The fact is that in 90% of missions, your only goal is to deal as much damage as possible to the bullet sponges. Therefore, almost all warframes are designed to deal damage through direct ability damage or damage buffs. Survivability is needed to keep killing enemies, speed is needed to get to the right enemies faster, and control is needed to more easily group them for damage.
You may ask, "Are there any other options?" And I'll say, "Yes, there are!"
Lack of ability balance and dull enemy design prevent the creation of universal combat rules where the player's decisions actually matters. Reduce duration, reduce radius, standardize effects, add soft cooldowns.
Imagine if instead of fighting a horde of bullet-sponges you encounter something like this:
The list goes on for a very long time. This is a list of enemies that would create new niches. And if warframe abilities were balanced, players could say, "Hey, this warframe, even though it does low damage with abilities, is mega-useful because it has 2-3 abilities that can knock out one enemy's super-strong attack and prevent another enemy from teleporting. This warframe, on the other hand, will have a hard time against these enemies. To compensate for that, he needs this weapon and this gear."
Currently, however, the abilities are so imbalanced that all the developers do is introduce enemies that simply prohibit you from using game mechanics. They're just trying to ban at least temporarily infinite control, damage-dealing abilities, status effects, etc.
That said, a number of control mechanics are extremely counter-intuitive, and do not prevent enemies from using their abilities in any way.
And I haven't even broached the subject of more utilitarian goals on missions yet. We already have a good example of stealth missions, where the player is given a fundamentally different goal.
This approach could be expanded upon. By providing, for example, a gate that you have to sneak through, but it closes almost instantly as soon as the player is in range of the scanner. Warframes with abilities like "dash" or "teleportation" or "superspeed" or «invis» could sneak through, unblocking the passageway for their teammates. If there are no such warframes among the team members, you will have to go through a small segment of parkour with hacking.
False builds
A lot of people say they enjoy creating builds. However, this is only true for players with a lot of experience. Without mystics (which are long and difficult to farm, and among which 80% are junk), beginners have no real choice. They simply can't not use mods like Serration, they don't have access to gamechangers for a long time, of which there aren't many for the whole game. The vast majority of mods give a conditional +5% to stats per rank.
I could go on for a long time, but there's little point. I think the basic message is clear. Don't think I'm a DE hater. I described an ideal situation, while they had to work in a crisis. And they did their job - they created a game that is played and profitable.