Why Defection shouldn't be a lame mission type.

[owen5ray]

Everybody hates Defection, it's kind of a fact of Warframe that nobody really, really enjoys it. It takes too long for the defectors to get to the ship, the mechanics of the life support and spawn points feel tedious at best and half-baked at worst. And that's a shame, because I feel like Defection could be one of the more fun modes if some really basic changes were put in place.

First off, enemy spawns feel far too low. I don't want to run escort missions because they're boring. It doesn't feel like I'm breaking them out of a hostile area when I play defection, it feels like a walk in the park. Send some infested at me, show me Plague Star levels of swarm, up the spawn rate to the point that if I'm not utilizing the game's CC mechanics, I'll just get overwhelmed. That would be fun, that would be exciting, and it might even be a decent way to rank weapons or frames. Think Left 4 Dead 2 swarm mechanics.

But fixing the lack of enemies is only part of the issue. The down time between escorts feels too long, and with a higher spawn rate on such large maps, it would feel like a slog just to rendezvous with the next squad you need to escort. Halve the size of the maps that get generated for Defection missions, speed up the gameplay by eliminating unnecessary, uneventful bullet jumps back and forth across the map. I'm not a programmer, I don't know what goes into the map generation algorithms, but I can't imagine what I'm asking would be insanely difficult to implement. 

As for the life support mechanics, give me a reason to actually monitor that. Right now I can ignore it completely just by playing Trinity, it's a completely irrelevant component to the whole mission type. I'm not suggesting that the ability to heal the Kavor should be taken away either. Make those capsules useful, give them an aura effect that slows the infested while it's powered up so that you have a chance to breathe before pushing through another horde. This gamemode has potential, it's just entirely untapped right now, and it doesn't seem like it would take an immense amount of work to make it fun to play. 

There should be modes that showcase enemy factions in a way that goes along with the narrative. Plague Star, when I wasn't mindlessly traversing large stretches of the map- was fantastic at that. The infested felt like a swarm that was meant to just overwhelm you, all led by these grotesque monsters. Put more of that into the game. There are a lot of changes that can be made to improve the feel of this game without radically modifying the core of what's already here, or adding extremely high production value setpieces for us to play through once or twice and then be done with. As much as I love the cinematic quests and honestly all of the work that's done on this game, I feel like the smaller changes could add up and polish what's already here. Warframe is a team game, and if all of the mechanics in Defection were deepened just a little bit, it would allow for much deeper team play.

 

TL/DR: Crank up the spawn rate, shrink the maps, and give me a reason to care about life support. I want to like this game-mode.

Edited October 2, 2018 by owen5ray
Added a TL/DR

[Dabnician]

You could play with PUGs, defection missions in those situations are pretty challenging

[owen5ray]

 

2 minutes ago, Dabnician said:

You could play with PUGs, defection missions in those situations are pretty challenging

It's not really about the challenge of the mission though, it's just that Defection as a whole feels lackluster and honestly not that fun. Just wanted to throw my feedback out there because this mode could easily be one of the most dynamic in the game, one that'd actually require some strategy at higher levels. Right now it takes pretty much no effort to play, just takes a lot of time.

[(PSN)Second_Phase]

Also i wish they made the guys run way faster. Im not talking about stims. It should just be there, you know, like they are running for their lives.

[Alaeacus]

Yeah.  Defection missions are a pain.  Not looking forward to farming that one frame that is gated behind Defection RNG.  I just reached the MR20s so I will be scrounging for MR soon...

[BiancaRoughfin]

51 minutes ago, owen5ray said:

Everybody hates Defection, it's kind of a fact of Warframe that nobody really, really enjoys it.

And who are you to speak for everybody? I like Defection and i know a significant amount of players that like it too. Of course, its better played with friends and a well formed team.

[W3zeer]

I don't know if plaguestar is a good example of how the mission should be. I mean with being swarmed that much you'd just be forced to aoe even harder than now, meaning only melee and abilities are viable as reload times on guns make them pretty useless. Personally I feel that so many adds are just there to cover up the fact that the boss has no exciting and engaging mechanics to begin with (backed up by the fact that the boss is indeed a Lephantis-clone and nothing more) and pretty much every boss in warframe uses those add-armies already without being a challenge. More enemies or higher levels are no solution in a game that allows you to disable or kill an infinite amount of enemies by pressing a single button or two. When they respawn as fast as I can get rid of them it gets annoying very quickly too because then we're in the cc-only territory that the old raids were.

[Teridax68]

There are probably things that could be done to make Defection feel less awful to play, but I think the mission type is also fundamentally not conducive to fun, by dint of being an escort mission. Even if the poor AI, slow speed, inconsistent collisions, bugs, and so on were all fixed, Defection would remain an escort mission. These get a lot of hate, and justifiably so, because the crux of them is that they mostly pit the game against itself: any escort mission relies on taking an NPC, handled by the game, through a hazardous environment, also handled by the game, and it's up to the player to protect that portion of the game against another portion of the game via whichever means. This would be fine if, say, the thing to escort were this inanimate object on an on-rails path, which is essentially what Hijack is right now (and that's not considered a particularly interesting mission type either), but the fact that the thing to escort is AI-controlled, usually made human-like, means that even if that NPC is technically perfect, and runs into no bugs during their run, they're still going to get blamed for any difficulty in the mission, precisely because the player cannot directly control them. If an NPC dies, or even takes damage, it'll almost never be interpreted as the player's fault, it'll be pinned squarely on the NPC for, say, not fighting back, not moving fast enough, not dodging, etc. Because of this, I think Defection needs to be changed: instead of having the players escort Kavor to a point, it should be about players locating Kavor trapped inside a derelict Grineer galleon, turning the mode into an object hunt, rather than an escort mission.

[LupoDWolf]

On 2018-10-02 at 9:03 PM, W3zeer said:

I don't know if plaguestar is a good example of how the mission should be. I mean with being swarmed that much you'd just be forced to aoe even harder than now, meaning only melee and abilities are viable as reload times on guns make them pretty useless. Personally I feel that so many adds are just there to cover up the fact that the boss has no exciting and engaging mechanics to begin with (backed up by the fact that the boss is indeed a Lephantis-clone and nothing more) and pretty much every boss in warframe uses those add-armies already without being a challenge. More enemies or higher levels are no solution in a game that allows you to disable or kill an infinite amount of enemies by pressing a single button or two. When they respawn as fast as I can get rid of them it gets annoying very quickly too because then we're in the cc-only territory that the old raids were.

phantasm sent regards : v 
but yeah, the kiling is fun only when you just want to wacky things, but the  lephantis isn't. If it at least had some eidolon abilities, mutated from the plains would be intresthing