master_of_destiny

So....quick feedback after so much has gone down. Dante's grind is pretty good. The mission rewards a metric ton of axi and neo relics...and almost nothing for Dante. That said, 8 rounds is a fun and relatively quick go where you usually wind up with one or maybe 2 bits. 90ish of the new material per one of those runs isn't bad...so you can buy your way out unlike the absolute trash fire of Citrine and Voruna...and not having to get 21 arcanes means that it's not a miserable hate filled experience by the time the grinding is done. Dante's nerfs suck. It was a bad decision, and "sowwy" doesn't cut it. It's the usual 2-3 good changes followed by a staggeringly WTF decision that Warframe has been known for, for the better part of a decade now. I don't blame new management...as I'm still angry with the obstinate "never having universal vacuum" crap that took years to fix. I think that the archimedian thing is stupid. It's primary end reward seems to be vosfor, to RNG roll for arcanes...which is frustrating as you've literally just slapped more RNG garbage onto old systems and bumped the numbers to make it "end game." I'm tired of the acknowledgement that you don't know how to craft an endgame so RNG is the answer... Finally, can we please get so feedback on what the plan is for Dante? I've read the Reddit...because you don't post in your own forums...which is it's own kind of stupid. I get the whole "well, our LoS check is borked" statement. What I don't get is why you had to decide to make it Dante's problem. You immediately cite other frames like that's going to make us more accepting of a broken mechanic....which boggles the mind...then you tell us it's being worked on. If it's been in the game since Excalibur it's been in the game for years. You obviously understand our frustration....because you deflected immediately....but instead of reverting you've decided to double down and leave him borked until the mechanic can be fixed. That seems like a half step...and it's why people are pissed. Maybe instead of just a non-pology and non-answer you can revert, and tell us when you'll get us a fix. That's taking a slightly borked Dante and keeping it instead of a greatly diminished Dante...with the promise of a fix coming. Who am I kidding though? We've had years of "buy the bunny ephemera and ears so it can disappear in a couple of months." The last two Baros have been reintroducing stuff from years ago....so there's literally nothing new. Dante's nerf is a clockwork of "good frame made meh." This is just how things are....right?

You do realize they hide them pretty well...right? There's one that's in the chandelier at the top of the room...that nobody in their right mind would look for. Likewise, sometimes they're inside of geometry...so using your amp...if it's got an AoE...is the solution.

Saryn, maximized range, maximized power strength, toxic lash augment, 5 green shards all Tau, 3 dedicated to corrosive and 2 to corrosive count. Equip the Sobek, build for stupid high burst damage, and equip acid shells. Face off against a bunch of Grineer. Apply spores, and shoot one of the enemies in the face. Enemy one pops, spreading huge amounts of spore damage and the explosion basically has a rolling corrosive-explosion punch that will clear maps, but assuming you've got a large enough group (spawn increase) centered together it will largely roll around the map and constantly up the spores damage. You'll eventually get a stoppage because the spawn in this game is silly...but it's a rolling death wave in any missions with high enemy counts and a high enough level not to be instantly wiped despite have effectively no armor. Regarding the other parts of this...I'm happy to see DE is still DE. Dante doesn't suck at the word go, so instead of slow small nerfs they have him eat a nuclear WTF. The Onos is meh....so it retain a huge cost and a minor drop rate. For the two or three genuinely new things we've got a dozen old things that broke...and more than a week later fixing them was a lower priority than Dante's nerf. I'm serious here...DE...stop. Please stop securing defeat from the jaws of success at every single turn. Damn fine companion rework though. Not having 2-4 options is good...even if Moas still suck the chromium out of stainless steel.

It's been a month without any hotfixes...on a supposed spool-up where all of your resources are focused on getting ready for the next launch. In that time, this game seems to be buggier than ever... I'm not submitting this to the thread for bugs because I expect it to be entirely ignored there, because there's never any obvious sign that bugs are being worked on. As such, this is less about asking for a solution and more about compending the issues. If you die in Duviri, and cannot resurrect before the timer goes off, you cannot summon a warframe with your 5 without instantly dying. That's right, press 5 to die. If you die while facing the Jackal in Duviri it can despawn...leaving you on a floating island without a way to progress. Speaking of Duviri, we are back to sometime being reward locked. 3 Arcane Intentions in a single run is statistically insignificant, but yet... More Duviri...why not? You can be teleported at random when entering a gate. Went to the undercroft, spawned a white screen, and wound up half way across the map with the map and other features broken. Moving on, the netracell is a great weekly...until you have 3 in a row break at the entrance door. Yep...that speaks volumes when the door won't open despite 2 instances of each key. Two instance of each key? Yep. When console players inevitably start dropping you have to have your own keys...because if they drop they'll kick you to your own instance and not let you simply have the key auto-assigned. Yep, mission failure. Oh, but those rewards. The netracell is great if you get good rewards. Less so when your rewards are meh. The amount of grinding necessary to unlock the faction isn't enough to guarantee that you get all of the arcanes...but when your reward for a timed weekly exclusive mission is the same as you can purchase from much easier to obtain standing points it's difficult to see this as anything more than a bad reward. Note that this includes both arcanes and the adapters...so the common rewards literally make grinding for the faction worse. This is why I've never purchased an arcane adapter...because eventually the netracell will make them worthless. Speaking of worthless, I know why you don't want to offer archon shards and tauforged shards in the netracell. It's another infinite grind if you've only got 104 per year, with only 52 having a small chance at being tauforged. If you suddenly can get about 4 per week, with 1 being low percentage tauforged and 2 being vanishing percentage tauforged, then the grind starts to be much lower. 4*52 = 208. You only have 50ish warframes, so you need 250 shards...oh my. You could outfit all of your warframes with something in about 1.25 years of grind...or 1.3 at the rate new ones are coming out. Then what is the evergreen grind? Well, the combined shards are interesting and double, quadruple, or octuple the grind if you require 4 base shards to make tauforged. That means another 2-4 years of grind to stave off the grind-hards. Do you really believe that we don't see this...and do you really believe that some of us don't engage with the systems explicitly because we see this? So...about the content part of this game. You've doubled down on the "but." Deimos is regular game modes, but with a small twist. The netracell is basically corrupted keys, but not limited to mods and time locked. Steel Path is literally the regular node but with numbers much higher and requiring more tactically focused play (ie, you need to pay attention to elements and armor instead of just choosing a big enough numbers gun). The incarnons are upgraded weapons...but only for a short time after charging. Do you guys have anything left? My personal suggestion is that instead of trying to "but" us into submission maybe you make old game modes suck less? I'd love it if I didn't have to hate sharkwing because the best mods with huge costs didn't suck so bad. Finally, let me end on a positive note. I...want to suggest Deimos's expansion was a relatively good launch. A new weapon, a bunch of new mods that make it amazing, and something resembling a reason not to simply hold down melee button to win with Tennokai. It doesn't feel like you guys gave it as much thought as you should have, but the Grimoire and Tennokai have potential to be rewarding. There's now an argument for Arcane Energize or Zenurik not being necessary, so maybe this is a turning point where the space ninja game gets back to being about that...instead of fishing. Unfortunately, we'll know soon. You're now competing against companies that do almost everything you do better. You've effectively silently raised prices on content that is a decade old. You are releasing content basically twice to three times a year, with quarterly footnotes for frames and weapons that aren't enough to change the tide. As AAA gaming continues to fail, and the developers escaping that ship continue to found their own new vision of gaming, we'll get to see how you navigate competition. Hopefully it's by listening to complaints, instead of telling consumers what they want. That said, I'm looking forward to how Soulframe is either DOA or cuts into Warframe resources. We'll see if this is another DE non-launch, or if it's the coming of the studio into having more than one active IP.

Let me short this. You seem to really think this forum will be read and acted upon. You...may want to recalibrate that expectation. You seem rational. I'm glad we can have a discussion. That said, I offer my perspective as warning after years of this...back when prime junk littered my inventory because the dozens of braton parts couldn't be sold to anyone and Baro didn't exist to trade. The reliquary, an idea proposed years before it was implemented on Maru's relay, was an idea shared here...if that helps frame that it takes years for anything to be acted upon...because at the time "unvaultings" of 3 month made sense...until they had to do double unvaultings...where the cost was slightly less than a new prime access for 2 full frames and content packs...until DE walked that back with the much crappier (for value) regal aya. PSO is...not a new game. Phantasy Star has had many iterations. I played on Gamecube with the expanded content of 1+2...though I'm aware of there being a more recent release. I...well, I remember having an android and hiding in a corner to get a three round burst of the guns for next to no damage, skittering across and arena, and repeating. This is while brain dead AI walked the shortest path between their spawn and my position...because most enemies were melee. See below, the 10 minutes of gameplay versus the "Epic" Dreamcast sales pitch of the same content. I...want to close with sorrow. It's sad, but DE has not cared about individual input in years. Unless you're a youtube personality, you're about as likely to be listened to as you are to ascend into the air under your own volition. The community asks for cosmetics for prime access for years and it's impossible...until Jim Sterling asks for it. Rhaetalius criticizes their moderators for being a clique, and DE pretends it's personally insulting until their entire community tells them that their response to facts is not rational...and they need to fix what he said. A black market for rivens and price manipulation is discovered...and they pursue a ban on the person who scraped chat to demonstrate this because "he didn't follow rules" when they previously claimed nothing could be done to prove such a thing. DE...has a history of not listening, because what they think is cool matters more than what us plebians want. A few years back this realization broke me...then the next one where people actually rewarded these decisions broke me further. Today I cope by realizing that their 5 second loop of gameplay is rapidly being outdone...and the fishing mini-game isn't solving it. As such they're bleeding...and people like Pablo can only patch things with their reworks. In short order they'll shed all of the people who jumped aboard this game's train with PoE...and at that point they'll have to listen to the whales...who by this point largely are after core gameplay because it's why they started playing years ago. I hope that then we'll get the pre-PoE DE back...who gave a crap about feedback. Until then, it's just yelling into the void here...and I'm hoping that you realize I have nothing to gain by this sad realization. This is meant to preserve the hope of better in someone else...because mine checked out.

I would ask whether you need a lollipop and a nap, or just need a good moment to sit down and suck on your thumb. I'm treating you like a child, because you are acting like one. I'll explain simply...where did I state that I think any of this was a good thing? I'll give you a minute...because this is critical... The short of it is that I did not. Rule of cool is entirely in the eye of the beholder...and you've got to imagine for a moment that they have succeeded in the past because the game is still running. If you're interested in opinions, then let me share that we may be in more agreement than you think. Let me express my opinions, without the condescension that you are somehow wrong...because. 1) This is a looter-shooter about space ninjas. Everything extra should be directly adding to that...not a self serving content island. 2) DE's idea of cool has long not matched their players as a whole. That will happen when you want millions of players added...when you introduce to core content items like mining and fishing. Remember, the first thing people did with their new mining laser was to draw phalluses on everything. 3) You never played PSO, did you? The grind was insane, the drops were terrible, and they sold the game on movement that was not part of the system. I remember a three step attack I had to learn to do at just the right distance...because something like breaking the attack of the giant moles was too much to program. This meant that in PSO if you started too late you took a free hit, too soon and only 2 of 3 would hit, and slowly strafing around a hexagonal arena (one of the areas, there was a cave, volcano, and a few other areas) sucked. 4) The rule of cool gave us Railjack, Archwing, Sharkwing, multiple focuses on cosmetics, Baro with an unwholesome focus on cosmetics, and the Shawzin. The results of which have been less than stellar. I do all of these only as required for rewards...so while I don't think any of the items as delivered are cool, I can definitely see how they could be amazing. Archwing was sold as space ninjas able to fly out into the void and destroy the ships we'd always been trapped inside...and it's just a new skybox and scaling for the standard mission types...with content island items. Just because it can be sold as cool doesn't mean that it is delivered well. 5) DE is composed of humans. They can be overly ambitious. They can have bad ideas, or bad execution. You're welcome to argue whatever you want, but screaming that you aren't getting what you want because you don't think a thing is cool is...well it's what burns people out when you're just ignored. I commend you on giving enough of a crap anymore to be angry...but does this game deserve that energy? I'll tell you that my vehement defenses and scorn of it has dulled over time, because once you figure out that your anger changes nothing it's an epiphany that you can just disengage...and it's not the end of the world. Lord knows the period from PoE to Deimos has seen less core content than a "live services" game should allow...but we're still here. 6) Finally...maybe have some constructive criticism. "I don't like" is not a response. If you want DE to respond then maybe couch your proposition in something attainable and message a developer on twitter with a proposal. Forums are...based on how DE rolls...not the place to discuss anything with developers. Wow....that's good to say, but hard to write.

Of note: "We're aware. We're talking about it." The Netracell missions are time locked. "We will talk about what we are working on in the next dev stream." Note that I added point two to highlight why things are stupid. Let me do the math similar to other areas. 2.5% Tauforged drop...97.5^5 = 88% chance to get no Tauforged of a desired color...or 67.7% chance to get no tauforged shard any given week. This of course is statistics, so it's a probability cloud. There will be a player in about 100,000,000 weeks who gets a desired color tauforged for all 5 drops....this is all assuming that DE's drop tables are 100% accurate. The problem with installing a bunch of time gating mechanics is that people are going to be pissed if you don't adequately respect their time. A one in one hundred million chance to get what is "the best possible" reward outcome is a joke. It's especially sad when you get 4 common arcanes, and a regular amber shard...when the regular missions offer you the chance to earn infinite rare arcanes. Likewise, the once a week thing sucks, but every 5 weeks I'm guaranteed a Tauforge...of a certain color. .975^25 = 53%. That means with a 2.5% drop rate and the same 5 weeks I have a 53% chance to not have and Tauforged shards of the desired color. The entire point of the netracell mission was to have more opportunities to earn shards. Unfortunately, DE decided to weight rewards to garbage...so they introduced a cure to Cancer that gives you Syphillis, and they promise that in a few weeks they'll give you access to the Penicillin used to cure that...and you're hoping that you are not allergic. I think that level of brain rot is sad, DE is "fixing it" without a proper sense of urgency, and we're letting this happen because the last update released as the most stable in ages. That is, except for: 1) Spawning with a mission condition to access sarcophagus containers (3). Also spawning such that none of them can be opened...necessitating a restart. 2) The door that opens after shooting a wall mounted crystal, where voca are usually hidden, not opening for clients despite the bars to the door visually sliding up and down. 3) Spawning on a level where the void angel won't awaken...but when you try to access the other murmur boss you get a pop-up that the void angel must be killed first. 4) Arcane reward dissolution and rewards packs not being uniform...IE with the weighted rewards there are certain packs more worth buying than others...and some where despite needing them the pool is so dilute that buying their rewards is pointless. What I'm trying to say is that two weeks into the new year, along with two weeks vacation, and it doesn't seem like we're moving forward. Minor patches are rolling...but they're bug fixes. Is it too much to ask for some balancing...in a month? I'd say no...but it's DE.

You are...on the right track. Do be cautious though, occasionally DE construes this as developer bashing instead of frustration with the poor state of testing. On the other side here, PC being "the alpha beta testers" was a thing. It was also a thing that PC was 4-6 hotfixes ahead of consoles, because they could push an update without any thought. Instead of hearing "our next update will address this" the PC community got a fix same day. You're welcome to argue whether that's better or worse, because it meant more buggy released more often, with more patches. Is it better to have a thousand fixes, or is it better to have more stability with less updates? Personally, I think that DE was never held to account to release good, and the general industry practices went to utter crap so now the "industry standard" matches such a "beta forever" mindset. Regarding the updates...I think you're wrong. It's not a dart on a board. It's a segment of "rule of cool." DE chooses what they think is cool to pursue...without a lot of planning. The Jackal, but in the open, is basically the same as Lephantis on the Plains (Plague Star). If you can see the pattern, it becomes inescapable that they have no plans....only execution and poor execution.

So...I view both of these comments as coming from the same root. DE has historically stated that they will not decrease grind, because "others have already earned it." See the Hema, Sibear, and other stuff. Now, allow me to offer what I see as a poisoned apple for new players. If you were given equipment required to complete content what would it be? Basic Odonata archwing...basic Mote amp...basic companion? I think that all of these things suck to varying degrees...and the second you can buy a new one you do. The thing is though, you can do these story missions with garbage equipment, because they're about the story instead of about gameplay challenges. For instance, imagine if $20 bought you a basic dash...and it'd be outclassed by literally anything earned through focus. Is this fair, and to the spirit that DE introduced years ago? No. What it is, is a naked cash grab that will have some people taking it thinking that it'll skip out on the long grind...only to find that they spent real money on garbage equipment so that they could enjoy the new stuff on day one. Read: poisoned apple. I think that this is great...because it's going to test DE's mettle. I just think that they're going to discover rather quickly how pissed people can get when their "pay to skip" offers almost nothing as far as long term rewards...and they then discover that to get the good stuff they'll need to endure 5-7 story missions and a few dozen hours of grind to unlock the content that isn't bare minimum. Let me put this into human terms. Imagine spending years riding the bus to school. You turn 16, get a license, and the first car you are promised is either a free geo metro or a Civic you need to spend an entire summer working towards. The free geo isn't great...but you did get it free. The Civic is cheap because it's on its last legs...and you discover that to make it good you'd need more money than buying a new car...while the owner of the Geo has been saving after their car and can actually buy something good when it breaks down...whereas the Civic dies and you get salvage cost. The Civic owner now has to go out and earn even more money to buy something...which kills any love for cars as more than a utility. Yes, I'm suggesting that we allow DE to be idiots. We allow them to poison their player base in search of a quick dollar, and despite railing against it we allow them to collapse the focus system from endgame to middle game because they literally don't seem to understand how their own game plays. I suggest this not as a learning experience, but as a means for DE to show us how little they've learned...and hopefully to anger enough people that they do something not stupid after this....because DE works in cycles of sky rending stupidity and clawing-back players with less stupid decisions. I'm hoping that the last three years of idiotic new grind and devaluation of everything can be clawed back...but it's really just me hoping that DE can maybe start doing more that minimum viable product releases where what should come out day one is about 60% right, and they then milk it for a second release so that anybody who was dedicated to grinding is going to have to come back to get to rest of what was missing. In shorter terms, I want to watch DE light the match and immolate themselves, instead of the current wrist cutting goth phase where they only seem to want attention. That's macabre to say, but I'll point in the direction of Regal Aya and having learned 0 lessons with it before they pumped out the heirloom pack...and then simply laugh because they didn't want to learn. They wanted us to swallow that garbage, because their monetization specialists predicted they'd get away with it...and they were wrong. Yes, the unvaultings are now more expensive than ever. Yes, DE lied about the duration and scope of Nightwave, and subsequently the nature of its rewards. Yes, the game is now a login and do time locked stuff instead of just play for fun. Yes, all of this is antithetical to the company who claimed that the Kubrow cosmetics were "too much like gambling..." but this is where we are. Instead of lamenting, I'm praying DE is as stupid as they are saying...because this level of perceived greed (whether real or not) is stupid. Boy...I can't believe that I want something I love to be abused more so social services gets called, but here we are.

So....while I appreciate your opinion, I believe that you are incorrect. I believe the root of this error is in assuming that instead of integration with the game you want legacy content carved out and ignored. Allow me to offer you an alternative, which I believe is less detrimental. I say detrimental because if you carve the story out of Warframe then you've got literally nothing but 5 second loops of movement and murder nirvana...surrounded by miserable grind. Now...you call out Tubemen. That's...short sighted. Operation gate crash, arid fear, breeding grounds, and cryotic front all came before that. Cripes, if you carved out all of the content you only received due to a story event we'd have...5 game modes? I don't think anyone rational looks at DE and suggests that level of garbage follow-through is acceptable...but there is a fix. That'd restricting new players from entering certain content until they receive a pass, and said pass would be tied to a 3-5 mission primer on game modes. Yes, I'm suggesting new players could initiate a lockdown on a Corpus tile set and not have a bursa wheel itself out until they'd done a quick 3-5 mission string introducing the enemies and terminology...without needing to revive a dead event. If we look at the content this would cover, I'd suggest: 1) Operation Gate Crash 2) Fomorian Sabatoge 3) Tethra's Doom 4) Breeding Grounds 5) Cryotic Front 6) Eyes of Blight 7) The Pacifism Defect 8) Operation: Ambulas Reborn 9) Gradivus Note that all of the above introduce enemies that are simply a feature of the current game...and people often forget what history brought them into being. That's because DE introduces crap, forgets it exists, and leaves legacy stuff in the game because why not. Tell me, if you started today how would you know how to scan the Kurias, or even how little it used to suck to have eximus units still entirely CC viable...instead of the current deader is better meta. Now...would this introduce more time between logging in the first time and being a true warframe player (read: mashed's video on 100 days in Warframe)? Yes. That's bad, right? Well, no. People are idiots, and want to pretend that this would suck. It's under the broad assumption that nobody has patience...and while that kind of idiot exists I believe better of this community. This would be the opportunity for DE to give us a more clear progression path from start to being amazing...and if they had an ounce of thought to offer they'd restructure the screen for missions into a tree. Vor's Prize is the start, from there you branch off into howl of the Kubrow and Once Awake, from there you'd continue to branch...and the above new missions would give you reasons to start filling out the star chart missions to access stuff like excavation missions and the like. Does this put up a barrier to entry for new players? Is that gate keeping? Am I a bitter old veteran who just doesn't understand the new player experience? Yes, No, and go take a long walk off a short cliff you stupid strawman. The barrier to entry for new players is a non-starter argument. If you want people to engage, you have a mastery rank locking content, and you have multiple 24+ hour waits required to engage with content then you've already structured your game with required wait. As such, claiming that a game which for 5 years and change has required full completion of the star chart prior to engaging with more than 50% of the content (read: operator abilities and high level rewards) is without barriers is shenanigans. This isn't gate keeping...because asking for players to engage with the game before they're given access to everything is called progression. For those of us old enough to remember when microtransactions weren't authored to allow you to skip badly structured grind, it's obvious that the only gate keeping is to force value from player effort rather than rewarding whales who pay to skip. Finally, idiots make the "you just don't get it" argument. I'll entertain you for a moment on that front. I remember getting knocked off the map, and it counting as 1 of your 3 deaths per day per frame. I remember spawning off map, and that was another death. I remember having to buy lives...because that was a mechanic. I remember 3 tiers of fusion cores, abilities being tied to mods, fixed daily maximums without regard to MR for focus, and my favorite mechanic of all was Pets. Buy genetic stabilizers, can't let them be downed, as you have a maximum count of daily interactions, 24 hours to unfreeze one of them, and worst of all because their stats sucked so bad they spent most of the time in missions rushing enemies and dying, so your only real option was a sentinel. In short, I remember that the grind used to suck worse. I'm not here to make people suffer through that...but maybe making them spend time figuring out how to build an obvious crit focused weapon without having to look up a guide on youtube would lead to a more competent player base...one that doesn't rely heavily on the ignis wraith. Having said all of this, you may be surprised about my conclusion. I support the pay to skip button. I agree with your outcome, if believing that your method to get there is flawed and incorrect. I believe it's DE experimenting with more monetization, as we've collectively kicked them in the teeth for blatant greed constantly. Regal Aya and Heirloom collections anyone? They increased the price of vaulted content with the inclusion of Regal Aya, without increasing the player reward. I think they should be allowed to make more money...but I also believe that them doing this will poison new players and older players for a surprisingly long time. When the chat for your optional dev stream loses its mind it's pretty obvious that their good will is running thin. That, combined with perceived greed, will force a death or renaissance. I am optimistic that it'll be a renaissance of restructuring content...so I'm happy. It's not like DE has anything else in the pipe...as Soul Frame is aspirational as shown. They cannot afford to screw up Warframe...so we'll either get a lot of presents to address their mistake or genuine improvement. Consider this trying to find the silver lining in a very dark cloud. Boy, was that depressing to write. Hopefully DE gives enough of a damn to read this...but I'm not holding my breath.

So....please excuse but I've only glanced at this conversation. As such, maybe I'm missing some of this. That said, you are requesting the floor to be raised rather than the ceiling to be lowered. It's a good idea on paper...but how do you square the fact that DE is incapable of this with asking for it? Let me be less obtuse, and provide an example (or two). Rivens entered the game as a means to bring everything up to the level of acceptable for later game content. They were initially pushed out with...very little balance. Their RNG nature meant that 90/100 rivens are about as useless as a lead balloon, the remaining 10 are divided such that 8 are useful and 2 are absolutely broken. They of course have multiple layers of RNG...between 2-3 positives, 0-1 negative, and then multipliers for each of the conditions....which makes my broad 90% garbage work...without having to do two pages of math to get a more accurate number. DE failed to balance, made a black market, and eventually came to the conclusion that instead of balance they'd equalize to a desired usage outcome....because 10th+ order systems are basically impossible to balance without a mathematician spending hours to even model. Likewise, our recent incarnon stuff is...a thing. I'd like to say great, but they basically tacked on some base stats to weapons that were utter garbage by a thousand updates power creeping them into oblivion. Instead of just fixing them though they slapped on an incarnon mode...which is a huge power boost that is so limited as to be useless. Joy...after half a mission's head shots I can enter into a slightly more powerful mode that feels good...just long enough know it's working before it's got to recharge. Ouch. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any points, but I'd like to understand how and why you believe DE is capable. Ideally with some sort of examples that I could rattle around in my brain and try to make sense of. I don't think your point is inherently wrong...but I'm also not entirely capable of seeing it through to some sort of engame where DE genuinely understands their own game as a whole. Blessed be the Pablo reworks, where an old frame gets reworked into something genuinely good (Grendel and now Hydroid), but Pablo is a freak (in the best of ways). He seems to have a laser focus on what is good, and fits it into the game without just simply stat buffing. Pets 2.0 is great...and it only took 5 years. Joking aside...I'm viewing Infested Salvage, the Grendel Missions, Defections, and what I see is a company that cannot commit. They add more, and instead of building up they build out. With that philosophy they cannot ever balance...because it would require that they balance everything...and that's a huge non-value add when it's much easier to repurpose. As an example, repurpose a basic mission type (exterminate), reuse the lantern mechanic from an old boss (Zeloid Prelate), reuse the low lighting condition from special missions, and gate it behind a new Dojo room and syndicate standing. Use this in conjunction with a near zero effort single model "story time with Grandmother" mechanic, and you've got what appears to be a lot of content that is literally a week of work for an animator and maybe a few weeks of work on designing the frame. Drag this out for 4+ months...because you're still working on stuff promised before you even started working at DE (read: pets 2.0), and have that mission mechanic dragged out because you need a new resource that's RNG valued...it's done. Ready for consumption. Please note that a lot of this is because when I logged in I was bounced out of a mission so DE could ask me to do a survey...instead of on log-out like before. They asked if the game respected my time, and my answer was no. It was no because nothing in this game is about respect for time, it's entirely about the line we're willing to draw between gameplay and skipping a garbage grind...or the content hidden behind it. I'm OK with that in free to play...but we're getting to the point that DE is starting to actually lose whales based upon their actions...and I think it's directly linked to the inability to balance things. Thus, I want to hear an opinion from somebody who...I don't believe is on the same wavelength I am, and thus might offer insight that I'm missing.

Thank you. It's almost like the argument here is that DE has multiple progression systems which don't mesh. They create plateaus, and instead of offering rewards on these plateaus DE seems to be seeking to remove them. They aren't being removed by changing the reward progression...they're being removed by giving you so much stuff that you don't have time to plateau before you're moving onto the next grind and incapable of appreciating your progress. 1) Start the game, grind for basic resources and credits while unlocking the start chart. 2) Discover mods as you level up. Discover endo as a requirement. Discover it's rarely dropped, and in 15 unit blobs. 3) Get to rank 30. Discover the joys of forma, the 24 hour wait, and the need to earn both reactors and catalysts. Find both are unobtanium unless engaging with Nightwave, which all of the aura mods are also hidden behind. Despair, because as a new player you'll have random weekly access with miserable time gates and then have to decide if the aura mod or the reactor/catalyst is a better reward. 4) Complete the star chart. Discover the Steel Path. Complete The Second Dream. Discover operator form. 5) Discover Arbitrations. A new game mode that penalizes death hard...but is basically an endo fountain. Nowhere else can you run 40 minutes and get 7 sources of endo and an ephemera as a reward. 6) Use the endo from arbitrations, and the mods. Get your crap pushed in during steel path, and start grinding PoE for either lenses or Eidolons. Alternatively, now engage with Duviri for huge nearly effortless focus gains. 7) Become dangerous enough to do Steel Path, by having the operator act as an extension of your builds. This functionally is meant to be where you no longer have to have a niche build to survive Steel Path...because enemies without armor are basically dead (Unairu), casters with infinite energy are immortal (Zenurik), and melee with the ability to regen health (Naramon+Arcane Reaper) are basically immortal. 8) Grind Rivens. You've literally done everything else...and without the operator grind being here it's lonely at the RNG rolling top. 9) Grind Kuva. End stage Rivens is not just to have them, but to spend millions of kuva getting a "god roll." Almost like it's an RNG sandwich...right type, right weapon, and right stats. The items in italicized blue are the plateaus. They are periods where the player is going to have issues. Note that DE has....kind of made them easier. That initial mod grind is endo supported, and all mods can be dissolved into endo. No reactors and having to get 1024 mods to merge into a single high level one. They haven't removed the exponential path though...so their cost is still an issue that necessitates not only getting a core set, but raising it up to be effective. Next is the Nightwave. It's been a pretty fantastic failure. Let me elaborate. For veterans who have all of the cosmetics it's a grind of old content to get credits to buy...Nitain and reactors/catalysts. For new players it's a weekly RNG roll whether they can get the rewards without help, followed by an RNG roll to see if they have anything to buy. What I will tell you is that decent veterans who find a lower MR player should offer them a quick trade, and give up some of their aura mods. It's the right thing to do to make the new player experience suck less. As far as I'm concerned, it's also the only way to retain people who see the grind wall to basic equipment after the first 10 hours and just tune out. Follow this up with forma. You've got to get access to the void and relics to farm stuff...and then wait 23 hours... It's not a pain to veterans, but for new players who need hundreds of forma it's basically months of artificial grind wall. This is why Formastar is an event the community loves. Moving on to step 5...arbitrations. I...have mixed feelings. It's great for new players to have a gigantic feed of endo...and older players keep doing it for the arcanes. As the later, and years in, I'm still 19/21 for the pistol efficiency with 33/21 for the companion armor and arch-gun summon armor. Likewise, the endo flow is a joke, when you've got everything maxed, 100+ of each statue, and 6+ million sitting around because the release of mods is so slow. It's also frustrating when people pop into this game mode for 10 minutes, get one reward, and duck out. The rest of the team gets to either power through (see: Revenant and shield gating) or leave a timed mission. With mixed feelings, it was a generally good thing that DE assumes everyone will love given how much endo is required. This is generally where new players start to drop. 400+ weapons is cool...until you test 5 in a row that suck. MR lets you do more...but it's not linear. The rank-ups take weeks instead of days to earn. With all the time gating people burn out...and fade away. No comments, just move on to the next free title. This is also why DE asks us in their surveys if we know what to do next...because at this step there's no clear "forward" that isn't going to require lots of grind without obvious quick benefits. Step 6 is late mid-game. With the changes to focus it'll probably move to 7, because the focus schools will be item 5. Grinding Duviri is a literal joke, because they removed all progression gates. You can enter day one with the Sun & Moon and be effective as someone at MR 33. Back to 6, you've got another re-equip plateau. You're going to need the mods to start winning at Steel Path...and the operator powers make it somewhat trivial even at low levels. When "challenge" is defined by big number and you can remove them with a single button press it's less about challenge and more about a gear check. Read: why corrosive damage and corrosive projection mods were the only choice for years...and now the "high level" content is Unairu as a basic requirement. Step 9 is literally the end of the game. It's where people stop logging in, except for content drops. Rivens have been divorced from their purpose of "allowing all weapons to be viable in late game" and has instead become an exercise in trying to find the 1% where the Riven hasn't been hammered to crap for what the weapon can do. You then have to get the riven, roll until you get the weapon, then roll until you get stats...of course those stats also have RNG. Goody. I can get the "god roll" for the categories, and still get a garbage individual stat roll that makes the riven unusable. Gotta love that level of fruitless grind. Anyone who has read this, and disagrees, should point out a few things. 1) If it's such a grind, why are you still playing? Answer - for 20 seconds. The 20 seconds to slice through mooks, jump against a wall and wall jump into the air, slam down with a heavy attack, and become a gigantic fanblade of limbs and mook bits. That's the core loop of this game...and why it's good. 2) If you're a veteran you don't understand the new player experience. It was too long ago. Answer - you forget that the new player experience is new. Amazing, but it used to be a total mess. Login, drop from a pod in the wall, have infinite energy to kill enemies for no apparent reason, then wander through a tutorial. Of course, that was 2.0. My understanding is that new player mission 1.0 was just dropping you into the orbiter. Funny that, the current experience leading you through everything. The initial start being the same rough smattering of missions, but evolving into dozens of parallel grinds. Finally, understanding that old methods were actually much more restrictive (coin lives, hard capped focus, and no shield gating), and thus were a longer grind. Of course, standing for ways to decrease that grind is reasonable...given that these conveniences aren't simply given up. IE, focus being tied to MR, shield gating being a mechanic which you can mod for with arbitration mods, and the coin lives going the way of the arcade for a live count which can be increased through earning higher ranked arcanes. 3) TL;DR. Answer - fine. TL; DR back. Too lazy; don't respect. 4) Rabble-rabble-rabble, gatekeeper. Answer - Cool. You want all of the rewards and none of the investment. That's called entitlement, and it's why games like Overwatch died. It's also why games like Star Wars Battlefront II died. If EA made Vader a 40 hour grind, and didn't let you pay for him, it would be a powerful reward. Instead, they claimed it being a "reward" and then offered it for money in a premium priced game. DE gets away with this because they're free to play...but only as long as we let them. I'm not gatekeeping to keep new players from content, I'm attempting to force them to engage with the progression curve so that by the time it unlocks they know what it is to earn that power...without the opportunity to just buy it. Key differences there that most people are too dense to link...but the two, and all too often the reality is that through years of conflation and inexperience with pro-consumer practices they may never be able to see that there is a difference. Let me end with this, for the 1% of the 1% who read. DE waited years before the focus system got any love. They waited so long that anybody who has it probably finished grinding for it more than 12 months ago. They added Thrax in the Zariman, and in Duviri they added Thrax with a mission section that spawns them infinitely without the 30 kill requirement on the Zariman. It's obvious that they're adding all of the easier methods so that players can power up faster...but then you constantly hear DE whine about minimizing power creep, and that's why all of the new content is "but." Let me explain. Incarnons are awesome upgrades to the weaker weapons, but they are only awesome in an incarnon mode which depletes quickly and requires charging. Decrees are awesome, but only serve to mask the uneven progression of a souls-like Duviri. The circuit gives us a quick challenge with immediate rewards, but it locks us into gear that ranges from great to garbage. I'm seeing a day in the not too distant future where this balance by DE is how they address power creep, but the truth is that once everyone else sees their "buts" I don't believe that they'll want to communicate it. I believe they'll state "but there are a hundred other free games in my library right now that don't require me to jump through hoops." That'll be the day a large chunk of players log off forever...because eventually seeing this game's ugly side will hurt too much. You know, I'm going to do two things. I'll take back an earlier defense of Unairu being the only focus school choice...because it is at endgame. I'll also share my love for statistics. 100% of games die...whether a slow death of by the hands of their creators or by being replaced. Most games that matter are resurrected...think WoW classic, Guild Wars, or even Final Fantasy. The thing is, all of these games were run by people smart enough to not aim for decades of content. Heck, current WoW pivots...and I'm betting DE thinks they learned that lesson. That's why we got "open worlds." Unfortunately they neglected to learn that the driver is core content, and the icing is that unique stuff. In the last five years we've gotten a tub of icing per each slice of cake, and now DE wants to replace the cake they already gave us with icing. That's how we stop liking the icing and the cake...because there's nothing worse than a slab of icing...because cloyingly sweet is only tolerable if there's some balance to it. Almost like rewards are not rewards if there's no effort in getting them.

What I believe is simple, that DE is making the endgame much more accessible and thus not endgame. I laid out all that would be required to do so...and I responded to someone who initially argued that they wanted this because it makes more builds possible. Now, if you'd like to argue...because it seems like you think this is zero sum, then explain: 1) Why not just remove the mastery rank system...because it places barriers to new players having powerful tools? 2) Why not remove the syndicates daily reputation gain...because it removes the player's ability to access powerful tools? If you can answer those two questions I'll gladly admit that you have a point, and that I should absolutely assume that nothing in this game matters and I should have access to everything. So we are clear...I've already answered the stupidity of "old man" arguments. DE did years ago with the quote "We do free to play right. You'll be able to access all core content just by playing the game." It was a statement that: 1) All content was "free" to access 2) Non-core content was the money maker (cosmetics, slots, etc...) 3) There will be time gating to make sure that players have a reason to continue to play. 4) Whatever was valuable would have the most grind. 5) The grind was proven out by low RNG values...because the Lato Vandal and Braton Vandal along with the 21 rarest Eidolon arcanes are 1:20 chances or much less. You know, it might just be a veteran thing. It might be someone old enough to have not been brought up on free to play garbage, who has seen successful monetization, and knows that money has intrinsic value. Maybe I am too old to just accept things. Of course, you've done nothing to make a counter argument but state a word, and proven that the counter argument is simply "I deserve more with less effort." Never necessary to argue why, or even cite that I've drawn a line in the sand because I accepted earlier stuff. Any actual potential argument is just "I'm too lazy and you aren't going to agree." Yeah...Deadblow. No effort, finesse, and entirely useless. Does make you feel good to swing that hammer though, right?

Cool. Cringe. If I only have to respond in a single word...maybe "Tool" instead of cringe. Specifically, Deadblow hammer for being completely useless in almost every situation yet perennially chosen by those who don't know what they are doing.

You are...wrong. Just so wrong. Point 1, the definition of literally. If the game "literally" had the focus system for 8 of 10 years it'd be something that I can demonstrate. Upon release there were no schools that could be unbound, no way to get lenses outside of RAIDs, and the release of PoE was the first time most could reasonably be expected to get lenses...of which there were 2. Point 2, you don't understand the difference between gate keeping and devaluation of effort. Let me destroy this stupidity. I appreciated introduction of the thrax. I appreciated not having to power grind for a fixed daily focus cap. I appreciated that DE made the system more intensive by requiring eidolon shards to unlock items, and that those same shards allowed you to earn functionally unlimited standing each day. That seems like the opposite of gate keeping...which would instead be complaining that nobody else is forced to get focus over literal months. My frustration is that instead of focus unlocking powerful new options, it's becoming a requirement. Can't kill Thrax without void damage. Can't do Duviri without a lot of bonuses tied to intrinsics, given the balancing. You'll note that I don't cite Kuva. Why is that? Well, rivens are "endgame." Getting Kuva to reroll them is great...and requiring it in late game sets up an investment to reward requirement that means you feel value in its power. My issue is that if you double rewards, make them required much earlier in-game, and then quintuple reward source things are no longer a reward for effort. Things become a tax for entry...which is the gate keeping you claim I am guilty of. Bummer, seems like your logic is rooted in a stupid misunderstanding of what gate keeping is....because you project that I "don't want newbies" to have the power I do. Funny thing is, I want them to be forced to engage and have that power feel like something earned. This isn't "spending $10 on Darth Vader or 100 hours of grind is 'rewarding.'" This is me asking for a powerful mechanic to not be devalued. My last bit is the new players garbage response. A new player, on day one, has no access to about 80% of the game. No Steel Path, Archwing, Railjack, Operator, most of Nightwave, and with MR gating even if they power leveled they'd be missing most of the arsenal. Put the 23 hour forma wait, vaulted content, and 24+ hour build times for things like a clan dojo and you're really pushing the bounds of reasonable for claiming the new player has any relative power. Why then is it a reward to grind, and grind, to get new stuff? That would be progression...which you seem to not understand. Let me short this. More time = more understanding = more rewards = more power =progression. Thing is, if you remove the time commitment and the rewards are simply handed out much faster it. not really a reward. It becomes a progression wall....like the one you accuse me of wanting. That's stupid, right? I mean, before the focus system was about bringing you to a place of greater potential...but not stopping you. Operator form could give you a revive, but you didn't need to have it if you could shield gate. Options, rather than a requirement, are the name of the game. --------------------------------- Now that I've heard many, many stupid reasons that "I'm an elitist, snobbish, gate keeping jerk" I think it's time to fix this hypothetically. Maybe that will get it past your inability to conceive of one counter argument. If instead of simply cranking up rewards DE decided to rebuild focus I'd be happy. Imagine for a second that instead of a focus school you just got focus at current rates. It was stored in a single value, and each school branched out from a central core. The initial branches and levels are very cheap. Think 50k to unlock basics,, which over 3 levels ramp to 50-150-300k. No lock to a lense, and no differentiation. This means on day one people who wanted to could have one level in almost anything. Instead of a school then you have a circle divided into segments which "mimic" a school, and you choose where the conical section you have access to covers. This means you could unlock things like Unairu's void dash, but the Vazarin void blast...and those low inner circle costs mean you haave access to underpowered versions day one. Now, ring 2 is the good stuff. Bonuses like changes to void dash are 150-300-500k to unlock, so they are an investment. Powerful, not locking you out of function, but giving you more. Ring 3 is the farthest out, and it's the big-boy stuff. Specifically, the waybounds that can be unlocked. If they're expensive, and require enough of the low level path done, you suddenly have power progression both within the power and to unlock it. The best part is that the conical section gets expanded. It starts out at 50 degrees (to cover one "tree" or focus school)...and once the outer ring is unlocked it widens. It now can cover 70 degrees, offering new powers. Think something like your void blast being able to both armor strip and slow, or your dash blasting and armor stripping. Again, you haven't decreased investment in these powers at all...you've made them easier to unlock at base but kept most of the insane power behind a huge grind wall. Not gate keeping, but drip feeding little rewards until you unlock the big one. Why is this better than simply removing the grind? Well, you don't need any of the operator abilities, if you don't build new systems around them. Specifically, note that I wouldn't require Thrax enemies to be void damaged, but instead have them function like their Duviri counterparts with overshields (note: the Orowyrm boss fight). This removes requirements, gives rewards sooner, doesn't remove the time investment required to get those rewards, and doesn't require things earlier in the game because of stupid design decisions. It's also a solution to basic functions because the gap between earlier game unlocks and true power is still there...without needing to dramatically increase player rewards so it can reasonably be assumed they have access to something, but there isn't a requirement that they have access to the most powerful version of it. This, despite players actually being rewarded with experimenting on different conical section coverage...because there'd be nothing quite so amazing to support as someone who could dash in and restore health, instantly revive a player, and then suppress enemies with a huge blast of armor stripping. Thing is, to do that you'd need weeks of grind...which I'd absolutely support. This is all while "new" players with only a few hundred hours could "only" armor strip or regenerate enemies... Maybe you get it now...maybe not. My issue is that focus is becoming a barrier to engagement instead of a reward for investment. That's taking an endgame reward and devaluing it until it's a middle-game requirement....which is pants on head stupid. What's even more idiotic is DE then justifying this as a good thing by "decreasing grind" while actually forcing more grind...because before this was an optional grind for power. My problem is when what was optional power becomes a requirement things are no longer a reward...and if you are a new player that's not rewarding, but changing rewards to requirements.