master_of_destiny
-
Posts
1,408 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Posts posted by master_of_destiny
-
-
3 hours ago, Van_Void said:
Well I, and probably many more new players, am not even close to playing steel path. Also I do not find the Duviri Experience very enjoyable. So getting pathos clamps for doing nothing is not to be sneezed at.
Do think about other people not only about yourself.OK....let me short this. If you are cracking open a window, and harvesting the rewards, then the stream is pointless. It's a cost gate to see if you'll buy twitch prime or amazon prime.
Now, let me tackle rewards. Just give this a little bit of thought. I can solo the basic stuff with sun & moon in about 30 minutes...getting 10 pathos clamps, resources, and the ability points. That's twice as much reward, plus resources, plus experience, in less time than it'd take to watch DE tell me nothing about the future...
Why complain? Well, because nothing is free. If you think your time has no value then I have nothing to say. 90 minutes for 10 pathos clamps, or 90 minutes for 30 clamps, experience, and resources is a no-brainer. If you just open the window it's a free reward...but DE is using you to inflate engagement numbers so you are the product being sold... It's pretty silly to not value yourself.
Barring the rest of this...it's silly to think that DE gives anything away for free. They want your engagement time to support their whales...and they've given up on things that drive constant engagement. See: Nightwave devolving. They may not have the resources to do that sort of stuff....but they can give away a limitless virtual resource that literally cannot purchase anything in-game at the rates being awarded...which is why people feel insulted. You're welcome to think that's complaining...but imagine if DE gave away a free frame...and once you got it a message on the screen flashed and said you have no open slots, either sell a warframe or buy a slot to receive your gift. It'd be less useful, right? It'd be an insult, right? Well, that's why free frames now come with a slot...
-
3
-
-
9 hours ago, PrimeEnLightenedShadow said:
Having enough players for that doesn't mean they aren't losing players. You don't need millions of players for fast chats to happen consistently, a few thousand will do fine.
Nice assumption you have there, would be a shame if someone were to present some facts to counter it.
While this is only for Steam, it has been proven time and again that things are proportionally very consistent across all platforms. If the player count for a game goes down by half on Steam, it went down by half for each platform.
Search for Warframe. In the top left corner of the player count timeline, if you click on All, you can see that Warframe's peak player count USED to be consistently going up. Now though, while inconsistent, it IS going down. Particularly, in September of last year, (October if you look at the list below, since that list checks from the 20th of a month to the 20th of the next one) Warframe's peak player count dropped to the lowest point it's been in 5 years.
Warframe may not be hemorrhaging players, but people ARE leaving, You're simply ASSUMING that everything is fine because you're just going "I'm able to win. Therefore, the game is good."
Here's the Catch 22, though: The backlash against bad design choices is almost exclusively voiced by the players THAT ARE STILL PRESENT.
Ever ask someone why they quit Warframe? Me neither, but I doubt that Final Fantasy 14 doing so well has anything significant to do with it.
You fail to see the big picture...but are on a reasonable path.
Let me rectify that. Warframe is in a constant cycle of content-logins-drought-losses. That's what you always hear as a counter, and it isn't entirely wrong. That said, the longer and longer there are content droughts the less people come back immediately. This is how we've gotten to the current model of two large drops per year...with "echoes" style booster packs because they need people engaged again.
To stop this DE introduced a variety of time gates. Think Sorties, Archon Hunts, and the current rewards for the circuit. That said, this started back with syndicate standing...so you can't call this magically new.
The best part of all of this is that you are wrong (about feedback). I have asked plenty of people who quit what their breaking point was, and youtube is littered with former partners. Let me enlighten you...and hopefully DE.
1) My time is wasted. Having a 2% drop for something that requires 20 minutes of my time is insulting.
2) The content sucks. There are maybe 5-10 great weapons in any category...but hundreds to grind. Getting to MR20 is a pipe dream...(yes, that long ago)
3) Bugs. So many bugs. It's a AAA bugged game that never fixes more than the most critical stuff.
4) Double standards. Watch a dev stream. Identify that DE's representatives are forever making lewd and inappropriate comments...as defined by their own ToS. It isn't me being a prude, but I've seen people nearly get a huge ban because of the name of their pet...and it was less edgy than some of the crap on their streams...in a game about slicing people in half you can't even make certain references.
Why do players come back then? DE has about 10 seconds of good game. That's not an insult, it's acknowledging that the 10 seconds it takes to mow down an army of mooks, parkour to another, and slice them into sashimi is a great loop. It makes this game. Unfortunately, 99% isn't that loop. Like opiates, that loop is so good it keeps people coming back despite all the bad. Thing is, rehab is a thing. People do get to their breaking point. People leave because DE is making their game more transparently time hungry while flogging microtransactions out the ears. That's all fair...but sometimes people leave because it doesn't feel good.
A fair few of my friends left forever...because there are hundreds of alternatives. DE is in the midst of making fishing more core to their game than murdering Grineer by the bucket load...and that lack of focus is showing. That said, don't flog the steam chart numbers. It's a poorer argument that's easy to contrast with peaks brought on by content releases. I say that because I was where you are. The people who care stick around and talk about what can be done. Normies just log off forever. It'll only be a problem when whales disappear...and that'll only be a problem when you can't get a match...which DE has "fixed" with cross-platform...so a 20% drop across all platforms becomes a 320% increase in players by virtue of multiple platforms (yes, 80% of varying player counts isn't going to add up to this...but the math is close enough to demonstrate the point).
-
3
-
-
On 2022-09-04 at 12:43 AM, (NSW)Vampire_Mika said:
a good question i thought of is could you get banned for simply having something like Teamspeak or wallpaper engine running?
I'm going to offer you a quick and dirty...but there' a lot more to be covered.
The ban on third party application is for those item which either alter memory or access data that the default game does not (primarily), or secondarily they alter input from the player. The idea here is not to mess with your client and do something that DE doesn't want.
What do I mean here? Well, imagine that you have a 10 button combination to draw a weapon, fire, repeat, run 5 meter forward to get items, run 5 meters back, and repeat. This is the basic idea of camping...and DE frowns upon it because it removes the grind. Basically, they want players not bots. Their anti-cheat here generally seems to be input inspection, verification of non repeating inputs, and it's good enough. As such, it seems like the more consistent the input, for longer, the more likely you are "cheating." I cannot speak to the voracity of this method...but it seems like they often start with trade bans instead of hard gameplay bans.
The memory alteration stuff is harder core hacking. Imagine if you altered the value for your health to be a constant 1000. Imagine if you forced rewards such that instead of getting 1 dropped neuroptics you get 10. Better yet, imagine if you can dump the program and actually have the knowledge to dissect it. That's the nightmare scenario, and it's why stuff reading player data from active memory is such a touchy subject for DE. It's a huge no-no for security.
But what about other programs? Well, you could go old school punk buster. That searched active programs for stuff named like an identified cheating program...and it was less hit and more miss. Not cool in the modern age when most people have dozens of background applications all named with literally no conventions that can be counted upon. This is why anti-cheat is not based upon program names...though the fringe benefit is that an anti-cheat trolling your active program listing and reporting that back to the game company was an issue that sunk many older anti-cheat programs.
Do I think tangentially linked programs will lead to a ban? No...because it's far easier to identify behavior than program names as a threat. That said...if you run on a console there's literally no reason to worry. The walled gardens all have to work together in their own ecosystem...so there's basically no rational reason to start banning anyone for software.
Why then do I worry about anything? I mean, if you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to fear. Right? Well, that's not right. Imagine if I wanted to search out what relics contained a specific reward. I'd have to go to the relic terminal, search for the name, troll through the list, and determine what I wanted to enrich before going to the match session start. This means if I select a mission, want an Oberon Prime Chassis, but choose the wrong relic level I am stuck without any idea of where to get it...barring spamming missions. It's silly to structure it as such...but that's our UI. Now, imagine that somebody created an overlay where you typed in Oberon Prime Neuroptics, it pulled inventory data showing you have 4 and 2 of the containing relics (example pulled straight from my backside, so take the grain of salt relevant there), allowed you to enrich them, and listed the active missions so in one screen you can start with a goal, see your inventory, mess with that inventory, and start a mission without having 3-4 separate screens to go through.
That's what these third party apps are doing...because to access your inventory they either have to make a call to DE or read data from your active memory...and DE views both as a security risk.
Being crass, Mo' function means mo' security risk. DE's policy is written with that in-mind...not on thing like streaming, recording, or even code designed to never make memory calls outside of its allotted memory area.
Now, this is a 40% answer. It's generalizing a lot, and not particularly technically accurate. That said, it's designed as an "executive" summary. One that highlights the general whys. If you'd like something better I'd suggest you look into API call functions, memory allocation, memory assignment, and good practices on coding. All of that will get you to a 90% answer...with the remaining 10% being DE laziness. Being fair, that is not a criticism. Laziness in this case is simply allowing themselves the rights to do anything, because writing a policy that actively evolves with the technology would be a joke. It's much more economical to be Eric Cartman, than Perry Mason.
I feel sad now. For those born much too early, Perry Mason was a person who upon discovery would often have a moment where little things would align, and demonstrate a much greater truth. In coding and the law this means a blanket protection is easier, requires less updates, and carries no logical issues to being implemented. IE, it's simpler, cheaper, and less effort. Hence DE will never update policies...because despite any criticism levelled they are not idiots...or at least legal isn't.
-
5
-
-
You know, as a long time player I don't get this.
Some people are making the request that DE includes more interactive UI elements...and they've literally stopped doing that a decade ago. They stopped the day that they constructed the terminal on the orbiter, and buried 90% of all data behind a terminal interface that is so obtuse that nobody can understand it without its own guide. That's been "good enough" for a decade.
Likewise, button clicking is a pain. Programmed macros in things like Razr hardware were a solution...and DE even partner with them to give stuff away. That said, the commentary has been, for years, that using said software could lead to a ban... Because at its core DE wants a horde shooter, but they also want to be able to be lazy and have stuff that is theoretically capable of going as fast as you can click. The problem is that this is idiotic...because the second that people got word of macro issues they did the only logical thing and moved their spam buttons to something like mouse wheel up...because an inch of linear movement suddenly become dozens of clicks...and it's undetectable as cheating because remapping keys is a core function of the game.
What gets my goat though is two things. There were two things that started all of this up. Thing one was someone finding out that DE's code control sucks, and they'd embedded the data for the new prime frame early. They got angry that it wasn't a surprise, and issued a C&D. Of course, later versions of pre-release data could be chalked up to DE enabling the stuff in chat look...do that was an exceptionally intelligent response.
The second item kicking this off was the riven black market. The community knows there's price fixing, DE says it's player to player so they know nothing and can therefore do nothing. A member writes a program to map riven pricing by scraping trade chat...and it's a third party piece of satanic programming. That forced their hand, and required they entirely retool how rivens worked.
My point in bringing up these things is that after them DE changed nothing about their policies. They retain the Eric Cartman rights. Namely, "I'll do what I want." This is not new. While I appreciate that we are again looking at fixing DE's shortcomings...have you considered that maybe instead of asking them to clarify something they have an interest in not clarifying, maybe instead you ask them to prioritize giving us the features that can somehow be done by a third party without access to warframe's code at all?
There's nothing quite like public shame to get DE off their high horses and into fixing mode. I say this not as criticism...but as a factual observation based on things like toxic moderation, the riven mafia, universal vacuum, Regal aya, and all the other things where DE eventually demonstrated they could do "the impossible," but only once backed into a corner and forced to see that it was not. It'd be much better if warframe didn't require those third party apps...because it already does everything competently. Of course, it will be pulling teeth from a ravenous shark based on the history.
-
8
-
-
So...it's nice to see that DE at one point in time paid attention, and asked for feedback. Cool. Less cool that it's been more than a year and utter silence is the resolution.
Let me suggest that none of your solutions are really good. They're mostly a part of the way to do something...but only a part. Let's consider how we might introduce a bunch of things at once. Let's also take it in steps, and minimize actual new content.
1) At the end of the quest you get a message from the Lotus, stating that they found Vor was holding knowledge of a secret cache. It was Orokin era tech that the Grineer stole long ago, and forgot about.
2) This message contains the 'Loot Radar" mod. It is noted as needing to be equipped to help you find the stuff...and is required to be equipped before you can do the mission.
a) This introduces the requirement to go to the mod screen, and equip an aura
b) It also introduces the concept of polarities, and how a non-matching polarity will either cost more or benefit less
3) Now, you take a standard sabatoge mission, carve out the ending, and make finding all caches required. The first two are standard resources, but the third is a rare grineer crate. This is visually new, and you need the Lotus to acknowledge this isn't the only one.
a) Our goal here is to value looking around, and show what rewards can be had
b) Oh look, now players know about the special rewards, the hidden crates, and can see what type of rewards (catalysts, reactors, forma, etc...) which could be waiting
c) Give them a built reactor so that they don't have to wait 23 hours...cause that big of a wait lock is going to kill progression
4) Now that you've shown players the reward, it's time for another message. Tell them that they've found one more cache, but it's going to be a real challenge, a "nightmare" if you will. Yes, introduce the concept of special missions and reward for these nightmare missions. Reinforce that this will be harder, and that it'd be a good idea to upgrade your warframe with the reactor and double the mod capacity.
5) Make sure that the nightmare mission is "easy" with a defined reward of the "Animal Instinct" mod. Make it something like 1/4 shields and something relatively easy like a capture.
6) Once the mission is complete have the Lotus send one last message. Tell the player that it's dangerous out there, and that the Tenno need to stick together to liberate the solar system. Have her give the players a Catalyst blue print, and the credits required to construct it. Have her tell them to check their foundry, and build it as soon as possible to do for their weaponry what the reactor did for the frame.
7) Close out the mission string as a success.
What did we touch on? What skills does the player now have a tutorial on, with constant rewards, that doesn't seem like a forced event?
1) Mod equipping
2) What the cache secondary objective is, and what they can do to find them
3) How to equip/use reactors and catalysts
4) What reactors/catalysts do
5) Why auras are great, and how a bad polarity can make your day a mess (introduction to formas)
6) What nightmare missions are
What questions remain?
1) So, what are the other nightmare mission like?
2) How do I unlock nightmare missions?
3) What do I do with this Animal Instinct mod?
4) Where else do I get reactors and catalysts?
5) Is there a rare cache on all missions? If there isn't, how often does it appear? What else are they hiding (intro to Ayatans)?
6) Well, the Loot Radar mod is nice...but it's limiting. Are there other aura slot mods to find?
Please note that the conclusion here is for how to find things, what they can do for you, and it culminates in "here's where you build your own." A rational follow-up would be to then introduce pets, specifically the sentinels. This would build on mods, how your companion mods can benefit you, potentially how set mods work, and finish with actually clearing a planet. This would give players a logical start from building, through to improving one's arsenal, and end with how you start jumping around to other planets by unlocking the nodes. After all of that, there's no core mechanic that the player has access to without at least a brief view of.
This is assuming that the operator sections get a slightly better setup in the future.
This is also acknowledging that none of this feedback matters, and the topic is now deader than RAIDs.
-
4
-
-
So....if I'm reading the stats right then Gara Prime has more armor and more health than the base model... So we've decided to make your favorite tank tankier....and Xzibit couldn't be reached for comment, or lawsuit, regarding the pimp my ride style logic.
That may sound like a complaint....but it isn't. This is the reason you'd wait for Gara Prime before plinking down the Umbral Forma to make a frame which looks at Inaros and Valkyr, then states boldly "hold my beer, and watch this." Hmmm... I'm not sure whether to be sad about Octavia and Zephyr Prime (not to mention Inaros), or laugh heartily that at this point there's finally a reason to plink those umbral forma into a frame. Decisions, decisions.....
-
3
-
-
39 minutes ago, Mara said:
My god, I fear for the Wisp players complaining about this augment in this thread. What are you even doing with your Wisps.
As someone who has to get Energy Conversion, Empower, Pax Bolt and Growing Power before I even cast a single mote, this augment is a godsend. The tradeoff of losing 15% PSTR is actually rather cheap for the QoL it gives me. Why people even thought it wouldn't take three mote slots is entirely beyond me too. It places all three motes at once, of course it will take three mote slots.
The definition of words is something you may want to stop and review for a moment. The item being released is called an augment, not a band-aid or improvement mod. The implication therefore is that these mods would provide an augmentation to the ability they influence, and change how it is used.
Now, the other half is that DE demonstrated the Wisp augment before....and demonstrated that it would only cost one mote cast. This is transparency and honesty in demonstration of features....that DE sometimes fails at miserably.
Now, reviewing these augments again. Which of them augments a power exactly? Wisp has a 33% power cost reduction and 67% casting time reduction. The "augment" is no negatives, because you can still cast individual reservoirs. Protea gets a whole new ability...to resurrect sentinels. Grendel gets new function to Nourish. Even Zephyr gets a straight boost to damage from the new mod. Exactly where is the augment part of these mods? Hello? Is DE unaware of their own requirements, definitions, and promises? Like the one they made that augments were not supposed to be adding back basic functional elements and therefore were effectively required?
Ahhh.... We seem to have forgotten balance again. DE simply allowed the mess that these things are to be. It's not like they've already released augments for some of these frames that get the balancing act (Zephyr's Tornado). It's not like they've got parallel augments that would exactly fit to force gameplay changes (Octavia's Mallet). Heck, it's not even like they could have simply scanned their own database of mods and seem to have copy pasted the effects of another mod into an augment and called it a day (Grendel, Rolling Guard).
I'm a Zephyr main. I don't do Grendel, and rarely do Protea. I value Wisp for defections, where plinking down a haste mote at each station allows for us to expedite the process. Now, despite this I'm going to let the Zephyr augment gather digital dust...because airburst is still garbage even with a straight up augment boost. I can't deal with the "QoL" logic for Wisp....because it removes flexibility to save you virtually nothing. Grendel and Protea augments seem to be useful....until you do any effort in reviewing whether they make sense. What exactly then does this update bring? Tennogen? Yay....more requests for the customers to buy digital tat with a surprisingly high amount of real money. This is why the most popular frame (Wisp), with the highest initially demonstrated promise (effectively 6 full booster cast locations active at once) is such a disappointment...while the other augments are for less used frames and therefore are simply ignored due to a lack of usage. Calling people out because you feel like this is QoL is backwards...because if an augment gives you QoL without augmenting play it fails to be what it is...
-
5
-
-
4 hours ago, Velaethia said:
So the augment is uselessl. If it didn't consume a mod slot then it might be situationally useful. Particularly in runs that have you keep moving like extermination. But other than that all it does is save a couple seconds of cast time of the cost of less teleport locations. As is I'd only use this augment if it was an exilus and on very few mission types.
To get me and probably many other wisp players to actually use this mod it would need to
A: only consume 1 reservoir slot.
B: increase strength of all buffs by 25%
C: Add a 4th buff otherwise unobtainable from the other 3 such as energy regeneration or damage boost or invisibly.
D: tripples the aura range and radius of 3 blind when cast on the fused resevior.
E: Buff range is equal to affinity range of the wisp.
I don't agree. Let's talk.
The augment is 200% of the cost in energy, for 3 functional casts. This means the cost is 200% of base with a 300% casting. That means you've got 67% of the total cost. Additionally, there's a benefit where you have a single casting animation with 3 casts completed.
This said, the downside is that you still have a cap on the amount of motes...so the maximum 6 quantity of motes is suddenly only two casts. Ouch. This then means that you also lose flexibility....because area control requires as much area control as possible.
Let me suggest that this only needs one fix to be viable. If each of the castings contained all three motes, you have a good mod. Suddenly a wisp can cover all nodes in an interception with all benefits. A wisp could reasonably cover multiple rooms in a survival. A defense could have mote coverage for a huge distance from the objective. This suddenly makes Wisp an unparalleled booster for the team, unbound by the limitation of multiple motes requiring a huge area coverage.
The issue with having all three motes, and a 33% decrease cost, is that instead of an augment this becomes a straight up improvement. So....DE decided to make it an "augment" by cutting out choice but keeping the cap on mote instances. It's pretty much them deciding that a straight improvement isn't desirable, but instead of designing an augment that plays differently, they nerfed the demonstrated improvements by considering each cast as three items against your maximum counter....and thus was only marginal.
While I can see why you'd want the other things you've asked for...they're not required. Likewise....they offer a change which could have made them augments. If you halved the range of reservoir, but had all three bonuses, you've got full coverage for 6*(.25*PI*r2) or 1.25*PI*r2 while the default coverage range is 2*PI*r2. This means the augment would have less total coverage area than by default, be 33% more energy efficient, but would mean more individual locations would get the boosts. This is effectively the Octavia augment....where you get to have twice as many mallets with half the radius (meaning half the actual area coverage). That would offer situation improvement, at the cost of overall area coverage. Basically, augmenting rather than boosting things... Kinda seems like the definition of what an augment should be.
Likewise, imagine if you lost 33% of the strength of each boost, but kept the area. This would mean that you're trading off total boost strength with Wisp, but allowing for much greater coverage area (300%) you'd change how you used motes. Motes would basically require full coverage area...but you'd have to balance the usage of the augment motes and regular ones to provide stronger bonuses where it's absolutely critical, and full but weaker boosts over more area. That would augment how motes are used, or the definition of what augments should be.
So....my disagreement is that what you are asking for is not an augment, but a mod to improve the base ability. You seem to be asking for things to be an improvement only, which is not the goal of an augment. I think that nuance is lost in your request....though I'd be happy if this was somehow my misinterpretation.
-
4
-
-
So....the augments we received we less than expected. It kind of justifies going from 30.1 to 30.2.
That said, let's discuss this with a level head.
1) Zephyr - Airburst
I don't get this. I'm a Zephyr main, and the first ability to nuke is always airburst. You continue to try and make this a boost, but the poor crowd control and functional joke of a damage source mean it's DOA. Now you're offering 25% secondary damage increases...for a reasonable time frame. The problem is hit enemies, not dragged. It's also capped in some way...right? I mean, 8 meters or AoE and paltry damage mean that boosting the secondary damage is likely the largest benefit...but secondaries are functionally only used for status spreading given that melee exists. Who is this for?
2) Protea - Dispensary
A mod....to infinitely resurrect any sentinel. Oh goody. I give up a mod slot so that I can use any sentinel other than Djinn on high level content. The catch of course is a mod slot, a single frame choice, and the frame already makes sentinels almost impossible to kill with her shielding abilities. Is this a bad joke? I mean, Protea doesn't have room to give up. The result is fundamentally misunderstanding the existing interaction. What am I missing?
3) Grendel - Nourish
Give up a slot. This is on literally the most energy hungry frame in the game. Now you get the equivalent of rolling guard, but only while burning through energy. Did anybody check that a mod didn't already do this better for all frames? I mean...maybe the effects can stack....but I'm at a loss to understand why this is better than rolling guard.
4) Wisp - Reservoir
I give up a mod slot. I spend 200% the cost of a single reservoir, and am forced to cast all three of them at a single point. It doesn't count as a single, so I only get two casts period...which means the only real savings is a bit of cast time and a single casting energy cost. No. This is not a benefit. If I wanted to cast all 6 potential reservoirs over multiple points it'd be better in literally every way.
I've got to ask a question here. Does anyone at DE have access to a dictionary? Augments are not meant as an addition of basic function to a power that lacks it. They aren't meant as a straight downgrade. They're meant as something like Zephyr's tornado augment. That is to say a modification of how things work, that fundamentally changes play. You've stated before that required augments are not a thing you desire....but then you release something like Hearty Nourishment that basically is a mirror of rolling guard. You release Fused Reservoir, that functionally cannot change play because literally no mechanic changes. You round this out with an augment that resurrects sentinels on a frame designed to prevent sentinels from dying. What in Hades motivated these? If you were a single person, I'd suggest this is impaired thought or trolling....but theoretically more than one person at DE reviewed this garbage prior to release. Theoretically....
-
18
-
-
23 hours ago, Slayer-. said:
I can just imagine Volt Umbra running around nuking the whole map while you stand there and think, damn leave some for me.
So....I don't get the logical thread here. I'm not singling out your sentiment, but it seems to be a good springboard to make a point.
Excalibur Prime is an exclusive...Excalibur is the poster child of the game...Excalibur Umbra is what everyone gets for simply playing the game. Umbra and Prime share basically the same stats, there's a single modified ability, and the void death spheres don't give you energy. The only real balance is that you get 3 Umbral mods....that only really mean anything if you want to build for health, armor, and power strength. From where I sit, this is largely a wash.
So....what exactly do we think that another Umbral frame would bring to the table? An umbral frame was a big thing before umbral forma....which DE denied that they were going to do. Then DE did umbral forma. It was a one time thing, or for special events. Then umbral forma were subsumed into the steel path garbage. This means that right now I can take something like an Inaros Prime, slap on two or three umbral forma, and have literally the best of everything. It's slightly better than the base Inaros Prime with standard mods, it still uses the death orbs for energy, and the only potential "loss" is a slightly modified ability.
To the quotation, what does Volt Umbra bring that Volt Prime doesn't? Ditto with Trinity? I mean this not as a rhetorical question, but a genuinely perplexed player that got to watch the most recent developer stream. One in which "when ghoul saw" was proposed, and then dismissed as though it hasn't been literal years and they didn't promise it earlier in 2021. Why would you ask DE to shoot out another frame with virtually no differences from what we already have?
-So we are clear, not a personal criticism. This is my gut reaction every time I see umbral frames discussed. I've yet to see any justification other than they might look good....which is fine....but it's basically more tennogen at that point.-
-
1
-
-
2 hours ago, Aeoni said:
I have not been playing for eight years myself but from what I have seen the games has undergone a lot of changes, and I probably would not have enjoyed the initial versions much. So I am not quite sure what you mean by "what's worked for the past eight years".
As for Railjack? I dreaded it when I first heard about it coming. Then it did and I built the dry dock and my ship and tried it out - and was lost and ended up hating the entire experience. I left it alone for some months... quite a lot of months.
I only returned during the Scalet Spear event. Some kind soul took the time to help me learn what to do. The roles were pretty fixed at the time, and I would do away missions or be the engineer mainly. Flying a ship? Shooting with a ship? Not for me. ^^ But I kind of learned to enjoy it for what it was and got all my Intrinsics maxed during the event and its associated affinity booster. It made me stop hating the game mode, even though I would not seek it out without reason.
However, the most recent changes to Railjack really made it even more accessible than previous ones. If you like the main Warframe game modes, then this is just an extension now, especially the Corpus missions. The AI crews enable solo play beautifully and will take care of most of the space shooting for you. Then again it may help that I am fairly comfortable with Archwing these days, so I will go out and manually sabotage the crewships instead of trying to shoot them with the big guns.
It's actually kinda fun now for me, who really is not into space combat whatsoever.
All of that being said, if you just hate the idea to the extent that you do not want to give it a try? That's certainly your prerogative. :) It's simply difficult to really gauge something like this without having given it a genuine try first.
Whatever you end up doing, I hope you find something to have fun with. :)
I'm going to use this as a springboard. As such, please understand that it is not my intention to speak for the original poster.
Regarding what I see as "what worked for the last 8 years," if you enjoy anything in this game other than the open worlds or railjack then you aren't missing anything. Allow me to qualify. The aesthetics on the tilesets doesn't matter. The weapons balance is immaterial. If you can throw those two things out, Warframe was literally stable (regarding content and structure) for about 5 years. Core ground missions, with the occasional content expansion, story driven mission, and even a game mode added....that might not just be a previous game mode with a new name slapped awkwardly onto it.
Now...PoE changed that. The last several years have seen game modes as static, with content island open worlds. Case in point, railjack. The Proxima mapping of the planets allows for a retread of the content, but on its own separate island.
The fun now comes in DE deciding to get out a tube of whacky glue, and fuse core content to railjack. People refer to it as a taxi because you've always got to do a core mission, preceded by a railjack mission. The railjack mission consists of one point to get a drop from, one or two points of interest otherwise, one or two crew ships, and it's topped off with a large ship to board in order to kick off the core warframe mission....that has literally the same onboarding tile before switching over to the generic corpus ship tileset.
Why would someone find this so frustrating? Well, I'm in the boat that this is about 1/4 the promised update. It rolled out onto PC almost 3 weeks before everyone else got it. It has 3 new pieces of content (warframe, weapon, and sentinel), a sentinel weapon that was a copy-paste of the Glaxion, access to a tennocon weapon (with no ability to get a second Opticor Vandal yet), a release of the stat modified Chinese exclusive Penta that should have been a skin, and a rebuild of the intrinsics system to something one step shy of simply being a copy-paste of the warframe customization.
That means; no restructured liches, no queenpins, a much shorter quest than was being sold months ago, and topping off all the other disappointment was that this is the first real addition of content since Orphix Venom....and event that was selling Lavos as the goal and a terrible time investment to reward proposition for arcanes which is about on-par with the absolute insult of rewards that is currently in-game for the railjack Orphix Venom nodes.
So, here's my opinion. Based upon the above, if you like core warframe then Railjack is a hard diversion. The rewards are minimal, and so RNG heavy that if you get them (yeah, they are buggy), you might find that you can get multiple Chassis blueprints and nothing else, or enough parts for 3 Pentas before a single blue print, or my particular favorite is to get a mission requiring you kill 2 crew ships....and only one spawns.
Yeah...DE managed to unfix what they claimed to have fixed in 29.10.x (not sure which patch). That said, it's SOP that DE releases a steaming pile of manure and calls it sunshine. Welcome to this game, and why veteran players can so reasonably say that this only hold play value until you get the content. After you managed to get good RNG, there's literally nothing compelling you to come back, because the enhanced rewards aren't ever seemingly balanced against the drastic increase in grind time. It's almost like DE hasn't done any modeling of the rewards structure, to make everything equally rewarding and thus worth playing...but it's not like anybody can calculate probabilities, and winning requirements. Oh yeah, they can.
-
5
-
-
14 hours ago, iPathos said:
Careful, we might get some obviously heavily biased responses from users calling those who disagree with them as kindergarten-level inputs. They might even drop to the point of trying to call us members of the "warframe-is-dying cult" or what-have-you! 😔
I will only repeat what I've already said. Strawmen are quite easy to knock down.
Regarding the other bit, it isn't constructive. I don't have to change everyone's minds with facts....because frankly some people don't even function by facts. I find it best to allow them to continue, as my past experiences in dispelling the ignorance simply leave me burnt out, and feeling like that Futurama meme. The Farnsworth one, from the episode about nanotech. Again, not going to quote it, because it's got its own baggage.
This all said, someday warframe will die. I only hope that it's a spectacular event, instead of a slow death spiral. Nothing quite like watching something you love die....but everything does. With my entertainment I prefer something like Lucasfilms, where the death is spectacular in its own right. With my people I prefer Puppet Master. Did you know there are currently 15 films in the Puppet Master universe? I like them, and I thought they stopped after the ninth.
-But there's always Warframe 2 to look forward to....funded entirely by the microtransactions...but it'll allow you to do the Warcraft thing where you can farm gold constantly to trade in for digital tat, which can then buy credits that disappear if not used in 30 days. (lord I hope this to be sarcasm, but don't know if it will be)
-
1 hour ago, BesucherPrime said:
Pretty cool on that. You know, biggest problem on boards is that we use avatars and I and many others tend to stomp in any discussion kick-in-the-door style XD
And then I, and I suppose others too, are way down to our daily practics. I’m pretty sure I’m not using the terms as I did when I learnt their proper use, as in daily life I just use them to get things done. And I alteady learnt them differently in different countries. E.g. where I originally come from nobody used the word ‚model‘; in my university everything on two legs (pun intended) was a model and I am still mostly sticking to that usage
Big issue on the original topic seems to me that we did not yet look outside for playerbase declining / increasing reasons. I could imagine that employment situation has a huge impact at the very moment and impacts the steam numbers negatively. I‘d rather not play in many situations (like yesterday e.g.)I also have to admit that in the beginning I was thinking to ‚stocky‘ as I was treating the steam average player numbers like a performance chart, just because that‘s what I look mostly at. And then even ‚non-growth‘, or slight player decline in month X year-to-year (I was looking mostly at the monthly figures) implyed to me something different than just players that take a break. So, I found the lookouts of average steam players not looking well. It looks healthy enough to support the game many years - and we are in a special situation with Corona around anyway - and we cannot model for that as most players have different situations around the globe.
Generally speaking, it‘d be cool getting daily player data, along their country of origin or IP based regionality, and average login time. With that one could nicely play :)I'm trying to understand...and it's obvious that we don't share the same default language. I don't say this as a criticism, only that I may be missing some nuance or intent in the translation effort.
To that, I have two differing points to offer.
The first, the Coof (Corona Virus) has impacted different countries differently, but the largest player base for warframe is the english speaking subset of the world. That's the US, Canada, the UK, and those who have managed to know more than two languages. The commonality amongst these areas is that as the Coof hit, most of them enacted some rather sweeping reforms. Whether this be welfare restructuring, rebate checks, or simply utilizing their existing social welfare systems the end impact has largely been more free time for a larger amount of people.
How do I justify this? Well, go check out the Steam Charts for games. The overall results are that more people are playing games than 18 months ago. Games with consistent and long term support are actually experiencing more people. Likewise, the surveys and data released from online stores (specifically Steam, given their semi-transparency) suggest more games are being played for longer times.
The second point is that Warframe isn't experiencing an 18 month funk. I'm sorry, but let me define what I mean. A funk is something that is out of normal ranges, and is generally not indicative of regular trends. Let's looks at the late 2017 to January 2020 numbers....and the trend for Warframe is no different than the previously established bad times. In fact, once you remove the late 2020 Deimos peak the numbers are....abysmal.
So, let's link this back to 29.10.x to keep on topic. Let's also assume that the 30.0 release is inextricable, and thus will fit with our model from previous years. The Corpus tileset remaster was the 2020 rework. It released with a barely working Protea, bugs that literally took the better part of a year to squash (spawning stuff outside of the map), if they ever were (yeah....corpus rescues on that tileset still spawn crap outside of bounds in the jail itself).
Let's compare to 29.10.x. We have about the same amount of content. That is to say 1 frame, 2 guns, and a new mission type. The current update is a reskin, a new sentinel that uses a copy-paste Glaxion vandal, and a restructuring of Railjack with about 80% unchanged (10% cramming in new content, and 10% simply broken features rounding out that equation). Things is, the remaster literally only had participation until people managed to get the excessively low drop rate parts to appear....assuming the thing was even possible to do between the broken spawns, inability to engage with the hands, and frankly insane litany of bugs that the new core feature made happen...
If it isn't clear, I'm calling this as the exact same but worse, because I can't trust what affinity, standing, or focus is being earned IN ALL GAME MODES because of this update. The remaster wasn't something that drew people. It didn't get fondly remembered....and people simply don't engage with the system in public groups. 29.10.x is a literal mirror of the remaster....and DE has no excuses.
"But the Coof" is pretty garbage when doing remote work for a software company that touts multiple offices around the world can't tolerate local remote work. It's funny that the complaint is not having mocap facilities....when the latest cinematic was, if memory serves, the Deimos family with no legs, talking to each other oriented as a side by side discussion. It's funny also that mocap isn't really necessary when your releases are 1% cinematics, 1% unique gameplay, 10% recycled content, and 88% terrifyingly bad RNG.
-I say this, because I'm salty. No qualms. I ran a 40 minute arbitration and earned 15 vitus essence (3 unit drop, and 6 random drops with a booster), 3 sculptures, and a few thousand endo. Nothing I needed, and no arcanes. Goody....40 minutes of life wasted because what I really needed was an entire day/night cycle of Cetus used to get no rewards...and that's just playing the game. Still waiting on any reasonable drop rate for those new Corpus capturas....in random containers....on the railjack missions....with what is apparently a much less frequent spawn rate for any containers. I see no lessons were learned from the rare containers having Umbral Forma with the sentient incursions.-
-
4
-
-
17 hours ago, BesucherPrime said:
That was some longer reading :)
I think it only missed that r2 in % is a human understandable indicator on how much your model can explain the data and I could almost use your comments as a statistics tutorial XD
The model of player data over time has another big fault; it litterally says: „Warframe is growing since age 0 because it gets older“. So the hypothesis to that graph would habe been „was Warframe growing after launch?“. The linear model is a bad idea as is starting from „zero“, because any successful game will have more players than at their start in any charts. Ask a bad question - get a bad model ;)I think that dataset of average players/day, patch dates, advertisment budget, and feedback posts could lead to a meaningful partly recursive function. And I am certain it would proof your the point of ‚recently declining steam player base‘. But that is (should be) like apparent from the steam data on sight
Let me....I think...address some of this. You'll have to excuse me a tad bit if things are already known.
With this particular data set we are graphing players versus time. What we are only scratching the surface of is what those player counts actually mean, and what inputs influence their output values.
---YOU CAN SKIP THIS SECTION IF YOU TRUST ME, OR DON'T CARE TO READ----
Taken extremely simplistically, content is king. Allow me to define why, with a single phrase that you may have heard. "Fashion frame is endgame." Why does this matter, and why cite it? Warframe has no evergreen content. There is nothing that would be required for a player to do to get better gear, after slapping on the required forma and weapons. As such, Warframe lives by the new content infusions (and the grind people do leading up to them). To cite a very specific example, what was the month with the highest peak player count ever for this game? It was the month before and release of Deimos. Why? The veterans needed to grind out a copy of each frame, gather the resources, and build the things. They then needed to log back in daily to feed the helminth. Almost the day after people could have had everything available, the peak player counts dropped like a stone.
Now, I've established content is king. What does that do for me? Well like 29.10.x, we've have various attempts at content delivery over the years. Starting Warframe was very small updates, quickly, where bugs were stomped in a week. You could count on nearly every other week releasing something, if not at the very least something every month. Events were common, like Gatecrash. Smaller content, more often, with responses to the limited player base which amounted to things happening. This spurred slow but consistent growth, where people didn't leave, but given the lack of advertising and a huge content pool you didn't get a huge infusion of players. This represents about 2013 to 2015.
In 2015 DE decided to experiment... The ellipses are for effect here. My point is that this was the genesis of the content drought. Things like the New War and Second Dream were large. They were also very much more spread out. In this phase people started to complain of the content drought, but the experimentation largely shifted people in to try the game. This drowned out the oldest veterans complaints, and the success of these quests bolstered DE's financial performance with a flood of new players.
Now, the end of 2017 was when we transitioned from less content, to biannual releases. Yes, Cetus and The Plains ushered in the rework in the first half of the year, and an open world in the later half of the year. Great...an inflection point. Things have changed, so we have a new type of output.
-----SKIP END-----
So, what does that mean? Well, a game with such dramatic player count changes is never going to have a function that is useful in predicting modelling. It's because the release of content is not consistent and therefore a wildly variable input.
While predicting the individual months then, our models are going to largely be....horseshoes and hand grenades. In the right ballpark maybe, but not accurate.
So, what can we predict? Macro trends would be a good start. I've cited three periods where the content delivery models changed dramatically....and if you graph each data set separately, you can actually get some linear regressions that make good sense. Poor predictive models for any one value, but great for discovering macro trends.
If you graph, the line trend from 2013 to 2015 is pretty low rise, but very consistent. 2015 to 2017 demonstrates many more peaks and valleys, but a more steep upward rise. 2017 to 2021 is largely the opposite of the 2013-2015 period...that is to say a slow bleed which has brief and wild spikes based upon the content delivery schedule.
HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO 29.10.x?
3 loss months between October to December. 1 stable month. 2 months with weak growth, directly corresponding to DE announcing that 30.0 was going to be a thing and Railjack 3.0 would be coming.
Let me predict the future....based upon the trends. April will see the release of the anniversary content, and 30.0. It will see an at most 30% rise in players (looking at you Scarlet Spear, in March 2020) which will either be a minimal change the following month, or a minor negative depending upon how late in April it releases. If you've got a late April release it'll be a 10-15% April uptick, and a May uptick of 20-30%.
This is all based upon DE doing a boat load of work on the framework defined in 29.10.x. I say this, because right now the game on PC has fundamental systems busted...and if 30.0 launches like Liches and Railjack 1.0 the 20% will be an extremely optimistic guess.
I don't really want to see this. I want to see DE go back to the 2013-2015 model, and maybe releasing a big open world in bi-annual phases to alleviate the need for huge amounts of content. Heck, that's functionally the model they used for Fortuna.
What I expect though is that PC players will be ignored. The trends which highlight why stuff like 29.10.x style releases are bad for the game will be ignored as a digression from the topic...because after players listing out the issues, DE opening up a message board outside their dedicated bug forum, and with a thunderous "meh" being the response to Railjack 3.0 I cannot see anyone stopping at 29.10.10.
Let me revise that. I cannot see anyone who cares about the consumer experience stopping at 29.10.10 as a good enough release for up to a month before the next patching will be done. That said, here we sit.
-
5
-
-
11 hours ago, iPathos said:
Actually reading through said "mass of words" would prove your statements to be false here. I'd recommend you do so, as I have.
If you already have...well there are worse things I could say, but it clearly hasn't sunk in.Also, this is the latest update thread, therefore it is by definition one of the places to spout exactly this. It has nothing to do with the update content and everything to do with potentially fixing the issues with the game. Some of us love it to a point that it pains us to see such blatant disregard for player intent and feedback, some of us simply dislike the turns DE has taken getting here, some of us have other reasons. Your reason of choice "warframe is so bad it's dying" is not a good one, nor is it accurate or appropriate. The game simply is bleeding players at the seams, and overall community outcry is again increasing.
I thank you for your agreement, and dedication to read.
That said, I do want to clarify. I'm not stating that Warframe is dying. I'm not stating that it's the end of the world. I'm also not part of some secret cabal that wishes for its failure. I want to outline all those possibilities, not to miss any angle.
What I'd like to state is that I'm looking for the next inflection point. The relatively slow and consistent loss of players has one of two outcomes for an online game. Either the bleed will stop because the remaining audience is functionally incapable of being removed, it stops because the influx of new players matches the levels of the bleed, or it dramatically speeds up because the lack of players effectively means a lack of content leading to a death spiral. So....which will it be? I'm hoping that instead of finding that inflection point, we can implore DE to do something that isn't stupid.
Three years and change have demonstrated the biannual release cycle isn't sustainable. Their history is in much smaller updates, with a substantial frequency. If they can go back to that, maybe we can use the 2013-2017 models to get back to either a stability or slow growth. It's odd to say, but that stability would be infinitely better than wild cyclical swings....and likely represent a financial windfall for DE.
Regarding the poster....please do not engage. You're welcome to disregard, but I'm asking politely because sometimes it's just easier to let people burn themselves out in a fit of apotheosis when everything is made clear. I say this not as an insult, but as someone who had the same arc.
Six years ago the game had just released Archwings (my timeline may be off here, but the events are accurate). My first experience was running through space without an archwing....and failing a mission because it was simply bugged beyond sanity. I found this my breaking point, claimed the game was dying due to being a bug and grind riddled mess, and then took about two years off. When I came back I discovered that the grind was worse, the bugs from years back might still be in the game, and the player counts were actually better so random groups were more viable.
It's tempting to view opposing opinions as blatantly wrong. It's tempting to see all of this failure, and assume the game is dying. That said, it isn't easy to prove that. It's very easy to discount people who state that, because you only need to cite a single metric to show "it isn't true." That's not a battle worth having, and it's why I'm not engaging with someone who has obviously decided that instead of a discussion it'd be a more reasonable course of action to hurl personal insults and construct strawmen.
I respect people who believe the game is healthy. I will express vehemently that 29.10.10 is not ready for release...and that the consoles actually have it better by skipping 29.10.x entirely. Hopefully DE sees this feedback....but I'm not holding my breath. I'm looking forward to maybe having 30.0.12 as stable enough to enjoy the 30 minute quest...because that's really all that seems to be on offer. Another, presumably grind heavy, Protea like quest. I wonder what the excuse will be once things start opening back up, and the Coof isn't to blame for everything under the sun? Good also to see the Tencent acquisition has changed virtually nothing.
-
5
-
-
2 hours ago, Graavarg said:
Oh man, you really want to sound like you know things, but it sure does look like a 13-year old copying stuff from the internet.
1) There was no "manipulation" of data, it is an aggregation, just like the monthly, weekly, and daily data are aggregations. Since it is by quarter, it says "by quarter" in the header (😁), and the Q1, Q2 etc. on the bottom axis means "quarter" 😀.
2) Subjective reasoning. Talk about being "thrown out of class"... 😀
3) Well, you were half right. I did it, but what isn't there cannot be seen (not with my eyes anyway). Even if we limit the "playerbase" to cover only the subset consisting of "Steam players", the trend since your subjective 2017 is growing. I don't personally care one way or the other, that just happens to be the mathematical truth. And that is even with leaving out all other PC players, all Twitch players, all XBOX players, all PS4 players (and now also PS5 players). And if don't remember wrong, PS4(PS5 Warframe account are creeping up towards 20 million, so that is a sizeable chunk left out.
4) No. I don't have access to a point cloud, the only cloudy thing here is your thinking. Also, calculating trends for point clouds is pretty standard procedure. However, this is a "measure over time"-trend, the most basic of all basic trendlines you can calculate. That is if you understand the concept of trends at all, you seem to want to calculate trends by first deciding on the trend you want and then selecting data to fit. Tip: that is not the way.
5) Yes, if you apply a polynomial trend it looks different. If you select other trendline options you get different trendlines (not surprisingly, and yes, "funny"). However, they show different things and assume different kinds of relationships between X and Y (a polynomial tries to find the current trend in a know fluctuation, and you put in how many such cycles you data has, it is widely used in economics, among other things to find when the "top" or "bottom" has been reached). If you want to assume that the relation between player numbers and time is not linear, feel free to elaborate (that might be... interesting). Or maybe it all depends on sunspots, like climate change supposedly does (or was that the Q-something thing?) 😀.
6) I was simply responding to another poster claiming that the Steam data (per quarter) shows how the playerbase is declining. I had it available, and it doesn't. Unfortunately I don't have your magical capability of "seeing", so I have to use math.
You are pretty quick with accusations, then again they are so... lets say "not very coherent", so it is actually more fun than aggravation. However, not all might feel that way and this is quite off topic (yes, it IS a diversion), so if you want to continue please move the discussion to a separate thread. I promise I'll join and irritate the f*ck out of the "I'm so sore DE doesn't do what I want", "Warframe is dying", "everyone is leaving", "boohoo"-crowd.
And really: instead of convoluted and disjointed efforts at criticism => the Steam data is freely available so just prove your point mathematically instead, and stop whining. And no "seeing stuff", trust the math & the data instead. And skip "the playerbase"-concept, since it really is only "Warframe players using Steam". And if someone could explain this strange hang-up with "the playerbase has to be declining"...
1) This is a digression. It's my last answer to this, so feel free to make some bass-ackwards assumptions. Strawmen are easy to knock down. It's also interesting that you believe that everyone is complaining. It's not a problem. Yeah, 29.10.x has really done a lot to fix things....with that 9.5% increase to a player base (in March). Of course, our player counts are still July 2020 levels...in March 2021....so apparently that's a healthy state of being that is sustainable.
2) Definition of manipulation.
to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage
I'd like to be honest here. You have a pre-supposition. That is that the player base is growing, and has been outlined in multiple different posts. You pull data going back to the beginning of the game, manipulate the data without denoting what you did to manipulate it, and follow up with blatantly misrepresenting any statistical data. You then generate a strawman, by claiming a personal attack on my credibility, because that's obviously the way to win an argument. Fantastic. Your position required one moment of honesty, but instead of doing that you make a personal attack. You'll note I said that twice as an act of repetition. I need to drive this home, as it establishes you as the second half of the definition, someone willing and demonstrably insidious.
3) Let's look at data manipulation, because you apparently need a lesson in that too. How many ways could a summed quarter be expressed? Well, you have three values. The easiest way would be the maximum, but that'd demonstrate a bias. You could choose a minimum, and that would demonstrate the opposite bias. You could demonstrate the median value, which would demonstrate neither bias. Alternatively, you could add all of them up, and divide them to show an average. This manipulates the monthly data, and smooths everything out. It's almost like the goal would be to knock down the highs and fill in the lows, an action which may be extremely beneficial if your point is to glaze over the extreme peaks and valleys that are generated because DE can't maintain new content delivery in any reasonable fashion. You chose to explain none of this...and choose a representation which doesn't accurately represent any value in a quarter.
I'd suggest that you really stop a minute here, and instead of trying to win a fight you ask what assumptions you've made. Why someone would have an alternative conclusion. But I'd most appreciate if you thought for more than 20 seconds before responding. The topic is about 29.10.x. It's about how DE squeezed out an update at the end of March, so they didn't have another quarter with nothing and demonstrate abysmal player engagement figures. That's why I'm explaining this, in a post about UPDATE 29.10.x. CLEAR MOTIVATION, ON TOPIC, AND WITHOUT BIAS. You'll note that it's without bias, and I'm assuming you'll take umbrage. Have at it. Thus far you've strawmanned the argument and issued attacks on my person. That's a real winner there. If this were November 2017 I'd be in the camp that the player base was growing, and that with only two months of data my conclusion was that the new model was a rousing success...less so in November 2018...absolutely sure that in 2019 the model was flawed...and in 2020 questioning exactly how DE was planning to address growing flaws in their content delivery.
It's almost like a competent game, with about the same mileage as Warframe, in this same timeframe, has been pulling down consistent and increasing numbers. I mean, it'd be sad if I could cite, say CS:GO and demonstrate that it's fluctuations in player count have been less dramatic and demonstrably more consistent over the same time period. It'd be even more interesting if they started slightly before Warframe, and thus can be used as a benchmark for a largely online only experience with shooter components. Yeah, not even sugar coating that one. CS:GO is eating DE's proverbial milkshake in consistency, player counts, and virtually every other metric.
If it's unclear, I don't really care about 2013-2017. I'm not going to distort trends by pulling almost a decade worth of data to obfuscate today. It's not about ripping on DE, nor defending them. It's about honest feedback, and why this tactic is not helping the game.
4) I appreciate that you're asking about being thrown out of class. I could point to the strawman again. I could tell you I'm a professional. I could also provide personal information. I'm betting you'd like that. NO. Being abundantly clear, this argument is already lost to you. You've resorted to a personal attack, because there's no reasonable defense for saying something idiotic. I would prefer you simply make this an instance of Godwin's Law. I have the distinct feeling it's where you're going next, but I'll choose to be an adult, and let you hang yourself.
5) You have a point cloud. You seem to be incapable of basic math. Let me explain, simply enough that someone who is failing FST (functions, statistics, and trigonometry; this was the highest level of math required to pass high school when I graduated) could understand. To graph data on a two dimensional axis you need a series of points defined by an X and Y relative position. Now, when given a table with multiple values, you can chose a variety of different ways to express that data, and orientations. If I wanted to demonstrate the peak versus average player count I could do so...as I have 5 different values pulled from the steam chart. You've chosen to represent the X axis as time, and graph the y as player count. You've therefore got a point cloud...that you can graph and start playing with to determine if there are correlations. A point cloud is fantastic...and literally the basis for any two dimensional graph...no matter how you choose to graph it.
Let me now ask you why? You seem to need this explained to you, so let me do it as well. Your question is how healthy the game's player base is, as represented by the player counts over time. You then manipulated the data into a quarter value, which was calculated by averaging the already average values. Let me explain some stupidity here...because you really messed up. Average is a monthly value...but each month should be weighted to represent the difference in number of days. Not accounted for. The math....not accounted for. If you're showing data, you explain things. It's almost like you've input garbage, are expressing garbage, and instead of simply explaining your assumptions and admitting error you've doubled down that your opposition needs to be attacked instead of admitting defeat. There is no loss in defeat, unless you're incapable of learning.
6) Let me explain basic math....because apparently you're missing the point. What is the r2 value? It's a calculation of the distance each point in your data cloud has from the trend line. The reasoning is cyclical...because excel calculates the trendline from a minimization of this distance, but for us squishy humans everything is fantastic. That value goes from 0 to 1. Basically any value under 0.9 is a poor correlation to the expressed data, where it only loosely corresponds to any individual point.
Why then do we choose other trendlines? Again, this is simple, but not all data is a linear expression. Also, maybe your data is not represented by a linear scale. If you use a logarithmic scale some data can be represented by a line, whilst using a classical constant scale you'd need a power function to accurately represent it.
Why is this a concern? AGAIN, RELEVANCE TO UPDATE 29.10.x. The nature of gaming is not a linear value. Warframe has established a trend where player counts largely scale to content infusions (this would be obvious, but given the responses I'm assuming nothing). Said content infusions are largely built around a classical quarter model, so we should expect to see a cyclical model rather than a linear one.
Now, let me give you the benefit of doubt, no matter how unearned. Maybe you saw this, or the person you seem to have quoted saw it. Maybe you decided to alleviate the concern, by averaging the quarters. Doubt unearned, but extended as a kindness.
Now the problem in your data starts to show. You've gotten everything all the way back to 2013. In 2017 we transitioned content from consistent to biannually. It's fun to poison the trend data with noise....which you did. You know, losing 10% of 100k players still looks like huge gains when you've got years of data where 20k players was a peak.
Scrub out the initial data, and choose relevant data. Chose a time period that represents the current input-output model of DE. That is to say, something that can accurately determine the future by ESTABLISHED TRENDS. It now seems like we're not looking at 2013 to late 2017 anymore. It seems like our point of change is the push for PoE. The "dramatic" change that DE brought, with immense ambition, by latching onto the open worlds trend in video games. Of course, AND RELATING TO 29.10.x, that trend has come at the price of heavily buggy biannual releases. So....it's really quite difficult to look at manipulated data, which I had to assume the manipulation of, and come to the conclusion that the player counts are increasing. That, by the way, is your implication. You didn't outright express it, but you did indicate the declining player base conclusion was at best questionable.
As a side note, this is the point where a sane individual would likely interject that I don't have console, Epic, or Launcher data. Correct. You may have a valid point here. My only defense would be the Leyou performance reports which existed up until being bought out by Tencent. They paint a picture of decreasing fiscal performance, and inductively agree that things are not looking good. I want to address this not because it's invalid, but because it's fair criticism that we do not have perfect data. That said, inductive reasoning to fill in the gaps indicates bad tidings.
7) You seem to not know math very well. Let me express an understanding that you seem to lack. The trendline is not dictated by where it's used. I can represent data with a bell curve, a linear regression, a power regression, or any other form I desire. Your inability to use them outside of other sources is simply your inability to understand data, or see a trend.
If I really wanted to get an accurate representation of this, I'd perform a Fourier transform and use a few dozen terms. What would that actually tell me though? A Fourier transform is great for a describing any one point in time from a finite range, or a natural system with a repeating value. Basically, you get to describe a regular harmonic pattern which doesn't necessarily conform to a sine or cosine function (yay, sawtooth waves). What it does though, is give me a small headache just remembering doing the miserable things. Of course, apparently 13 year olds are now doing them....or that strawman is looking pretty idiotic.
8) "I graphed literally 2013 to 2021, and despite the last section being down, and averaging out performance, the game isn't showing a decreasing player base." This is a simplification of your point. You'll excuse me here, but I must not remember my math. I don't think these statements are correct, but apparently;
105k<70k (that's a visual guess of peak at Q3 2018 and Q1 2021)
I can see that you've got what looks like 2 quarters increasing...while the surrounding 6 quarters are much lower than the 2018 peak. Apparently
2 > 6 (quarters increasing substantially, versus those significantly lower. I've not counted one quarter as it drops, but is not appreciably larger than the next given your averaging)
HOW DO I RELATE THIS TO 29.10.x? Well, there was an uptick at the very end of Q1....because this update launched. It's almost like DE showed basically two months of minimal positive change. January was a statistical stall. The developer stream at the end of that month basically announced that Railjack was going to be the big focus. February saw about 8.5% more people returning on average, to get the grind done. Another 9.5 came back in March to do THE NEW CONTENT.
Let's not mince words though. October (-26,69), November (-3.35), December (-9.83), January (+0.37), February (+8.54), and March (+9.54). I may be missing basic math here....but your largest negative drops you down. The resulting Novemeber is a minimal loss. December is about 10%. January is a draw. February doesn't negate December, and in fact is less impressive because it's 8.54% of a lower number. Ditto with March, as it cannot touch the 26%, and is also 9.54% of a much decreased value. This is all despite the 29.10.x release....and indicates it has not been as well received as would be necessary to regain the player counts.
9) Why not just show my data?
You are walking a funny line here. Let me explain:
If I graph a relevant period of time (October 2017 to March 2021) the linear regression has r2 of 0.2347. The equation is y = -364.43x+57519. You seem to have a love for that regression, so what does it tell us? Every single month 364 people on average have left the average player count for Warframe since 2017. Funny that, as October 2017 corresponds with PoE and the absolute peak of average player count (barely missing peak player count as well, to the Deimos update which literally only retained those numbers for a single month before crashing). It also indicates that individual months don't correspond well to the trend....but if we're to look at the macro level performance things are not going well. Your conclusion is to go all the way back to the start, and say that the player count is just fine....because for almost 4 years all we had was slow but consistent growth...because the content delivery model was different....but that doesn't matter.
I also don't show math because it offers people the ability to strawman. Why? Well, last time I showed any graphics people decided that they could cut out segments, draw bizarro conclusions, and then question me personally about incorrectly entering data. I've not desired doing that again....because simply denoting the issues with other people's graphing and transparency is infinitely easier. You'll note that I didn't denounce your graphs by personal attack...I stated that the peak value I found was insanely higher, then correctly cited that you likely averaged the quarter values. It's almost like I was using my own data....and not showing it because there's nothing to gain. That's or I'm apparently a 13 year old savant who can simply manufacture graphs in my head based upon a chart of data from the internet.... Yeah, not letting that personal attack go unquestioned at every corner, given that you decided instead of being reasonable that is was logical to personally insult me.
AGAIN, LET'S RELATE ALL OF THIS TO 29.10.x. It's a rushed release, that's buggy. It's framework for 30.3, which is slated to be our rework for the year. The model of biannual releases, implemented since 2017, is not doing good things to the player base. This is represented in-game as difficulty in getting matches, but being completely frank is generally also being felt when you literally cannot get a pick-up game going on PoE or Fortuna unless there's a Nightwave requirement for them that week. It's also frustrating that you engage with things like railjack....and other game features break. I have video of being on the daily syndicate rescue mission, having a syndicate medallion and ayatan star spawn in an area that constantly forced a respawn because of some overlapping boundary issues, and watched as both respawned on the exit point....and thus out of reach because I couldn't get to them without ending the mission. So we are clear, the old behavior for these issues was to spawn at the start point. That would mean a huge back-track, but solo players hell bent on getting their rewards could do it.
In short, 29.10.10 isn't ready. The technique of jamming out an update to artificially inflate metrics is detrimental. I'd gladly choose to give back everything Railjack I've earned, even the 6% drop chance garbage, to go back to update 29.7.
If you'd like to join in on the choir that "everyone who doesn't see this as an upgrade, and everyone citing issues with the game is just a whiner," then I implore you to simply swallow your tongue. This isn't a threat, but an acknowledgement that those capable of talking out of both sides of their face should really watch out for the repercussions. This industry is littered with games where absolutely everything was fine....until it wasn't. There's a nice youtube channel that I watch when I start to feel this way. It's here: https://www.youtube.com/c/Nerdslayergaming/videos.
If you don't get it, let me explain. Watch two or three death of a game videos. It's rather nutty, but my experience is that nearly all of them have overlap with Warframe. I like Warframe. I don't want it to die, but with stuff like 29.10.10 being the final update until 30.0....I guess maybe a part of me wants to watch DE have to stop being so stubborn and actually deliver. It was refreshing that their developer streams have been curtailed, and placed on a schedule. It's great that they've stopped promising the moon weekly, so that the undelivered promise list isn't getting longer on the wiki. It's even great that nobody has been in a Twitter fight for months, or provided an absolutely insane hot take that has garnered attention. Unfortunately, they're still using the PC as unpaid alpha testers and releasing a beta product. That's 29.10.10....and it's why I take umbrage.
It's also possible in the content creator purge that DE simply removed everyone that had the chutzpah to question them. The train man has given up warframe. The potato and Brozime have dramatically walked things back, and one of the two has consistently put out videos that are less than absolutely praising DE. Funnily enough, I haven't heard about a registered user count metric in a long time...as the focus seems to always instead be placed on individuals who form their lives around the game and thus cannot extricate themselves from it.
-
8
-
-
20 minutes ago, Graavarg said:
🙂 It was graphed per quarter due to the suggestion of the previous poster, which you would have known if you had actually read that post.
And since you asked for it, here is the exact same data per month. With totally non-manipulated standard classical trends, calculated by the mighty Excel, the best software in this universe. Actually you asked for a lot more, but I feel merciful today.
If you want to subjectively manipulate the playerbase numbers by selecting only a part of the available data, feel free to do so. I won't.
Tip: even if you would calculate a trend only starting with 2017 (for some unfathomable reason), it would be positive. Maybe you won't get it even so, so I'll spell it out: it means the playerbase has actually been growing since then.
Let me highlight the points here....because you seem to want me to read everything....but you do not have to synthesize anything.
1) You graphed per quarter because of a request....without highlighting that the data was manipulated. It's an average of the peak and average player counts. That's not the display of data, but an analysis of quarterly trends. You don't highlight this in your description...and that's dishonesty that would get you kicked from a discussion on statistics because you've demonstrated manipulation of data to obfuscate things without documentation.
2) Funny you should request that I read, and then you not read mine. 2017-2018 were peak population years, with relatively stable releases following the transition to two annual releases. It was literally the "things are changing, but no established release pattern" years. It's highlighted, because it's a point of change where the data would be expected to demonstrate different trends based upon new inputs.
3) You'll note I didn't ask for anything. I said that if you did this, then you'd see that. Again....copy, paste, format, and graph.
4) Also funny, you applied a linear trend to a point cloud. If you go from 2013 to 2017, 4 years of previous data where the game basically has to be growing....which would drown out 2 years of data. It's almost like when the historic data outweighs recent data literally any trend is impossible to predict until it's established itself so well that there's nothing that you can do to react to it.
5) What is the r2 value exactly? I'm seeing 0.69, or basically nothing of value. Funny. Apply a polynomial. A second degree is indicating a plateau (0.76). 3, 4, and 5 indicate a downward trend for the last two years (0.84 peak). 6 indicates a very weak uptick in the months from the Deimos release to the Railjack 3.0 release...with an r2 of only 0.84. For those that don't understand, because statistic is obtuse, that means that most conclusions indicate a declining player base even despite the very low correlation between the model and any individual month.
6) It's funny how the player base can increase in your world. Average player count maximum was in 2018. If the player count were increasing you'd see more of the peaks surpassing that, right? Ahhh....the closest we've gotten to that is the Deimos release. But of course when you're also including the April of 2013 data it's really easy to lose this.
Let me again state this as a simplistic conclusion, so you don't have to read. Since the end of 2017, when we saw PoE release, DE has changed strategies. One open world, one remaster, on a yearly basis. That's the reason that graphing all data available and slapping a linear regression on it is....just silly. If you graph from the month before PoE, to March 2021, you'll get a trend for the current release style. It's a downward trend if you slap a linear regression on, at about 364 players lost per month. Please note this is average player count, which washes out the peak player fallacies.
BEFORE SOMEONE DECIDES THIS IS A DIVERSION, PLEASE READ:
29.10.x is a quarterly release. It's an attempt to garner some players, on the road to 30.0. 30.0 will be our early year remaster....with what is likely Duviri Paradox or a sentient open world as an October/November/December release window. As such, the game is bleeding players. It's bleeding players because of stuff like 29.10.x. You get new content....but old stuff breaks. The new content is a reskin, finally getting a component promised 15 months ago, and a new sentinel. It's largely hidden behind nutty grind (intrinsics), terrible drop rates (Nautilus and Carmine Penta), or my favorite of simply broken mechanics (yeah affinity, standing, and focus seem to have broken to get this thing).
In real short, stop trying to come to a conclusion by obfuscating data. Part one is to average out quarterly value, which hides the very content driven participation. Part two is stop trying to bury trends by providing so much data noise that you won't ever be able to hear anything. Finally, let's admit DE are humans. They do stupid crap, to make the financials and metrics look good. They release bad. We shouldn't let them get away with that, as their paying customers. I'm not sure that hemorrhaging 364 players a month is healthy...or that at this rate 4368 players a year is good. I'm also not happy when a PC exclusive release brings 10% of players back (as in previous month +10% not 10% of total count)...and based on a linear model we'll be permanently losing that this year. Is it worth releasing something like 29.10.x when it's demonstrably hurting the game? No...to say otherwise is baffling.
-
7
-
-
1 hour ago, Graavarg said:
Well, isn't it easier to look at a chart (to notice the "declining playerbase")?
It's becomes a bit more interesting if you connect the Steam data to the release of content on PC and to the release of new (competing) platforms.
Whoa. Full stop. This is a digression, but I cannot let this lie stand.
Let me explain the practice of data manipulation, and how exactly a person can be "honest" with data but choose a rather unique compression scheme to agree with pre-supposed conclusions. If you're to take the data available from Steam Chart, and graph it as a month by month value, you'll see that there is not a "constant upward trend." In fact, to generate the above graph you'll need to take the data for quarters, and what looks like average the three values, and then graph. This is what we call lying by omission, because it fits a narrative. Remember averaging X, Y, and Z is not showing their three unique values. It's taking a lot of noise out.
I applaud the fact that you did the barest minimum of work, and it's fun to see someone who is willing to do so much with a flawed core conceit. Graph, average, hope that nobody calls you out on the obvious shenanigans with numbers. It's like graphing a 10% difference between two values, and starting your graph at 90%. It LOOKS like item two is double item one, but you're showing 90-110%.....so it's actually only a 10% difference. SHAME.
Do you want to know why I'm so willing to call shenanigans? Graph it out month by month, and only show 2017 to 2021. That's 39 data points for each series....just barely enough to establish a trend if one exists. You'll note the peak is 154,246 peak players....in August of 2020. How high is your graph? 120,000 is all the higher it goes. Curious. If I then graph the thing by quarters, and then divide the values I get by 3 to compensate for being three months, I get what you've shown. So....what is it that you're actually graphing, and how does it fit into a discussion about quality and updates like 29.10.x?
Well, if you are willing to average the peak player or average player count over three months you'll see that there's roughly an upward trend (barring the bit you cut off indicating that this is blatantly not the case....but that doesn't fit the narrative). Fine. What does this mean? Well, let's discuss with a pool of 90 people to make the numbers easy to process. There's an update month 2 of the quarter, where peak player count reaches 60 of the 90 potential players. For the following and prior months you get 30 of the 90 players accounted for. That's 120 players to count, but averaged for the quarter the value is in fact 40. What month does this represent accurately? Where do you account for the dramatic spike of doubling player count? Ahhh....the answer is that you don't. You don't because then you'd have to accurately account for a rubber banding of player counts directly related to content drops.
Why even discuss this by quarters then? Well....DE generally squirts out a release in a quarter to meet financials....which are often reviewed on a quarterly basis. You can literally hide the bodies in plain sight by whacking the high value peaks off, and using them to fill in the gaps from the other two months without content. It's technically accurate....but in reality it's a very difficult road to walk because players burn out and you have to have one content month every quarter or the illusion is shattered. Case in point, and why this is topic relevant, Railjack Refit is the first quarter content patch....released to PC in desperation to give that slightest of player count bumps so the averaged player counts don't visibly tank.
Long story short, and thread relevance defined, 29.10.x was an update released stillborn. It was meant to bolster quarter 1 of 2021 player values, and could be released in such a sorry state because controls on the PC platform are much less strict than those on the consoles. It's funny that you'd obscure data and transform it without actually denoting it, but I'm not surprised given that it fits a narrative that isn't so depressing. That said, I don't like to cover a turd in sparkles and gold leaf, and call it a piece of art. Remove the one month of 8/2020 and the player counts are on a pretty consistent decline, once you stop normalizing quarters. I'm not an executive wanting to be shown success from a distorted perspective. I'm a player struggling with things like 29.10.x....and finding that match making is difficult for new content after a couple of weeks because it's never a decent amount, and always locked behind trash RNG.
-
7
-
-
3 hours ago, ValinorAtani said:
If you need a spreadsheet which compares steamchart numbers by each quarter let me know (as you already noticed, there is a declining player base)
OK...I'll bite. Go to Steamcharts. Copy data. Paste into spreadsheet. Tweak cell value displays. Graph. This takes all of about 3 minutes to complete. Assuming you then create a pivot table it's dead easy to show any one metric with respect to another. Personally, the two graphs I'd be focused on are average and maximum player count with respect to time.
That said, you should use that wonderful brain in your head. Let's take this data, and process it to demonstrate a more complex trend. If you are to take the peak player count, less the average, you'll find what I call the content rubber band. Basically, this is the difference in players that is brought about by large influxes of content.
Basically, for a healthy game you'd expect for this to either be cyclical, or slightly downward (representing that the player base was playing consistently, and not logging on at a peak and then logging off). Instead what we get is a largely upward line, with only minor cyclical behavior (2017 to 2018). After this cyclical period things begin to be less cyclical and more flat....indicating that (with player counts) we are seeing people logging off for good, and not even come back for the new stuff.
Now, let's talk the period from 2018 to 2021. The graph does show weak cycling, and when compared with player counts this seems to indicate that the content driven players are evaporating and the core players are disappearing. Is it transfer to a different platform? Is it player loss? It doesn't matter. What is relevant to this thread is that this is the era of updates being far fewer, with less quality control. Exactly like now, you could have nothing for months and then get something like 29.10.x. What I mean by this is an update that has been identified as "done" but riddled with bugs for what could be weeks, or months.
So, before anyone labels this as a digression let me close. Railjack 3.0 is...disappointing. It's just about as disappointing as 2.0, just in slightly different ways. You're more than welcome to link this back to player data....but people don't need to. It's so much simpler than that. We players should have known when DE announced that 29.10.x was a PC exclusive. Yeah....that means they couldn't be bothered to fix it enough before console certification....but the next update was going to be at the same time for everybody. That meant PC was going to be a pre-beta tester source, because test servers would take money and resources to setup. Nah....just ship it as hot garbage, and setup an outside feedback board that you are going to use your internal board to announce. It's giraffes from the top down...and that's DE. It's been years, but now everyone else is seeing it. Hopefully they fix things before they commit ritual suicide by extreme stupidity...but Liches are a thing. I can't reasonably suggest that isn't indication that they'll take rope, tie a noose, slip it around their neck, and suggest that it's our fault for leaving such a tempting piece of rope out in the open.
-
8
-
-
6 hours ago, -Augustus- said:
Are you, though?
Hmm.... Fair.
Allow me to be less optimistic. I cannot believe that DE pushed yet another update that is so half baked onto a player base already demonstrating they're tired of being pre-alpha testers. This is inviting more people to simply log out and never return, because if DE cannot get things stable and running after two weeks and enough hotfixes to be comically inept then there's no reason anybody should spend real money.
For the price of the middle tier prime access (the one with all of the content at the cheapest price....because fashionframe is just insanely expensive), I could get literally any other AAA title new. I could also wait for the 2+ years some of the promised features of warframe have taken, and get about 10 AAA titles for that amount assuming they're on sale.
I was incorrect in my wording. Thank you for asking that question, and forcing some introspection.
-
2
-
-
Let's add a part two to today's turd sandwich. So we are clear, I'm sticking with my statement that DE is going to pay for this level of crap on the PC.
So, two hard locks. What is a hard lock? I can enter the star system map, highlight a mission, but it never starts. That's a solo mission, and clicking the force start button is somehow disabled. It's also being in a mission, and unable to access the menu. Yes, pressing the escape key is simply not recognized.
Let's top that off with absolutely whacky affinity gains. I ran all 8 ESO round for the nightwave....and I got 100k on round 8. I then checked at the end of the ninth round (yay portal spawning on top of me), and my total was about 110k That....does that mean DE cannot do basic math within the game? Combined with the phantom affinity and syndicate standing for railjack, that seems like A CRITICAL BUG.
Now, what about Railjack? It seems like going back to the grineer missions is actively idiotic. Let me highlight the fun bits. The drops for grineer seem to be heavily weighted to mods and resources, and the enemies are tankier. The Corpus seem to reward just nutty amounts of wreckage, ad even with their eHP being higher they are still less idiotically bullet spongey than the grineer. You also don't have to build 1-2 helpings of Dome Charges, so the Corpus missions are easier, more rewarding, and fail to require the engineer grind (because apparently the ship designated engineer just doesn't like to craft anymore).
What about regular missions? Well, it seems like more rooms are overlapping than ever before. What I mean by this is that areas are blocked off because the extended bits of one room literally jut into another. It's almost like this update borked more systems than it introduced. Combine that with certain tiles having something like a syndicate medallion spawn in an area that the game seems to consider out of bounds (Ceres, Lex), forcing you to respawn without giving you the ability to pick the thing up, and I'm pretty surprised that anybody there has decided that this is "good enough" to stop updates on.
Let me close out, in a similar fashion to what you've done here. Steam is the platform that offers real tracking of users, that the public has access to. You've got 11 updates thus far with 29.10.x. The uplift in average players for the month of March was about 4k people. That's an update, Easter, and the announcement of both your anniversary and 30.0 being delayed into April. It's almost like even a PC exclusive update can only spark about a 10% uptick in players. While I appreciate your honesty, the communication coming from your team sucks and has no thought behind it. Please don't stop update. We need at least one more, with some of the big lingering STABILITY issues addressed. If the rest of this month is going to be with this release as "good enough" then it's going to just be enough for people. Your former support base on Youtube is finding it difficult to sell this...which should really tell you that things are bad. These same supporters defended things like mod drop chance boosters, but now can't swallow a content update because it's just a mess.
-
14
-
-
40 minutes ago, FSK41 said:
you dont even have the things from the current update but already ask for the next? I dont think there is any way to please players like you
You should really check yourself, before making such a bold and dismissive statement. It'd be rather interesting if someone could lay out the promises that DE has made, and highlight exactly why someone would be frustrated when they've amounted to literal years of not being addressed, and promised but then pushed out without any thought.
I mean, it's not like it's been literal years since dual wield nikanas were promised.
It's not like DE promised the railjack would fly down to the surface of Fortuna and pick you up, before ascending to a space battle.
It's not like the Hydroid Prime trailer was 90% done for literal years before it was released.
It's not like DE was promising the Duviri Paradox, with a cinematic trailer, before the announcement of Deimos.
It's not like DE has moved dates out on things constantly, while also releasing things with about 60% of promised features, with "coming soon" as the tag line.
It's not like DE has decided 29.10.10 is the end of updates...whilst the underlying systems are so buggy that issues from release are still present (looking at you doors that decide simply not to open).
It's not like after everything else I've just stated, DE decided to dilute the rewards pool in railjack with Oberon parts....making the first healing support warframe now so far down the tree that new players functionally have no reason to learn to support anymore.
Last of all, it's not like DE has been playing around with Railjack with almost no player feedback. I mean, they don't have test servers, or a bunch of creators bound by a non-disclosure agreement who could be their QA department.
Heck, it's not like DE has been guilty of over promising and under delivering for literal years. Where the only way we could get a straight answer out of them is if a player mob functionally crashed developer social media accounts, or if their latest hot take on a well researched and factually supported video called them out on this crap caused DE to react like hurt children.
Oh wait. This entire thing was for comedic effect, and all of the bad stuff above is how DE works. It's their constant promises which have driven their community to demand updates on their promises. It's their less than professional actions which have driven just miserable responses from what their defenders call "entitled" gamers. Of course the same response to a game like No Man's Sky was warranted. So....hypocrite or liar? A hypocrite for castigating others for the failures you let DE get away with, or a liar to believe they have justified the duplicity?
Before any mod decides this is off topic, because open criticism seems to be that now, let's review my stance. 29.10.10 still has affinity earning bugs. It still has issues with a solo person getting the proper rewards. It still tends to simply disconnect groups at the end of missions at random (without the host disbanding them). It still has the highest tier weapons reward 25 endo instead of 225. It's got all of this, and DE wants to say it's fine to stop updating. Great. It's fine to stop updating at a 70% success, that's MOPAR. Many Odd Parts Arranged at Random. Yes, that was a car joke. Yes, I'm aware they all have jokes, so let's not be butt hurt about that. No, 29.10.10 is not a good enough release. Go back to the drawing board. I for one finally have a Zephyr Deluxe skin....and cannot spend a penny on it because supporting releases like this in any form is laughable.
-
12
-
-
Let's talk about this buggy mess again....because apparently DE as a whole believes it's time to announce that they're going to go dark for a while. It's great that you're being honest...but not so great when the state of the game is so riddled with bugs.
1) If you run multiple railjack missions back-to-back you're going to lose affinity, and syndicate standing. Let me explain. Had about 6k left to earn for the day. Did two runs of exterminate on Pluto. Mission lists a little over 5k as earned. Great. 124k total. So I return to dry dock. I leave after selling wreckage. When I get back on the orbiter I've got 118k syndicate standing....what? I also have less than 100 standing left to earn. So....my standing just evaporated?
2) Rewards are not working. Again, back to back missions. Do the first, and it's 2 revealed rewards and two unrevealed. Start the next mission, and I can see all 4. Play through the next, and get 2 revealed. Fly back to dry dock, and I have 1 unrevealed that is rewarded....hmmm. 4+3=7.....8-7=1. By jove, I believe you've shafted me out of a reward.
3) 25 endo for weapons is still a thing. Oh joy, I have no reason to try and earn 40k for a mod 25 at a time (40k/25=1600 scrap wreckage).
4) 6%. Only about two weeks to earn a Carmine Penta.....and it's junk.
5) Speaking of junk, have you been poisoning the water for our railjack AIs? I'm asking because they seem to be powered by stupidity. I've had an engineer decide to become a defender. I've had engineers simply decide not to fix hazards. I've watched a gunner get off of a turret, go to a hazard, a defender simply wander by, and the gunner fixed the hazard. None of this even touches on the idiots deciding to prioritize shooting a crewship that had been rendered inert, while a couple of boarding pods crashed into the ship. It's nutty to say this, but the state of their AI a few revisions back was actually better.
6) Orphix Venom. I want to make this feedback concise. As such, it's going to lack a lot of nuance. The rewards suck. The arcane drops are a joke. The speed of the event is completely unbalanced for solo play. After I finish a node it's never going to be reasonable for me to play it again for fun. High level sentient enemies, like the rest of railjack, are not a challenge. What they are is bigger punching bags. What I see value in is grinding the mechs if you haven't already done it....but it's more efficient to do an exterminate solo or a defense with a team to get those levels. I'd ask who tested this and was responsible for the poor implementation....but it's clear. You took the feedback that it was too slow and the percentages ticked too fast. Everything else was ignored. Oh boy....my feedback really mattered.
While all of the above is going on in your content rework, it's hard to articulate how much of the rest of the game is suffering. I've failed missions on the Plains, because enemies didn't spawn in an exterminate. I've had steel path enemies one shot me through my shields. Arbitrations are still a toss-up as to whether you can be revived or whether resurgence burdens are required.
So we are clear, announcing that you're going to go silent on updating is an honest move DE. For that, I give you respect. The problem is that you're announcing it with an open time frame, whilst 10 updates into a mess of another update that you could only release on PC because it doesn't have to pass certification for stability and quality on PC. The communication without words is that PC is going to be the beta testers yet again. The communication with words is that you're going to be focusing on the next release soon, so be ready for April to not have a lot of patches and fixes, despite the current state of things. You have a PR department, and I'd imagine at this point they might start to favorably look on alcoholism to both deal with the frustration and for its antiseptic properties. Maybe think before you speak.
Let me offer an alternative. You include the patching disclaimer at the top of all the recent updates. This is likely a means to assure people that you're still working. Great. Now, how about a list of what it is that you're looking into as the 5-7 priorities for the next patch? It'll be the footnote to the update, and it speaks volumes more about your focus than introducing new emojis to chat. Because my game about space ninjas needs more texting......sorry, choking back some bile there.
-
4
-
-
0.99 = 1-(1-0.06)x The chance of 99% of people getting the 6% drop rate item.
0.01 = .94x Take .99 from 1, and shift the thing around to move all numbers to one side
x = log(0.01)/Log(.94) = 74.42
This means that for that 6% drop item, if you want 99% of users to have it, they'll need to run the mission 75 times.
Let's then do the math here. Athodai, Nautilus, and Carmine Penta. 75 runs each, so 225 runs total. If you only get 5 intrinsics per run, that's 1125 accumulated intrinsics. If you were previously maxed, you need 1023. Hmmm. It looks like DE designed this thing to overlap.
You know, maybe it was just shenanigans. Maybe they just randomly came up with a number, and that's simply what they wanted to roll with. Of course, if it takes 15 minute for you to run this thing solo, it's a 225*15/60 or 56.25 hour grind.
Kinda seems like an insult to our investment. Also, seems like a dire attempt to stretch 2 new pieces of content, one of which is actually new, into a month worth of casual gaming sessions. Ouch.
-
5
-
Community Stream Schedule: June 19 - 24th
in Livestreams
Posted
Stopping for just a moment...do you remember when the developer streams used to just be a video with no rewards?
I do.
Do you remember that the engagement was from people deeply dedicated to the game, because the community was a very shallow pool?
I do.
Do you remember when this died? Let me give you a hint. DE generated a massive population increase...and had a backlog of content literally years old. They spent months tinkering with the open world...and all the while people had a bunch of content to explore. Veterans...were a thing...but the community that supported the game from kickstarter to sale to Leyou (sorry, whatever the poultry farmer in China was named) was largely left out as content droughts got longer. It's been years...and people have burned through the content. A few years ago DE started increasing engagement via partnering with Twitch to do give-aways...and get eyeballs on the developers. That's why they need to offer free stuff...because once you start paying people to watch it becomes a requirement going forward.
Now...the developers "retreating" to discord is a joke. It's how we get garbage like the latest COD game, or the complete misfires of things like Prey, or still yet the shenanigans like No Man's Sky. It's people not wanting negative feedback..so cutting off all of it instead of employing human punching bags. I mean, customer satisfaction agents. I say that not as an insult, but because that's often how those people have described their job to me. To be clear...DE as a developer has a mixed track record in their response to negative feedback, but have been consistent to reward players. Considering that they desire positive feedback, then host dev streams which promise features that can take years to happen if ever they do, then a bit of bribery for a positive player response is probably not a bad use of resources.
Let me qualify the above just a bit. Dev streams have shown us Parkour 2.0, and they've shown off frames. On the other hand you have the Ghoul Saw...which took a community backlash to get into the game after being told for months it was "almost done." We saw modular archwing, which was deep into development...and years later is still not in game. We also watched things like a third orb mother...which is chilling in a lake, as it has been since launch. I say that we learn nothing about the future of the game not in jest, but because the delivery of promised features is often a roll of the dice as to whether it's a goal or a fun idea...
Finally, why complain? Because occasionally DE listens and fixes things. It's a pipe dream, but not unprecedented. If there's a possibility, then people will ask for it to be less...insulting. Please note that DE isn't stupid...so the decision to reward in this value is likely based upon math. With the recent release of content, it's likely that DE is betting on people being invested in seeing updates...so they're testing if worse rewards is a community acceptable practice. We provide feedback by either forum comments, or not engaging with the stream...and as per all the other people DE doesn't have the capability to see a difference between leeching and engagement.
Of course, you could also suggest that some of these have rewarded an umbral forma for watching. 45 minutes of engagement for a thing that cost a bunch of steel essence and comes around every...10 weeks I think...or 45 minutes for half of a basic reward you can grind infinitely in 30 minutes. With that math established, this really seems like a bad reward.