master_of_destiny
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Posts posted by master_of_destiny
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DE....I'm getting tired of this crap now.
I thought the range on Primed Animal Instinct was wrong...so I did some testing in-game. CONSIDER THIS A BUG REPORT!
Stated range: 33 meters with a 12 meter height. (checked on wiki, because the +33 stat might be magic math)
Actual range: 20 meters horizontally.
Let's cover the test methodology. Go into a mission as Loki, so you can stealth. Find a decently long hallway, with a relatively stationary enemy. Equip the synthesis scanner, and walk forward until they appear on the radar. Check the distance with synthesis scanner...20 meters. Move back, and they instantly disappear. Move forward, they reappear.
Assume the synthesis scanner is wrong. Equip Vectis Prime. Perform same experiment. 20 meters.
Either you've managed to break another thing that was working....because, or you've managed to stealth nerf another thing. I don't even understand this anymore, because the loot radar still seems to be working. Come on.
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A bit of background. Saturn-Casini-Capture mission. Completing daily synthesis target mission. Enemies tested on include the butcher, lancer, and drahk master on this mission.
No spawns for the kuva lich at this time, but the target was a trooper.
Why so frustrated? Well...at this point I'm coming off of grind for the Deimos bounties....and the Latrox Une segment is a mess now about a month without commentary....and it's getting to me.
These blasted stealth changes are just miserable, and you can never tell if it's an intended or accidental change. All the while, I get to hear about the next big update....and wonder what fresh misery and breakage it will bring.
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So....quite an interesting week. Let me take my negativity out first, so we can move on to the much more optimistic.
- Your current release is still unstable. In the span of 48 hours I've had one Helminth subsume lead to infinite loading on the arsenal screen, two black screens while trying to access the star chart, and a multitude of ping-ponging through hosts that have made missions unplayable. Joy.
- No updates on released content with Deimos...that has basically had two months to fester. The promise is some time in November this will mostly be fixed....yay.
- More arcanes...yay. Will it be the 3 rank grinds, the 5 rank miserable grinds, or will it release with a 0.201% drop rate? Yeah, not letting this go.
- Please fix your spawns on the corpus ship rework from this year. 4 tiles have visible spawns (with radar mods) that are beyond player bounds, two of the five spots can be seen by clipping the camera through walls to see these things. It makes getting ayatans and syndicate medallions frustrating.
- Let me reiterate, it's been years since this game has been this unstable. Please, fix it instead of issuing 10 gig downloads to prepare for the next generation of consoles while insulting your current player base with a bad experience.
Now that we've had the negatives, let's discuss the stream. I'll get to positives, but I have to point out concerns first.
- Tap to cast on Zephyr is not a fix. Casting in a single location will need a huge tornado to make it worth casting, otherwise it's just a bad version of Vauban's Bastille. I applaud the attempt, but it seems like you want to add mechanics rather than understand its usage scenario and try to fix the problem. More isn't better, just get the thing to actually work. Maybe the "stickiness" is the solution, but without more speed the tornados aren't going to be fixed.
- Air Burst. I...I just can't. Increasing the damage fixes nothing, because it's not a scaling damage. It's not capable of consistent crowd control. Why exactly are you bound and determined to fix something so fundamentally broken? If you remove the need for it to increase tornado size, then this ability can simply be ejected and replaced. Adding damage isn't a solution, it's trying to make this ability do damage and CC without being good at either.
- November 6th. We have less than two months. Thanksgiving and Christmas/Chaunnakah/Kwanzaa/other winter holidays kill about two weeks. That's basically 6 more weeks for you to release 29.4, two warframes, and Deimos Arcana. Maybe it's time to sit down, give us a real picture of what is likely to be released, could be released, and isn't going to happen. To be abundantly clear, we're still waiting on Wraith. You promised 4 frames this year after tennocon...and it's not looking like that's going to happen.
- Ghouls saw when DE? Dual wield nikanas when DE? Let me be immensely blunt, these questions are borne from huge promises and bad delivery. They're continued because of worse communication. Please, fix this.
Now, finally the good stuff.
- No Duviri Paradox promises! Thank the lord above that we aren't back there yet.
- Promises to make the Lich encounters stable and on a galleon. Interesting. If you can fix the 1 in 6 chance of getting the right order after the miserable murmur grind, fix the encounter being RNG, and make the Liches actually feel like something more than a bad joke it'd be quite interesting.
- Corpus Liches. Yeah, the Queenpin designation is pretty goofy considering the situation, and that nearly all the mooks in game have been male. That said, it'd be interesting to see exactly what more than a year has taught you about these systems...and I'm hopeful that it's more than "ignore this content other than as MR fodder because primary and secondary weapons are garbage now that melee is the only thing which scales to higher level content."
- Steel Path....I have mixed feelings about. Consistent earnings is nice...as well as the events allowing for random groups. That being said, people are already farming the best missions so redoing these missions for a single guaranteed drop seems like a lot of frustration for little reward. Likewise, weekly stuff from Teshin is a very risky situation. This game mode is still bullet sponge hell, with cheese tactics dominating it. If you're going to hide anything but cosmetics behind this it's going to be received poorly. Exactly what possessed you to make a "hard mode" where 90% or more of your content is unusable? It's still baffling, but hopefully will spur engagement.
- The communication on stream was actually good. It's refreshing to see you acting like a real professional entity, and not immediately devolving into nebulous promises and "soon" content. I applaud whatever you decided to do prior to this, to make sure you were all on the same page.
- Welcome to warframe, with regards to falling through the level geometry. It's really not funny that it happened when displaying content that is to ship shortly, but it's really indicative of our experience with this game. I know it's a bit to ask, but maybe experiencing this can spur you to prevent it from happening in game?
- Acolytes as "mini-bosses." I'm not sure how to feel here. The thing about the acolytes is they used warframe powers, and you had to quickly kill them to get an RNG drop before immediately grinding the missions again, just to try and get a rare mod. It's now going to presumably be a single steel essence drop. You've killed the ability to farm via the current endless missions....but that 85 steel essence requirement is looking to be a literal month of grinding missions to get then. It's exchanging a relative RNG roll with grind potential into a much slower resource accumulation....and I'm not sure this isn't just motivated by the desire to decrease rewards and artificially extend engagement with the system by making it less rewarding. I've got my fingers crossed hoping this is well thought out...but am still looking at 0.201% drop chances and not holding my breath.
It's largely been a bad year. This game doesn't feel like it's made such slow progress since 2015....and the start with Liches and Railjack releasing in such a poor state poisoned any optimism remaining. You're welcome to chalk this up to a pandemic, but the history suggests otherwise. I'd like to retain hope for 2021, where maybe we'll see a new DE. One that listens like they did in 2014. One that isn't focused on open worlds, and maybe decides to clear the list of outstanding promises so any detractors can finally be silenced. I have hope, but it's time to take those first steps. If not...I don't believe there's a future here. Warframe isn't going to start "next gen" with a clean slate. One of the first youtube videos you can find is about controversies, and the rabbit hole deepens every year. It's going to be tough to push this as a next generation game with all of the history....and hopefully you decide that as developers it's time to clean the slate and make this game next generation.
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26 minutes ago, Aikonce said:
Can someone explain me the difference between these 2?
If i have this:
...which should i pick?
Choose the one on the left.
Why? Look at the glowy green bits in the center. The one on the left is an open, closed, closed pattern. The one on the right is an open top with a solid bottom.
While you're at this, make sure you know the pattern of the other item. It's not the overall investigative piece, but the bit suspended in the middle.
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18 hours ago, GEN-Son_17 said:
That was our fault as players.
People complained about not having enough time to earn the rewards. DE then extended the time intervals.
People complained about the points being too low as well as having too many tasks to do per week. DE, therefore, reduced the task list, durations of tasks and increased point values.
People then vets started complaining about the lack of "meaningful" rewards while others complained about "not enough variety" of rewards. DE, once again, obliged and offered special mods, rotations per week and even tossed in a good lore story for good measure.
And now, people are complaining about...stupid stuff. This forum is proof that we ask for and receive too much and yet there will never be enough. In fact, I think the ONLY real area that DE always gets hit the hardest is when they listen to the whining that's disguised as "constructive criticism". Knock it off guys. 2020 is already hard enough without the pointless complaining.
Funny that....let's give this logic an acid test.
When did the "complaints" about the length occur? Well, prior to release. There were concerns amongst the players that DE was going to introduce a system that would require daily logins and even more grind. Prior to launch of Nightwave they assured the players that the duration would be more than sufficient to earn the 30 unique rewards, and that there would be an ability to earn credits thereafter to buy other stuff. This means that it was not a reaction to player criticism, but an inherent function built in. Your point is therefore invalid.
People did complain about the point values being too low. It was a few thousand points to spend an hour doing a Kuva survival, which meant that instead of the 7 weekly activities we'd have to do far more. That is not the player's fault, but DE not doing any reasonable balancing between rewards and investment. I'm going to call this a wash, because it was bad design that was eventually remedied after lots of feedback. Alternatively, you believe that the rewards for this were fine. If that's the case then there's no reason that you should ever complain about things like a 0.201% drop chance, because the possibility exists.
Regarding the complaints about meaningful rewards....are you kidding me? Nightwave has offered weapon specific modifications since its inception. The complaint from veterans was not about not offering those things, but about the actual limitations of what was on offer. Maybe you don't get it, so let me short this. Look at what is on offer any given week. 3 Vauban parts, reactor, catalyst, kuva, nitain, 4 aura mods, a smattering of helmets, and some cosmetics or alert weapons. Let's look at this through the veteran lense. Kuva is a stupid credit waste, nitain is a waste because it used to drop 4 times a day, so you can have hundreds lying around. Vauban is one and done with Vauban Prime existing. Aura mods are something you got huge amounts of with alerts. The cosmetics are one and done. This means literally the only thing for veteran players was reactors and catalysts. DE then decided that the conclave had failed spectacularly, and instead of releasing new content they'd recycle the old mods from it into Nightwave. That's a bit more one-and-done rewards, but realistically we're not getting anything new. Now the real fun bit, DE has limited the amount of these mods in Season 3, so we don't even have a real ability to earn all of them.
Let's compare and contrast this dumpster fire to a bigger dumpster fire. Fallout 76 has a season pass. The rewards in it are largely cosmetics, and some content. The experienced and new players alike appreciate these rewards, because they haven't made this a barrier to entry for new players or a lackluster option for veterans. Imagine the Fallout alternative to lock the ability to craft a weapon behind the season rewards, making it only available every few weeks, and giving the veterans who already have all of those crafting recipes the incentive to participate as only a recipe to craft stimpacks. That's what DE did by locking auras (direct and immediate mod capacity and power), and reactors/catalysts behind the Nightwave grind wall.
Let me short this, players were angry because the reward structure targets a phantom audience. To get the best out of Nightwave you have to play passively, have some but not all of the alert rewards, want all of the cosmetics, and find it deeply rewarding to do what you are told rather than what you want to do. You find that player, and I'll show you the smallest selection of the player base.
Let's talk about stupid stuff. When Nightwave started there was apprehension, because DE doesn't have the mechanisms to deliver constant content. They aren't LoL, Fortnite, or other companies where the season content would be their focus. This was the DE that in 2017 spent half the year releasing nothing so that PoE could come out. Their proposal for the Nightwave was ambitious, and their track record for delivery pointed to this requiring real vision and consistency....which was in stark contrast to the Second Dream and Old War events established history. We bought it, and got a stream of challenges that looked like an alpha testing sample. Force us to do things with friends/clan mates, force hour long survivals in a game whose staff specifically stated that this was not the game to do something like this, and require blowing through the "rewards" to earn less standing than a new reward required (forma 3 things, with one of 30 rewards being 3 forma)? Yeah, it was bumpy. DE did smooth it out, but it took a lot of feedback.
Now, about that timing. Let's review.
Season 1- 81 days - Feb 27-May 19 (2019)
Dead Time - 24 days
Intermission 1 - 23 days - June 12-July 5 (2019)
Dead Time - 1 day
Season 2 - 99 days - July 6-Oct 13 (2019)
Dead Time - 8 days
Intermission 2 - 195 days - Oct 21-May 3 (2019-2020)
Dead Time - 9 days
Season 3 - 168 days to date - May 12-Today
Let's look at this as a progression, and establish a pattern. 81, 23, 88, 195, 168. Well, two seasons of about a quarter (90 days). One month of intermission. Then...Intermission 2 and Season 3. Those two basically are going to be about 7 months each. That's not great, but if the rewards reflected more than double the duration it would be fine... The ellipses there imply that they did not. Another 30 rewards, but more than twice the length. That implies DE really screwed up. If we followed the previous pattern we'd have been almost out of intermission 4 by this point....but we're not even through season 3. Critical failure on assigning resources and planning by DE.
Is this fair? I mean, maybe it was planned. Well, DE has said that it was not their plan. Their feedback is that this has gone on way longer than they intended. That puts to rest any debate from the outside.
So....is Nightwave a successful replacement? Well, it's less rewarding. DE has not had the manpower required to sustain it, and they admitted to that. The constantly increasing duration implies that they still don't have the manpower. We're getting the third extension to point earnings in three seasons. There are people who will have the 30 extra levels unlocked today if they add them today (and more). That implies that DE isn't tooled up for this. They released bumpy, fixed some things, an have over time experienced continued failures because they simply do not have the resources and or planning to execute this. Uncoincidentally, this was the hesitance people demonstrated years ago regarding the failures of DE and the implementation of Nightwave. Almost like truly long standing veterans saw this coming....
Now, I just did the math. Where in Hades is my stupidity coming from when I suggest 3 years of Nightwave? I must be stupid, or in error, right? Let's discuss the past. Nightwave is not a new concept. On and off the alert system was cited on developer streams and the like for being an issue. About 3 years ago we had real proposals for it to be changed, and DE tested the waters with things like the Proxy Rebellion event. That is, set out a goal for the community that takes time and a reward earned once that goal was met. That was the testing genesis of Nightwave, with its weekly events. I'm getting my start date of three years ago from that testing, because it's the tipping point where DE went full in to revising alerts.
Is that unfair....maybe? Why do I suggest this? Well, PoE tested the waters of open worlds. We now have 3. DE slammed bunches of relays into the game, did an event to limit them by having fomorians destroy some, promised rebuilding, spent years waffling, and since have rebuilt a grand total of 2. DE cannot be held to immediate delivery on promises, and their experimentation takes years. Nightwave has demonstrated failure, but hasn't been replaced. They'll iterate until something new comes along. This is the frustration. If Nightwave was 90 days, 7 off, 28 days, 7 off, then a new season it'd be fine. Instead it's a 6 month wait between rewards. The failing is that with that duration their 30 rewards focused on cosmetics is just sad. It's also frustrating because it represents a barrier to new player entry. If you can't serve newbies, and don't serve content to veterans, then who exactly are you serving?
Regarding the 2020 is hard....go do the math. 2019 was when warframe's performance financially sucked. 2018 was a down year after 2017. 2017 was bouyed by the media blitz of "open worlds" in this free to play game. All 2020 has been is a continuation of established things. The excuse of work from home is great...assuming you don't have the capability to see established patterns from DE.
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7 hours ago, (PS4)camwyn-xenos said:
As a 3000hr+ 3 yrs of experience tenno i still care about catalyst, reactors and a few other items. I started as a fully free to play player. And bought packs once i realized i liked warframe and its vibe on support. So while i have every frame, sentinel, companion, arch weapon and wing, my weapons collection grows each release. I'm not a trader so plat is always short. Slots slots and more slots is still my where my platinum goes. Nore do i care for fashion frame i have losey fashion sense. So i care very deeply what the devs give as grind rewards, loyalty bounuses, etc. Not all veterans play the same or have the same view points, its the beauty of warframe. I still try to play as a free to play player where possible. Again one of warframes best point is the economy.
Something nobody outside of DE knows is what effect the sale by layou technology has had on the De market decisions so what we got in the past may well be about to change. So we can ask for changes. Only the devs know what they can give!
Let me offer you the perspective of someone else, and justify it as we go.
Slots are warframes's primary financial motivator, and have always been. Doing the math here, virtually everything that is actual content requires a slot. Until the start of Nightwave, years into this game, there was no way to earn slots. In fact, even with Nightwave there's no consistency and absolutely no way to actually select and purchase them. As such, the random smattering of slots offered during the main rewards selection is not particularly relevant. My example- Vulpaphyla and Predasites. If you started with Nightwave act 1 you'd have experienced the vampire kavat, the 3 Vulpaphyla, 3 Predasites, Dethcube Prime, and Dethmachine rifle. If memory serves there have been a grand total of 4 companion slots offered, meaning you're 4 slots short of keeping up. [if I'm off on count please call me out, as it's difficult to be 100% accurate]
Likewise, let's look at warframes. 3 slots, and we're looking at 2 slots being required per quarter as an average. Nope, not enough room there. Weapons....I'm not even going to try to catalog how short we are. Finally, railjack....just railjack. Nothing good to report there, but the content is fairly lackluster anyways.
In short, if Nightwave was a 10-12 week event, and prestige levels weren't really a thing, then maybe Nightwave would offer us a way to earn enough slots to keep up. The catch being that it's years into the game, there are literally hundreds of weapons, and the amount of slots earned is still nowhere near enough to not still require real money transactions to buy slots.
Let me also make a quick comment about fashion frame. 75 platinum for a color pallet. Syndanas. Tennogen. Deluxe skins. Baro skins. Immortal skins. Day of the Dead skins. Winter holiday skins. I'd like to go on, but I think you get it. It doesn't really matter if you care about the cosmetics, the cosmetics are what defines players. That's the design decision DE made a long time ago, and hasn't changed. It may be inconsequential to you, but it's vital to the people in this game who are deeply invested, because it makes them unique. Whether you agree with that, or not, it's how this game functions.
This ties to the economy. People spend real money for platinum. It trades between players to alleviate grind. Grinders spend the platinum to either skip other grind or on monetary outlets like fashion and slots. If you're going to praise the economy, driven by painful grind and cosmetics, it's difficult to then suggest Nightwave is an improvement. It's driving more purchases that deplete the platinum pool...which is not a player improvement. It's an improvement to developer financials with minimal new investment into content. I would gladly eat those words if the extra spend was justified with more content, but more than half a year on an intermission with only two real content releases meant 2019 was a demonstration that Nightwave was not a player beneficial system.
Now, let's talk about a person who still remembers void keys, movement 1.0, and barely missed the time of rainbow builds. The point here is that the term veteran applies to many different types of players, and those who barely experienced the game before Nightwave are not veterans who experienced the old system. You seem to be in that category, which means most of your experience has been with the restrictions of Nightwave.
Let me offer you the experience of someone who came back to the game after a two year hiatus, just before the introduction of PoE. That is to say, I came back and had to buy lots of slots, burn all of my reactors/catalysts, burn through almost all of my forma to level things up, and create the entirely new exilus slot adapters, and basically do all of this with nothing remaining from the old grind. To frame this, how many forma, reactors, exilus adapters, and catalysts do you think someone like that might have? Moreover, I've stated that I've got about 20k MR points before MR 30, so you know I've done virtually everything.
Let me answer you. 200 forma. 40 Exilus adapters, and 42 blue prints. 71 Reactors. 78 Catalysts. I'd like to explain why, but that seems like a rant. My point here is that the veteran community that can realistically compare and contrast Nightwave could be sitting upon 400+ nitain essence, and all of the above. This is a person who has largely only used Nightwave credits to purchase cosmetics, replace reactors/catalysts, purchase the new cosmetics, and never touched the Nitain as a reward unless there was no other way to spend the accumulated credits.
What kind of veteran is this? Well, someone who joined warframe while it was on the ascension. Someone who remembers when the game was growing, instead of cyclically spiking player counts but having average player numbers decay over time. Someone who remembers when DE released content more than twice a year, but made the reasonable compromise of tenno reinforcement levels of commitment. Namely, anyone that was hoping Nightwave would solve the issues with alerts, and has since found it to simply be a failure because DE never assigned the resources to it, so it's become a running joke as to how long it'll be dragged out before we get the next lackluster offering. High concept offerings, but with such a poor actual showing it's difficult to show it any love.
Regarding the buyout....seriously? You do realize that the purchaser is Tencent, right? I'm asking because the "nobody knows" thing was entirely valid when Leyou bought them out. It was a meat packing company diversifying into software, and that's realistically unprecedented. Ten Cent buying a developer is not. Let's look at the reasonable comparison list. Riot, Funcom, Grinding Gear Games, and Supercell are where I'd like to draw your attention to, but there are others.
Now, with the precedent set, what is Tencent likely to do. Well, I'm going to go for Clash Of Clans, and call it as exploitative "free to play but pay to win" as the first step. After that we can suggest League of Legends, a game built on very limited content but lots of cosmetics. I don't have issues with League for the lack of content, but cite it because most of the MOBA content is player generated from rigidly defined rules and consistently bug minimum mechanics. Finally, let's talk Path of Exile. Oh boy, is that a huge box of crazy. It's theoretically a truly free to play game, buy you can buy points. Points offer you access to purchasing gear. Additionally account features are locked to purchases. It'd be like DE incorporating an auction house into the game finally, but making it linked to the purchase of at least one prime access.
So, let's have a little think here. Tencent has a track record of relative non-interference, assuming a product is making money. They then corporately seem to place the burden of being profitable onto each developer, with individual responsibility for how going to them until there's a point of not making money. At which point there's changes to monetization, which make things profitable.
Let's model where warframe is on this curve. They aren't in their growth phase, as Riot was when acquired. They aren't in a stable phase, as their financial reports suggest that DE had a bad 2019 and 2020 is not looking a lot better. They aren't due for release of a follow-up, as warframe is functionally a live services spaghetti mess of code. Now, with all of this said, where is DE? Well, let's look at this objectively. They experience huge spikes in player engagement with content infusions. Financials are generally reported monthly or quarterly.
Let's extrapolate. To appease a new corporate model the best thing to do would be a monthly release of something. That would level out the spikes of player engagement, and retain people for longer. It would be reasonable to have newer players focused on spending platinum to get things, because there's less opportunity to earn them through gameplay. It's also beneficial to have focus on cosmetics, as it's functionally the best bang-for-the-buck investment. Basically, it's minimum effort with minimally talented staff (I don't mean this as an insult, but that they require less monetary compensation for their output).
What are we already seeing? Well, monthly releases is a check. It was Deimos last month, this month is prime access and Nightwave. Next month is Deimos 2.0. We're seeing more required platinum buys, couched in the potential "choice" that Nightwave offers to players. We've already been told Tennogen will be more frequent. It kind of sounds like DE is already tooling up for this. It's almost like they can see the same financials, and have been working quietly to increase their performance. It's almost like the buy-out was a thing on the table since 2018, when DE saw a dramatic decrease in profitability. When did Nightwave start again?
This aside, it's unlikely Tencent is going to be a new sugar daddy to DE. This isn't a new game, it isn't on the most sound footing, and it's not like it'll be expanding to new systems soon. There's very little growth potential, so until there is it'll be another managed property. This isn't good or bad, but it will mean more consistency. Is this better for the player, who knows? I personally preferred the age of tenno reinforcement packs, but it'll be a shift for DE. Hopefully they figure it out, but when Fallout 76 can copy Fortnite better than you it's a sign of truly fundamental issues in execution and planning.
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44 minutes ago, (PS4)camwyn-xenos said:
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I personaly like nightwave structure for supplying rewards and the challenges. The rank 60 30 + 30 was a good idea and time frame around 10 weeks i would like it if DE would stick to that for seasons i don't care if its intermission 3, 4 ,5 , 6 even just a set rotation and reasonable time frame. story is not as important as certainty, i think some other agree on the timing point of view. Weekly rank limits control the amount players earn and the grind/burnout restriction this should stay as a general idea
Some have said a restriction on the amount of catalyst and reactors is why DE limits use to ranks. If this was the case DE would have changed the sale cost which i cannot remember them changing from season 1. Cost not restriction on ranks is how you control this as a business they control the Cost and supply of items. We the players control only our willingness to grind.
I hope as other the devs use the potential that is here in nightwave and build on its good points add more to it and hopefully reduce some unrewarding grind in the game as awhole.
Ps on consoles can you please split nightwave box in two extractor/nightwave or reprogram DEkickbot to say press L3 for resource location when it tell players were to look for resource locations as its currently hidden on default looking.
Short answer on the above, the cost of the reactors/catalysts have not changed. The issue is that by limiting credit earning potential, and forcing a lot of other items into the pool, DE is making it necessary for newer players to buy things with platinum.
Long story very short, if you can only earn these items through a limited resource, and that resource is restricted over an ever expanding time frame, you basically need to spend platinum. This is a concern, as the initial promise of this system was a defined season where rewards could be chosen. It's rather problematic to have the promise of choice be outweighed by the falsehood of that choice being demonstrated to push players to platinum spending. That's a mobile game tactic...and generally a problem indicating a developer is not exactly worthy of trust due to perceived dishonesty.
-As a more veteran player, I don't have to give any concern to this. You earn the umbra forma, and then spend the next several months waiting out the timer until they finally let you earn another. It's not a veteran issue, as most rewards are already something that veterans are unmotivated by. It's really frustrating that this is a barrier to entry for new players, and even Fallout 76 managed to do this better. It's amazing that the lackluster atoms currency is somehow superior to all the iterations DE has provided for Nightwave. What I will not deny is that it is better today than at the start; but who really wanted an hour of survival, 3 formas being required, and some of the goofier challenges?-
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1 minute ago, RazerXPrime said:
Looks like it's really bothering you that I don't have the issues you're describing.
Answer confirmed. Troll. Disregarding from this point forward, and with all subsequent interactions.
Goodbye.
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1 hour ago, RazerXPrime said:
I started playing this game a few months ago. NW never bothered me. Got to rank 90 no issue. What's the issue for new players again?
You know I think you're confused. All the issues vet players bring up on these forums are only issues if you've been playing this game for 5 years.
20 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:Wow resorting to petty insults is really helping your point. Look NW isn't perfect. It's not the best reward system. Also. I don't care, because unlike you I'm not actually entitled. It's funny though that you threw the word entitled towards me, when you're the only one acting like it. But perhaps if you throw more insults my way it may make your experience with the game better. I do enjoy coming here on the forums looking at how sour people become because of themselves.
It's amazing that the quotation button can be used, and demonstrate that what you are saying is about as internally inconsistent as a 70's jello mold. It also has about the same palatability and structure under the slightest outside scrutiny.
Let's start with "it's only veterans" having issues. It's face palm stupidity, but let's prove it out mathematically.
Nitain - You need 189 assuming you don't have to do any research. Let's assume each costs you 3 credits, as it's 15 credits for 5. Now tell me, exactly how expensive is that? 567 credits. Great, so a new player that earns all of the Nightwave ranks can earn up to an additional 30. 30*15= 450. 450<567. This means that if you started the game with the start of series 3, spent credits on nothing but nitain, and somehow did everything that could be done you couldn't possibly earn enough nitain to make everything requiring it. That's really crappy for a new player, because it's an artificial grind wall with a wait timer.
Let's say that you simply overlooked the nitain. You bought Auras. There are 18 at 20 credits each, or 360 credits. Woohoo, that leaves a grand total of 90 credits to work with for 20+ weeks of content. You could buy the parts for a single Vauban.
Now, let's talk memes. Fashion frame is endgame...because DE can't figure out a reward system that would allow for repeat play. That means 79 helmets at 35 credits each....that brings the total cost for the recurring cosmetics to 2765 credits. Yep.....that's definitely not friendly for new players. Hopefully they're willing to shell out real money and buy the cosmetics, while veterans sit on multiple cosmetic helmets that cannot be traded.
But all of this can be hand waved away because "you are OK." It's just a veteran problem, and presumably you'll never understand. There's always an infinite supply of new blood, and it's not like today's veterans are simply the new players of three of four years ago that dismissed the same issues then, and have gone full irony by acting like they're new now.
Yeah.
Come back in two years, and tell me that everything is acceptable then. Not the cop-out of "you don't have an issue" or the non-answer of "you're the one with a problem." Assuming that the game hasn't fully face tanked, given the last three years of declining performance, I'll listen then. Alternatively, maybe introduce yourself without immediately being insulting, and acting indignant the second you are responded to in kind.
Alternatively, I suggest a helmet. When you headbutt the door to show your dominance eventually somebody is going to make sure it's a very costly mistake. Introducing yourself by literally whining that other people are children, because they have issues with decisions, is really not a good look for someone who wants respect.
2 hours ago, RazerXPrime said:Love it when children complain. Do go on.
Above is the quotation you started out with, which earns you disrespect. That's what happens when sentence one out of your mouth is disrespect.
I want it directly quoted instead, in the event that someone decides to edit. It's pretty difficult to earn respect by slapping people as a form of introduction.
Almost as bad as promising us improvements, and spending three years repeating the same mistakes again and again. You may have missed this, but intermission 2 is the longest Nightwave event by far. Imagine watching TV, and the commercials lasting 20 of the 30 minutes. That's Nightwave in a nutshell.
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1 minute ago, RazerXPrime said:
Wow resorting to petty insults is really helping your point. Look NW isn't perfect. It's not the best reward system. Also. I don't care, because unlike you I'm not actually entitled. It's funny though that you threw the word entitled towards me, when you're the only one acting like it. But perhaps if you throw more insults my way it may make your experience with the game better. I do enjoy coming here on the forums looking at how sour people become because of themselves.
I can't tell if you understand the term irony, or you're trolling. Let me quote you.
"Love it when children complain. Do go on."
It's almost like when you start a conversation being entitled, people will treat you like an entitled jerk. For reference, if you had started with "Hey, I'm new and I think the Nightwave is a rewarding system." We could have had a conversation. I could have pointed out the flaws, you could have pointed out why alerts were flawed, and this could have been a forum for discussion. Instead, I respond in kind to your own words.
Now, let me offer you one last bit of stupidity. You believe there's no middle ground between love and hate for Nightwave....but obviously didn't read. I stated a NIghtwave with rigid time frame would be acceptable, if not great. That's a thing I said. The issue here is you have no grey. It's black, or it's white. That's a terribly stupid thing.
It's even more frustrating when DE tacitly admits that Nightwave is horribly flawed, with the bi-weekly alerts they put out after developer streams, for events, and really any time that they want people to engage with the game.
Of course I must just be angry and butt-hurt. Maybe you could construct a better strawman....or heaven forbid, show the respect you believe that you deserve. That might be a little much, but when you decide to do so I'll gladly offer that respect back. Until then, those that start the conversation with insults deserve to be dismissed with insults of equal voracity and vigor.
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24 minutes ago, RazerXPrime said:
I started playing this game a few months ago. NW never bothered me. Got to rank 90 no issue. What's the issue for new players again?
You know I think you're confused. All the issues vet players bring up on these forums are only issues if you've been playing this game for 5 years.
You know, this is why veterans get to hating newer players. People who cannot see the nose past their face, and act like entitled jerks because they don't know any better.
Let me explain to you why you're being a more entitled and whiny person than anyone you claim to be entitled.
We've gotten a total of 5 Nightwave chapters in about three years. That is to say almost 3 chapters and two intermissions. The system replaced was the alert system. The reason that the alerts "had to be replaced" was because they were "a relic from a different time." That's all DE, not my words.
Now, what was promised as a replacement? Well, they'd be copying what Fortnite and similar games were doing, and that was a season pass system. How does that work? Well, you string smaller daily an larger goals together to accumulate points, points unlock rewards, and if they've planned things out you can earn all of the rewards with some wiggle room in a defined and rigid "season" time period. That sounds great, right? I mean, the only way you could screw this up is by dragging out the season for an indeterminate amount of time, so that the rewards effectively could not be earned....oh, right. That's what DE did with season 1, then they had weeks with nothing, then they introduced the intermission, which was not a defined length, before finally doing season 2, another huge and undefined intermission, started season 3 on track for one segment every 4 weeks, and have officially gotten to the last segment with way more than 4 weeks and no end date in sight.
So, let's look at the rewards. I'll ballpark this out, so we can simply understand the setup. The Alert system could have literal months where you wouldn't earn a reactor, catalyst, Vauban part, or other things because they only lasted for a couple of hours at most. If that alert happened while you were asleep too bad for you. Theoretically then the season model could offer much better rewards, that you choose. That is until you lose access to all cosmetics, most aura mods, and most importantly Nitain. They took away the randomness of things, but the truth is that they also decreased your rewards by giving you the illusion of complete choice.
For veterans the choice is to get the meager new cosmetics, or the catalyst/reactor. Everything else is repeated, so completing the challenges becomes a joke. For new players you've either got the ability to purchase necessary aura mods, items for mastery rank, or cosmetics. That very limited quantity of event credits can quickly be expended, and because it's on an unknown duration you're simply out of luck. Yes, it is choice. Despite this choice it's less rewards period.
Now, is the above OK. No. If DE dedicated people to this and it was a set length it would be fine. They don't. DE took a system that wasn't broken, and fixed it such that it was beholden to their bass-ackwards release schedule inconsistency. That's hooking a brand new wagon up to a horse with a leg you know is broken, and being utterly surprised when you don't suddenly have a better experience in this new wagon.
So, let me give this to you in a sentence because most people who lack any ability to understand others need TL;DR. Nightwave is less rewards, hidden behind the illusion of choice, and because of DE's failings they drag on for too long.
If you missed the point, explain how the dumpster fire of Fallout 76 managed to get this right. Release content, have an end date, make everything rewarding, so people come back. Alternatively, release with no end date. Have people grind until they get the one unique non-cosmetic, then disregard because the work to reward ratio sucks (that's umbra forma BTW). Bethesda is a flaming dumpster fire, and managed to understand this better than DE. That's comically depressing, and points to DE having ambition but no planning or management skills. They broke something already working, then fixed it to be worse.
Let me catalog the alternatives I've heard proposed, as high level thoughts.
-Galleon/Corpus treasure ship weekly missions to replace the alerts for large reward caches.
-Longer duration alerts, with more rewards, but less of them.
-Hourly alerts, instead of completely RNG scattershot.
-Alerts rewarding tokens to allow you to purchase what you want from a new vendor.
-Alerts not offering garbage rewards. That's credits, common resources, and the like. The idea here being less of a pool of stuff, so more of them are rewarding.
-Relic like rewards from alerts. You could make them radiant, and open them like Engrams in Destiny. This way it's all rewarding, but you don't have to be time bound.
Fill in your own ideas, but the truth here is that Nightwave is not better than alerts. It's different, and would have been worth overlooking, but the issue is weeks upon weeks of thumb twiddling for no rewards....which is what we were promised to have when the alert rewards were removed.
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On 2020-06-21 at 10:19 AM, RunsWithChainsaws said:
Take pictures? My cellphone responds to my touch so poorly that it takes me roughly 10 minutes to take one picture. They don't give me time to read in between the jumps, do they? I'm really slow at reading...about 5th grade speed when I was in junior high school. High IQ but really slow at reading and writing. It's why I majored in applied mathematics in college. Apologies for sounding harsh on the real life comment. I don't actually have one and played a previous game a total of about 30K hours over 7 years, but for once I'd like a game that doesn't have a schedule of activities that get in the way of what I find fun. People say that Nightwave can be done by just playing the game normally, but I think I'd likely never do most of the elite weeklies in regular play and only about half of the dailies would get done. I have all the nightmare mods and corrupted mods, so I'd likely not do nightmare missions anymore or touch derelict except to finish the star chart, farm mutagen samples or kavat DNA. I don't like index and spend credits almost as fast as I get them. I could see doing hydrolyst, profit taker, and exploiter orb, but only until the loot rewards are all duplicates. So, at that point I'd only be doing those bosses for Nightwave, unless I start selling arcanes (not really wanting to spend my game time loitering in Maroo's Bazaar). The issue is that there really isn't anything that isn't just working for nothing after a certain point outside of the Nightwave rewards unless you get into decorating your ship and clan dojo big time. Maybe have a credit to platinum exchange system, but at a really grindy rate so that only the people who don't have much money would do it, but at least would have some way to get the cash shop items eventually. I'd like to actually see more deluxe skins for the warframes in the game, especially for ones that don't really have any or have only one.
Back on the nightwave subject...why not have a overall pool of things you can do for a certain amount of nightwave standing with multiples of some acts (profit taker, etc.) equivalent to the total of all the things to do over the course of the series, including dailies? Have all the credit offerings for the series available at all times and no expiration on buying them or accruing that series of credits, only a total standing or credit cap. Then just leave the series active so people can do things when they want to. Next nightwave series have a separate pool of acts and credit offerings that don't expire? I think maybe the technical resource cost of keeping the series ongoing will be balanced by not having to manage all the dailies and weeklies. Just have a credit payout instead for each thing, like "do 3 sorties in a week" pays 7,000 standing and you can do that a max of maybe 3 times total. I hope people can understand what I'm driving at, and hopefully DE won't try to implement any variation of it that misses any of the positive aspects.
So, here's the bit that is missing. Nightwave isn't a rewards system, it's a means to force people to do old content with a bit of reward provided as incentive and pseudo-choice to compensate.
What do I mean? Well, before Nightwave was the Alert system. Random missions, random rewards, limited time, and a lack of participation when the rewards we something as goofy as a bonus 1000 salvage. The complaint from people was that if they weren't around when a good reward came up it might be weeks before it came around again. Case in point, the cosmetics for a new alternative helmet could come around a week after launch, then two weeks after, then a month later. If you weren't around you'd miss the new one, but be buried under alerts for stuff you already had. They also had Vauban parts, Nitain, and auras linked to this system so people could go long stretches without getting something good.
DE decided to fix this by copying the season pass model. You get the illusion of choice, at the expense of severely metered progress, and the developer can insert challenges based upon old content to force participation in old content. It's not a terrible idea if you've got a constant stream of rewards that do not give you power, and there's a define duration for the event so you can control expectations. What we got with NIghtwave was not that. Nightwave is an unknown, and often extended duration. Rewards are direct power because they lock auras, nitain, reactors, catalysts, and MR increasing items. Oh boy.
Knowing this, what's the goal. Well, you generate a random list of activities, allow the pool to be picked from weekly, and drive players to do content that otherwise wouldn't get done. If you allowed them to pick from a pool, there'd be nobody doing thing like gilding weapons, as the investment to reward is too low. On the other hand, if it's time limited you get people to do the content because they might lose out. I like the idea proposed, but it's fundamentally not what Nightwave is about. As such, best of luck petitioning for it. If after more than a year DE is still stubborn enough to not set a schedule, and extend an intermission for longer than the actual content, then I wish you luck in swaying them to this.
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2 hours ago, Nez-Kal said:
It's the Secondary Selling Force for "Battle-Pass" systems in games now-a-days, unfortunately. The "FOMO" effect, or "Fear of Missing Out".
By making a Time Limited Event with Rewards that can only be earned during "This Season", it makes it so that people who weren't interested in playing suddenly feel they NEED to play, or else sacrifice whatever stimuli that "Reward/Thing" would provide. (They don't know what Stimuli it will provide them, but it's better to Get and Have than to never Have at all)
DE swears they're not going for that effect though, and that the old rewards will in fact return someway, somehow. I know Intermission brought some back, but they're going for more of a "Play Now, Have Now. Don't Play Now, wait until maybe Later to Have" style of things.
........Still has the FOMO effect though, which causes Players to not only Play, but also Play Hard, Grind Hard, and Burnout Fast trying to get the Nightwave goods.I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. It is correct, but misses out on a lot of the detail.
DE had the alert system. This system allowed anyone to do a mission, and get a reward. The issues with this system were that many awarded credits and resources, their duration was low, and if the reward was a cosmetic you'd avoid it after getting one. They called this system outdated, but it functioned for most of the life of the game. It was great when things popped up, and when you didn't have 80+ cosmetics that were randomly being drawn from. It was bad near the end when you wanted a cosmetic, and then discovered an alert happened while you were sleeping or at work.
So, the system was not working as well. What did DE do? Did they learn from Guild Wars, and make events use a universal currency reward? No. They saw that the season pass system was working for some games, and decided to do that.
On paper, the season/nightwave thing is great. You have daily challenges to drive activity, weekly events to keep people active, and the rewards cycle weekly so you have plenty of time to earn them. The problem is what they decided to wall off. Catalysts and Reactors are needed for new weapons and frames/companions/archwings. Nitain is needed to build a lot of stuff. Aura mods are a miserable thing to so without. They walled off content behind the events, making it more difficult for starting players. They gave veterans the illusion of choice, and new players a massive inconvenience.
So, what should have been the play? Well, nightwave sucks for newbies and veterans. The former have to buy auras, the later already are flush with everything from 5 years of grind. The fix was not to remove alerts, but to alter them. Increase the duration to 2-3 hours, remove the ones spawning only credits and resources, and bundle disparate rewards. In an example, instead of an alert having one cosmetic blue print it would instead have the cosmetic, and 400 endo.
We also have to get into the seasonal reward. Other games have defined seasons to drive new content, and they focus on cosmetics as they are the easiest thing to pump out. What then is nightwave? Well, they've hidden power behind the grind so it can't be enjoyed and turned off. If you don't engage you've lost the access to items which newer players need. Likewise, it isn't engaging enough because you have no idea how long it will last. Intermission II was the better parts of a year, so if you kept up there'd be no way to earn more credits. DE dug themselves a hole that needed to be full of content, without the team to pump that content out. They prevented it from being something to engage with at leisure by gating power behind the wall. They then top it off by having no schedule so that you never feel like you're working towards something, you only feel like you're ticking off another week's worth of activities you may or may not appreciate.
So my criticism is that FOMO is a problem, and DE has no plan to address it. The current nightwave will let you buy a beacon to summon the wolf....who has crap drop chances for his weapon, and will eat away earned credits. They fixed this with the zealot on the derelict, but never fixed the Wolf. There's no end date, so you never feel like there's an actual goal you're moving towards. The rewards that are unique are cosmetics....and only visible so infrequently that they cannot really be used to demonstrate you did something. As such, the inclusion of the "rewards" is largely a spacer between how long it will take to get an umbral forma rather than how cool it was to get a new emote.
If I were to boil this down to a phrase: "Nightwave is bad because DE did what they always do; they took a system that worked in other games and implemented it without ever properly provisioning resources to make sure it worked, or even considered how it would be maintained in the long run."
Some people call that bold vision, but I call it reckless and foolish ambition unsupported by your resources and talents. Nightwave can be improved by closing it, going back to alerts, and putting the time into fixing them without trying to sell us on "player choice" as your motivation.
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15 hours ago, JackHargreav said:
It isn't a meta ability and you think It's garbage, pretty much.
But it has It's use and no other frame has an ability like this.
You want to use her turret way too much while She has a versatile kit.
You want a turret while she's not a turret frame. Turrets weren't the main point of her ever. De never advertised her as a turret frame either.
You are right and wrong. Technically, no other frame can rewind time, but what is the effect? You can refill health and energy, to whatever the point you cast at.
What does compete with this? Well, instead of pressing 4 you should press 5 on any frame. Bam, you've got the operator. Zenurik generates energy constantly with energizing dash. Multiple arcanes can heal you for a massive chunk of your heath. If you use the void blast you can effectively slow and stun enemies, allowing you to kill them outright.
What's the problem? Well, energy restoration is an over time effect. Yeah, Protea's pool is pretty small anyways. The health regeneration is effectively instant. No, it isn't. Measure rewind time against the healing of an arcane and it's pretty comparable in practice. Operator mode doesn't let you die and be revived. Fair, but you can pop into operator and die, and be revived in your warframe with a small penalty which goes away (and doesn't exist if you use a different arcane).
Let's then set aside ability 4, for just a second.
Ability 1 is functionally a slightly less horrible Torrid projectile, which could buff. It's Vauban's power remixed slightly to be less awesome than the Tesla Nervos.
Ability 2 is only good if specifically built for, because the duration is garbage. As people have discussed, the reason Team Fortress 2 got away with turrets was their relatively low durability and time investment. You didn't set it and forget, you used it as a choke point holder and had to supervise it. Somehow DE decided that instead of durability they wanted duration to limit the things, and they thus feel useless because they disappear so quickly. Supporters claim that specific builds address this, but the counter to that argument is that this kills build choices.
Ability 3 would have been great five years ago. Why that long? Well, there was a time when pizzas didn't exist, operator mode didn't exist, no weapons had infinite ammo, and the landing craft couldn't call in any support. Since then, we've gotten almost half a dozen ways to deal with resources being dropped (health, energy, and ammo). What is the purpose of this today? I'd argue that people can use it, and the power isn't bad. At the same time it's having the power to get resources, at the expense of a warframe ability. As someone who uses Zephyr I get one power being useless (use power 2 to buff power 4...ok, why not just make power 4 better?), but Zephyr is something that DE effectively doesn't give any concern to (still waiting on that Deluxe skin). Protea is new. How about before this frame gets shelved for whatever is new we can make sure it is worth taking out regularly. All of this ignores that you can use a Wisp, and get motes that do all of this better than Protea's dispenser.
Is one ability, the non-turret turrets, enough to make a frame viable? I don't think so. You've got a 1=Vauban, 2=Protea, 3=Wisp, 4=Operators/Pizzas/landing craft. I only see one thing there that isn't competing with what we already have, and doing a worse job of it. My only counter is that the kit is viable if you build for it...and that can be said of literally any frame. If Protea isn't at least doing something special without a specific build focus, then why use it? That's the sign of a warframe that needs a rework to not be forgotten about.
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I've seen plenty of feedback here, and a lot of people claiming that other people just don't know how to use Protea. Fine, my feedback is that after initial impressions the frame just doesn't have any consistency to the theme and application of skills. That lack of consistency means using the skills as they are now is a bad joke, and requires very specific conditions.
As an example, power 1 is either crowd control or a regenerative ability. Why? How does this relate to the time theme. It's pretty much taking Vauban's power, and instead of active attackers making Protea either a buffer or a point control frame. Power 2 reinforces that point control, but the non-turret turrets barely last long enough to shoot without specific builds. That's a strike against time manipulation, one for point control, and a strike against build diversity possibilities. Power 3 is a dispenser. Why? It's literally stealing the Team Fortress 2 logic, and effectively is miserable if it provides energy and you use her ultimate. Those energy orbs are erased if you pick them up before the rewind. Finally, the time rewind... I can think of nothing to say here. It's effectively operator mode, without the huge investment into arcanes.
So, what's the feedback? Protea is Vauban if there was less thematic cohesion. It's a frame that wants an area to control, but if you use the ultimate ability it can erase the benefits of the third ability.
Make the turrets from ability two spawn, and exist until the ammo is depleted, or until the maximum limit is reached based upon power duration. Have them do percentage damage to enemies, with a splash damage of that percentage so that they function as level scaling crowd control that can be counted upon. To balance this, give them them one health and 1 shield. This means they could take one hit with shield scaling, but must have some sort of CC to be effective. This makes them a turret that is limited by ammo, instances, and durability. That would balance them being a set-and-forget, which has been a problem you say is being focused on.
The dispensers are a joke. In practice they are trumped by consumables, the operator mode, and other features. Instead of this make them "temporal shears." A crowd control element that has immense aggro draw, and absorbs the fire it draws in. Instead of being a Nyx lite, the shear will explode after a time rewarding ammo, energy, and health based upon the damage it absorbed. This could synergize with the ultimate ability, to provide resources after time is rewound.
The ultimate getting an invincibility period is pretty backwards when for all other frames you've basically said casting times require natural talent to influence. Limbo is especially galling, when you consider cataclysm makes a squishy frame a target. It's a fine ability, but the issue is that you're going to apply a bandage to fix dying in long animation times. Why not just choose a much shorter animation?
I don't like Protea, I don't think she's bad. Protea is a thoroughly middle of the road build, with powers that seem intentionally nerfed and inconsistent to the frame. Hopefully in two years there'll be a rework making her less of a mess.
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Still downloading a hotfix. Haven't yet gotten to see everything, but positive! Let's go backwards from my usual and start with the issues.
1) Corpus ship design has largely become a maze. It isn't flowing better, it seems like something from Unreal Tournament 2004. It's difficult to see how the space ninjas will fly around these levels, and the clutter is making things less clear to work with. This was and is the same complaint I had with the Jupiter rework, and I don't understand why you went to the trouble of making things bigger but similar, then populated everything with details which hurt our ability to move around.
2) You need to have an open weapon slot to do a quest. You gave us a slot for Excalibur Umbra, the Broken Scepter, Skiajti (spelling guess there), and other required items for the game. You don't you do the same this time. Why?
Two complaints. Now it's time to shut my complaint hole.
- The new quest thus far has been fun. I'm looking forward to completion and seeing where things go.
- The new content seems decent. I bought 4 of everything (3 in stock, 1 to craft), and still had some SU standing left over. It's nice to not be time gated, beyond the 24 hour build timers associated with MOA components. Hopefully it's worth it.
- Improved MOA descriptions. Yay. The components doubling effect after gilding was...always a thing? It'd be nice to understand if you'd boosted us up, or if this was a quiet feature from before.
- Communication of the game mode. Yes. Thank you for actually doing this.
- Simaris getting the rest of the bps and umbral mods is nice. I have another few weeks of grinding now, but I'll gladly do so to get some extra potential from Umbra mods that aren't full. Now if only the formas themselves were available from here for around 75k standing. It might mean we'd have a reason to scan more often.
- Pets 1.5 ish. Stasis being removed, along with constant degrading, is nice. Hopefully this is the start to some additional pet options, but either way it's much appreciated.
I reserve final judgement, but this is actually turning out rather promising. Hopefully it's a turning point to making 2020 be a better year.
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So....yeah. More feedback on broken stuff.
- Railjack missions are not consistent, with regards to objectives. I specifically want to focus on Korm's Belt, which is supposed to be a galleon mission. Ran it about 10 times. Of the ten 5 were galleon, 3 pulse turbine, and 2 were hangar destructions. This would be acceptable for most areas, but if the purpose is to grind the captains for a chance at the Pennant and Quellor blue prints then each load-in is a gamble as to whether you've got a good chance or a 20+ minute solo grind where your objective is simply to rack-up resources.
- Railjack breaks after 1 mission. Fantastic, I've got three runs in a row....and upon going back to dry dock I have no clue what I've received. Hopefully I actually got it.
- Crafting on Railjack. If you craft after the mission end, the items don't exist upon returning to dry dock. I can't tell if the earlier supposition was stupid on my part (rounding error), or the system penalizes you for finishing a mission and preparing for the next with the much improved crafting costs. Whatever the case, if the mission ends don't waste time on crafting.
- Zaws. Tested two variants of pole-arm style weapons. Both would randomly start not working in missions. The slam worked. The stealth kill worked. I could not perform a regular or charge attack. This happened on longer (4+ minute) missions, entirely at random. Sometimes they fixed themselves, sometimes they never did. Whenever a new mission started everything was fine and dandy, but not being able to melee is pretty frustrating when trying to open crates.
- Drop rates. Yeah, fractional percentages on rare enemy types are a joke. Ballista Measure is...alright. The inclusion of archwing mods on the unique enemy types is good. My issue is that I've gotten 4 rare mods from the captains. I've gotten 1 Quellor blue print. The drop rates for Titania Prime Systems should be 10%, but after 20 radiant relics I got 1. I ran a Lua disruption last night and of 10 rewards got 4 G4 relics...in a row. It is statistically possible that these things are happening, but a string of 11%^4 = 0.0146%, a 12% likelihood of relic rarity failure, and dropping 4 rare mods instead of "common" blue prints is teetering on the unbelievable. The statistically unlikely enough to believe that the provided percentages are inaccurate. I know this is a claim based off of depressing results, and that's possible with RNG, but it's difficult to see this level of annoyance and know that 5% chances and needing 21 arcanes is going to make me hate Arbitrations more than I already find them tiring now, simply to earn the one or two that I might use.
I really wish I could give you more here. At the same time, I would like to offer some encouragement. It's nice you've publicly admitted Scarlet Spear was not ready. It's nice you're already making it clear the Duviri Paradox is not something for 2020. It's even nice you've suggested that the digital Tennocon won't promise the next big thing....two years from actually entering the game. The progress to this is likely painful, but it's worthy of respect from your community. Kudos on finally matching delivery more to your promises. This may not sound like a positive, but I'm happy to not have to ask what the next big promise is going to be, and just look forward to improvements and smaller events. A smaller scope, hopefully, will allow you to focus on what can be delivered on effectively.
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So, immediate feedback....the update is quite good.
I've got a 100-90 reactor. I managed to slot in everything except for one slot. I've not gotten everything slotted in, but what I have does offer some build diversity and enough capacity to be interesting. Kudos on the cost reductions, even if it means I had to spend half an hour re-upgrading everything in my inventory.
Valence transfers are actually pretty good. I had a bunch of 56% or better Zetki stuff, waiting around because building a 56% and then getting a 58% was a gigantic insult. Now I can simply upgrade everything to its best version, and scrap everything else. I'd like to make note of this as a good, but also note that trading wreckage is still something which needs implementation.
Mission pacing....is better. The highlight is that ships blow up, rather than spin off. It's much easier to grab the resources. It's also much more resource heavy, so it's not going to be a hundred missions to get enough resources to build anything. Fantastic. I hesitate and only say better because the rewards are....interesting. 4 breach quanta in a single mission on Earth was a bit much. Coupling that with the new avionics....and I just don't think you've yet understood what it is driving this game mode. Being fair, I can't either when one minute it's wreckage and the next is ultra rare drops with bizarro house alignments.
Finally, bringing up the rear is enemy and weapons scaling. 100% improvement. The fighters are less annoying, the ground enemies can no longer tank multiple fully charged 100%+ critical hit blasts with 3+ beam instances to the face and keep coming. I know some people were less than happy that this would "remove challenge," but it removed a gear check and cheap sponge enemies. Consider me happy that you've done this, even if the resultant changes seem to have made early levels easier but kept some of the annoying sponge at the higher stages.
Again, good update overall. Not without its flaws, but solid and actually responsive to the test server issues (despite the limited player count and time). If this was Railjack in January I'd suggest that Scarlet Spear would have been less of a mixed experience. Kudos for finally getting to a state where I can see past the flaws and identify the potential.
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Maybe I missed a step here. Let's explain the basic assumptions.
1) HP still works as it did before. The equation to determine what it is per level changed. DE stated this, but never really provided and equation.
2) Armor still works as before. DE never stated this was going to change.
3) EHP calculation functionally has therefore not changed.
4) The quoted s-curves for the new values of these things are accurate, and are the actual current systems after the update.
What has changed is how much armor and HP are added by level. DE stated that they'd be using an s-curve (around the 23 minute mark in Dev stream 139). This armor value will impact the growth of EHP, but without the equation to describe HP we're largely out of luck.
What about the other factions? Well, the corpus have shields which functionally now act as an addition to HP, and the infested are purely HP. Fine. I don't really care, because it's the Grineer who offer the best current rewards for playing. Yes, that's largely because the affinity gains from them are larger than any other faction when you compare a random blend of enemies at roughly the same count and levels. The easiest proof of such is running Adaro, and comparing affinity gains.
What has been returned to this inquiry? A graph supposedly showing HP, presumably as a deconstruction of tested HP values. I'm suggesting this because it looks remarkably similar to what I saw on Reddit doing the same with level 9999 versus 100 enemies. Should I assume that in a thread about HP, Armor, Shields, and by extension EHP. No, I would be stupid for assuming this without data showing what it actually is.
So, let's be real. I'm going to assume the HP graph is fine. I'm going to assume that the armor damage reduction is accurate, because DE hasn't said it was changing. Despite these assumptions, I don't have EHP calcuable because I still don't know where that S curve is responsive and where the two plateaus are. DE has not released this information, and only showed us a blended armor value during a stream. A blended value they can still mess with, that literally leaves us with nothing but questions.
Why is this a priority? Well, Railjack again. The enemies there get to the 80-90 range, and they've already demonstrated the ability to tank a critical hit from an Opticor Vandal to the face multiple times before going down. What does this tell us? Very little. My point is that what we have to work with is pretty useless from what has been provided. Even the graphs created, with the eventual understanding of what is being shown, give us nothing to work with. If the HP equation is an S-curve the interesting bit is where the response is highest, not where DE has deadened the response. That's kind of the point of the S-curve, have a region of high response and the ends have very little response.
With all of the above, DE should release an EHP curve and confirm the equations for HP, Armor, and Shields. If everything was an s-curve as stated, it would literally allow us to pinpoint where the difficulty walls are and how to control the grind. Imagine for a moment knowing that you should only go to level 49 enemies, because thereafter each level's response made the enemies disproportionately stronger. Of course, it'd also give us the chance to check what is actually in-game. That would mean changes could be found very quickly, if they're stealth changing things to balance. I hope DE trusts us enough to be open, hence my issues with someone pulling a graph with no source and no axis data.
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4 hours ago, SadOverlord said:
The new armor equation multiplier, that is followed after level base level+80, is y=1+(0.45*(x - base level)^0.7), where x=current level. This graph is basically what was shown in the DevStream, the values in there are quite clear. The function is basically shown, if you look at the excel graph you can see the coefficient and the exponent. After getting the multiplier you need to multiply what you get with the base armor value.
So, for example, a CHG at base level has 500 armor, which means 62.5% damage reduction, or 2.6667x multiplier over health(500/800). At level 108 (100 levels after the base level), it has 12.303 times the base armor value, which results into a value of 500*12.303=6151.5 . The damage reduction in this case is 0.9535%. Which results into a 21.5x multiplier over HP. This is why Slash/Viral, Corrosive and Heat were and will be always meta unless Armor becomes a flat value. If they can deal with Grineer (by ignoring partially or completely the inflated armor value), they can pretty much deal with the other factions. And the game will never be somewhat close to being balanced.
Much obliged.
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35 minutes ago, GKP_light said:
"Graphic of by how much the HP are multiply, depending of the level."
So horizontally, the level ; and vertically, how much the base HP are multiply.
The scale is write on the axis.
(and they don't come from the devstream)
for a Infested, HP=EHP
for the Corpus, you have to add the shield. (except if you use Toxin)
for the Greener, you multiply by the armor.
OK, let me ask you some further questions.
Is 600 the multiple, or is the multiple 6? You see, a scale of 0-600 could be a difference of 0 versus 60,000 if the scale is stated as thousands. Likewise the two graphs are what? Is the left the scale and the right sample values? If it is, then the HP is a functional constant as graphed (as it is impossible to tell from the scale). If it's a graph of HP added for the levels, then we have a very different story.
Without axis labels your graph is useless. That's a trick to make people think you understand things, and you could hide a lot of information with some clever labels. I'm not suggesting that you are intentionally, but clarity in communicating data is not present at this time.
I'm going to refer back to my previous statement regarding all of this. EHP is the only value that matters. DE demonstrated that an HP or Armor buff can easily be obliterated by the other stat being changed. Just showing us health is not useful.
Regarding all of this, the armor function equations are quite clear, and DE has not said this would change. Despite this, I've seen no clear equation they are using for the new armor levels, which depending upon its range of highest variability may mean our average enemies do take a lot more damage even if the level 100+ don't feel like sponges any more.
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The succinct feedback is that you have a power function for the required intrinsics, and each reward level is roughly a linear improvement or basic feature that was cut out of the game to pad grind time. All current intrinsics functionally cap usefulness at level 8, with the last two having such a huge grind that they aren't worth the effort. As such, the system as a whole feels bad and really highlights why the railjack was scattered in pieces.
The slightly longer explanation is that you didn't seem to put effort into this game mode's progression, only its end state. It seems like you started with a full feature set, carved out everything that was quality of life, and then padded the remaining levels with efficiency increases to make 40 total rewards with a grind that completely disregards how play is completed.
Namely, the act of extermination is inherently not rewarding when enemies simply rush you and there's no skill. See enemy, shoot, alert all enemies, divide priorities between shooting and repairing because enemies are too numerous to avoid damage. Once you get lucky, use 1-3 powers constantly to avoid damage and pray for good drops on items. Continue to mindlessly grind for minor buffs, knowing that because each level costs double the previous you effectively have to take all bonuses rather than focus on one skill tree just to be a viable player in missions.
The fix here is non-trivial effort and something that isn't straight out of 8th grade mathematics. Instead of a power function break everything into categories, with levels. Throw out the generic names, and use them as background decoration for something like the skill trees already in the focus system. Each individual item has a bubble, and multiple levels within the bubble are possible to progress. If you want to keep the power functions have them here. The farther the bubble is from the core the higher the base cost, and the more you have to unlock at least one level in. The idea here being base functions at low costs (1-3-6), efficiency boosts being at moderate costs (4-6-9), and the advanced items of game changers (archwing) being at higher costs (9-11-14). The total amount of grind is going to be much lower than before, but you can actively sub-divide things to create extra levels.
Imagine the unlock for the engineer area being munitions (archwing cannon, hot-load, and forward artillery), and leading to three different middle tier items (archwing driver range, munitions creation efficiency, and artillery charge time decreases). The final 4 upgrade segments are Flux Crafting (assuming that costs are decreased, this make flux non-renewable in mission and thus more important to manage rather than power spamming), Archwing Speed, Archwing Armor, and Archwing power efficiency. You get 1-3-6 (10), 3*(4-6-9) (57), and 4*(9-11-14) (136) for a total of 203 intrinsics required. The total then would be 812 required now and 1015 required eventually.
The resulting decrease in grind can be further mitigated. Each avionic slot has a grid improvement, and an efficiency score. The intrinsics can be spent upgrading each slot, offering a 10-20-30% decrease in avionics cost for 10-20-40 intrinsics each. That's 70 intrinsics for 15 positions, or 1050 additional intrinsics. This now offers the player a balance while leveling, and forces them to measure the skills versus straight upgrades to the Railjack. If you go as a group your primary Railjack operator might not have a lot unlocked, but their equipment being top notch allows them to contribute.
What's the goal? Make intrinsics to unlock powers cheaper. Make less required. Make them useful without requiring 512, because that grind is just silly. Offer more player choice, because some of the skills are garbage for play styles but required to get so you can get something better. On top of all of this, make players in control of unlocking skills instead of arbitrary gates which penalize and only allow certain types of play. Basically, allow people to be the forge master who can still act as emergency pilot rather than everyone having to get the basics before they can do anything fun. This is what you sold us with the whole "teamwork required" bit. It'd be great if I didn't have to get a camera that isn't usable in combat before I could start focusing on how efficient my flux is, especially when you balance flux against mod capacity which is dependent on flux to work. That's just some next level circular logic.
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10 hours ago, GKP_light said:
Graphic of by how much the HP are multiply, depending of the level.
In bleu, the old scaling ; in orange, the new scaling.
You seem to have screen grabbed the devstream graphs. The issue is that this means nothing.
Questions that need to be answered:
What are the scales?
What are the axis labels?
How does this influence a useful statistic? More specifically Effective Hit Points or EHP is what we experience in-game, not the HP.
I've got to admit that there seems to be some serious residual issues with the damage system. There now have been several enemies that I hit with the Kuva Nukor who just decided that they'd take no damage at all. Yes, it isn't a strong weapon, but the enemies were level 50 eximus units If the damage scaling, by armor and HP, is yielding enemies who are less broken I don't understand how this is possible unless there's some goofy math with beam weapons. They definitely still died with an Opticor blast to the face.
Come to think of it, the Nukor versus a nullifier is also pretty wonky. It seems to never pop their bubbles, but it can bring them all the way to the lowest possible radius.
Moreover, the stats above don't show play. They pumped out a graph of HP and armor, but haven't adequately shown the new frustration of enemies taking AoE as a joke and weapons capable of previously one shotting them and their friends now taking 2-3 shots because their gating seems to work more consistently than ours for anything but the across the room one shot enemies (looking at you bombards).
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5 hours ago, rstripn said:
I'm not arguing "rights" in a "free country" here, I'm just talking about being civil and respectful.
Calling changes "stupid" may not be an insult to DE but it's also not particularly useful feedback. Very small and recent examples of targeted insults are "evil" and "uncaring".
Everybody should help others feel comfortable when discussing opinions. You don't have to try to make the other person feel better but you should try to not make the other person feel worse. Separate the person and their argument.
P.S. Unless I spectacularly disagree with something I will not be commenting further on this aspect of providing feedback.
If you think making others upset is a legitimate tactic in discussion then I think you're a bad influence and should go away.
If you're mindful of how how you make others feel then I agree your posts are meaningful even if I disagree with your execution.
You missed the entire point. Offense is something you can assign to anything, and there's no reason that we should decide to disregard that which offends. Sometimes, it actually makes us better. Sometimes, it lets us see what we cannot because our perspective is different.
For a moment, join someone who deals with quality all of the time. They have to listen to internal personnel, who believe that there is never a problem. They then have to take a lot of thing from customers, who immediately know that a thing is bad simply by using it, and sometimes don't have the ability to express why it is bad. They can express that it feels like these changes are spiteful, that the changes are brought about as insulting to players, and that there is evil when a game radically shifts with a directly negative impact.
To whit, I'm demonstrating that I respect your thoughts but believe they are wrong. I'm calling the changes stupid. I'm calling DE out as either not doing the math (lazy) or not respecting the investment of time players put in (insulting). I use this after a wall of text, which people don't read. Moreover, DE seems to not read text walls, preferring what used to be a 140 character limit.
Why do I believe this? Well, when people complained about the Hema the response was that it was not going to be changed. The further justification was that DE wants to respect the time people spent grinding it. OK, I'll give them a pass. Likewise, the grind for Mesa was terrible for literal years because it was all about respect, until a minor patch note decreased the cost per beacon from 3 coordinates to 1. A minor patch note. What about the cost of a Railjack? Well, that was justified initially as a thing only veterans should have. Three months later it was a bad idea, they're refunding the resources, and nobody wants to go back and review.
My point is that this is not new, and arcanes are not the first time. Yeah, if you've got the arcanes most of them are either about as good or better. The issue is that if you don't have them the grind is now insane for something that is power. DE has consistently stated that power would not be hidden behind a pay wall, yet these arcanes are very much. They also have the RNG associated with the Arbitration systems, which I haven't even touched on.
If I did this to somebody else it would be called evil pretty reasonably. It would be called gouging, insulting, and horrible. If you disagree, I'd like to point you in the direction of the CEO who decided to increase the cost of drugs because they were required to continue living, but not profitable enough in their eyes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli). As a side note, they rolled back the gouging because it was terrible, but still wound up charging more. It's really hard to not see a parallel with the arcane situation, where new players literally cannot be brought into the game because there's a fundamental power gap that they'll hit and immediately discover is a reason not to play.
So as stated, I'm not calling DE anything terrible, but seeing why some people do is not hard. It's also hard to say that we need to to make sure not to hurt their feeling, because the last time we tried that route it took years, and we still don't have a universal vacuum in the game. If you want examples let's peruse the market in-game. DE is selling a bundle to remove RNG from the Lich system. They're selling bundles to remove the grind wall in Railjack. The only thing they aren't selling is the arcanes, but they'll gladly allow you to buy platinum and trade with somebody else. None of the purchase options are unreasonable, but that's largely because it's a few hours of grind. The arcanes have such low drop rates that it goes from a few hours to literal months.
The funny bit here is that you want everyone to offer their opinion in a kind way. I would have agreed with you, but there's too much history here to ignore. Our in-game chat moderation is now better because of a situation where people said things, it was taken as direct offense, and only once it was understood as a huge problem did anything get done. Maybe it's not kind to be so angry, but there's a consistency to the response that anyone raising an issue is in the minority of players and a toxic hater. If anyone who doesn't agree with you is a hater, then everything but praise is an insult.
Arcanes are a problem that DE is "fixing" and making worse. They tell us this is better, show us token math, and then it isn't. If you want an example the change to railjack armor was a decrease, with a nearly silent HP increase, that if you did the math was an EHP increase. Their fix for sponge enemies was to make them spongier. Their fix for arcanes being too strong is to make only those that have them already get access to the best ones, and the means of acquiring them is now now a much longer grind. Despite 40+ pages of feedback, another 20+ on a part 2, and the 10 here the feedback is largely something that doesn't seem to be heeded. The response back is "there are some minor number tweaks to still do." Yeah, not evil but maybe so tone-deaf that it makes DE seem more like Bethesda than the DE who I supported years ago by buying prime packs. Somehow "I'm disappointed" doesn't seem like enough after seeing the fixes we suggested implemented months or years later, and taken as a win despite immediate feedback things were wrong. They keep telling us that "you can do better" is always accepted, but when we say this it's just hate.
I'm spending all of this time to write because I can see your point, but believe it to be fundamentally wrong entirely based upon DE's history. Constructive feedback is great. The issue is that you need to have the blind praise balanced against the blind anger. If you tell people that are angry to stop it, then you're killing players who love the game but want it good. Once you bury too many of them you'll bury the game too. It's pretty much an Overwatch situation, where a lot of people have left the game after bad patches. The issue is Blizzard never listened, kept pushing their agenda rather than listening, and despite the chorus of people who still praise them the participation is looking pretty grim. It's almost like comparing this forum to the poll Steve performed at the end of 2019 using the subset of players who love it, who also happen to be non-representative given that his polled population had to leave the game, find his twitter, follow it actively, and only then could they answer his questions.
It's almost like asking a fat kid if they like chocolate ice cream. Yeah, we do. That doesn't mean that everyone on the planet likes chocolate ice cream, it means your sampling population is biased and to get a better understanding you need to also poll the skinny kid who is lactose intolerant. You also need to consider that once polled, you're going to get people who don't know why they believe something, but the data that they are on whatever side they take matters.
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9 hours ago, Grey_Fenn said:
The buff icons for Energize and Guardian appear to be the same. I can't tell if Guardian is active or if Energize is on cooldown...
All arcanes have the same icon. The only way to see which hit is to wait until the name scrolls and you can read which one.
Heart of Deimos: TennoGen: 29.3.2
in PC Update Notes
Posted
Let's entertain this idea, and try to understand how it might work. Please note, this is not criticism of the idea. I want to understand a perspective and believe talking it out might help me, and hopefully others, to get the ideas straight.
Now, step one is to determine how the kit interacts in itself. This is....frustrating. DE has one power directly buffing another, and it's not a trivial buff. 100% increased size means that even a small stationary tornado could theoretically be buffed into a screen destroying mess. This is somewhat the problem we see with a Vauban using a very light energy color, because a lime green bastille should really come with an epilepsy warning and a welding helmet to prevent blindness. So...I think we really have to separate the interaction of air burst from this, or your default tornado is going to be an issue.
Our next step is to look at what it does, and ponder why. Let's peel this onion. Tap will be a stationary large, with presumably a lot of local CC. Hold will be a quadruple dose of slow meandering messes that are mobile. Presumably hold+augment will produce an octuplet of fast tornados completely without CC. This mean Zephyr basically gets to have all of the potential iterations of this ability....and none of them have yet proven to be effective. How so? Well, the big tornado is Bastille....which Vauban does better with the Bastille/Vortex ability (AND HAS INNATE ARMOR STRIP). The quadruple tornados are too slow and stupid to be consistently effective. The augment is great...if you can consolidate enemies and use the tornados as status spreaders.
So....Vauban does the big tornado better. Khora and Nidus both do the enemy consolidation better. The Kuva Nukor does status spreading much more consistently. By my count then, there's no usage case where this shiny new iteration is not paling in comparison to other pre-existing content. If it's not better, then the only justification is that this is to simply add more, and hopefully use it to sell something instead of putting forward the huge effort to actually fix this.
Now, I'm Buzz Killington, right? There's a usage case where you could theoretically suspend enemies, chain status, and thereby result in massive CC and huge damage numbers. Well, theoretically. Just like the tornado augment could theoretically obliterate level 170 enemies nearly instantly with huge status stacks. In reality such a build would have to forego any balance....and Zephyr is a frame that desperately needs survival tools at any level it is conceivable for this to be reasonable.
Let me elaborate. If you're dealing with mooks then it'll be faster the do a single melee attack, rather than a chain build to insane status. If the mooks get to be durable, then the problem becomes the inability to use close quarter combat. Remember, Zephyr is a frame with very low armor despite the huge health and shield pools....and the casting animation for turbulence is longer than the rolling guard invincibility...and even with a decaying key you'll never get a second chance to shield gate....and finally, building for the power strength to make tornados dangerous hurts either range (thereby reducing how good turbulence is), efficiency (300 base energy for 4 large tornados is very high), or duration (hammering turbulence and tornado).
Note that I'm not a fan of Vauban....but it's not like he isn't king of direct and predictable CC. Octavia's Resonator can CC enemies into a murder conga line. Nidus and Khora agglomerate enemies better. The proposed tornado doesn't rival any of these....and most frustratingly it's not better than the sum of its parts because each "extra" power added changes its usage case instead of making it better.
What I fear is a never ending vacuum problem. The last Zephyr change was for the Prime. Before that was the change from Tornado rag doll to damage transfer. If they slap on this new coat of paint it'll be years before we see any new attempt to fix her, and it's not like there's a huge amount of masochists, ahem, Zephyr mains out the screaming for a good rework.
Maybe DE has it right. Making the range greater will prevent enemies from just ignoring the tornados. That said, I don't see this as competing. It's a side-grade with some niche potential just like the Opticor Vandal. Yeah...I'm an idiot. I loved Zephyr, and I loved the Opticor. It's basically the only Vandal whose variant actively spits on the original and doesn't really deserve to be a "better" variant. This said, I don't think they care. If Zephyr moved merchandise like Excalibur this might be a different story.