Hard / Easy mode + Intelligent Gameplay Suggestions (current game is easier than casual. Please increase enemy accuracy).

[L4D3M]

Here's some more half entertaining off-the-walls commentary from myself.

Post script: I know game balance, coding and adjusting difficulty in games can
be extremely difficult, but by some very strange chance,
everyone seems to have missed the error that's experienced
in most of this game (99%).

Some might find some humor in the inclusion of a difficulty option,
and you might or might not take it more seriously in a second.
I'm going to suggest this, and atleast the re-insertion of
the old system.

From what I remember, playing on my own or as game host and soaking up enemy
shots long ago, they would swarm as a moving maze, putting pressure on me
to think fast and dart between cover to expose myself to as few
guards as possible so I risk the least damage, even aiming myself via movement and lining
up two guards so the one behind the one I'm meleeing doesn't hit me.

Challenges are important. They create memories, especially
when working in teams with friends. If you play a video game,
it's to have your abilities tested, and feel accomplished
for succeeding with them, especially if the reward was
adequate for your limits being pushed, or for memorizing
or learning new things, even if those things were just
previous things that were procedurally re-arranged
to create emergent variation on approach. To me, just being
challenged in such a visually stunning game
is rewarding enough.
Now here's wherein lies our critical problem.

THERE IS NO CHALLENGE. The challenge has been completely erased. This is baby mode.
Nobody wants to fall asleep at a keyboard just rolling their face on the keys.
Veterans brag about the early game's difficulty, but it just isn't there anymore at all.
Try it for yourself. All you have to do is stand right in front of an enemy and / or
jump up and down, and they'll never hit you. No new players are taking damage.
Nobody wants a participation award. Any enemy who holds a gun (almost all of them)
can't hit anything.
Going solo either isn't a challenge, or it's a bare minimum one
that favors specialized enemies as being the only threatening ones
instead of swarms that smartly try to out-maneuver you in terms of
positioning (because they have lots of guns instead of parkour
agility).

As a post edit to this, another idea that came to me was
you could try and fuse the current gameplay with the older system that had
stamina and more deliberate, tactical play. During a mission, a random
toggle could trigger between cutting through the map freely
and slower tactical sections that make that break to near-invincibility worth it.
Players could also get a warning before it switches modes, so they can prepare for it.
Yes, I'm aware that everything stamina related was cut out of the game.

So, I am half embarrassed by my last few posts,
and I feel partially responsible for the cutting
down of this game's features. The reason why I suggested
enemies lose accuracy when the player moves is to provide
another timing mechanic, and another reason to reward creativity.
Having it completely replace the thoughtful cover tactics and make the
whole game way easier than it was wasn't my intention.
Also, by reward creativity I essentially mean make you remember
your previous actions and try not to repeat any of them twice or too soon.
Anticipating and jumping over a sniper's shot the first time is
pretty fun, but to have it work repeatedly and by jumping in the same
straight-up direction removes the sniper's appearance of a thinking
agent, and the challenge along with it, and it's better to give them no aim
penalty at all than to have it be overused. I seriously tried this -
all you have to do is jump in one place repeatedly, and snipers
(and all enemies with guns) will completely miss you.

I also can't entirely tell if it's just that I've stuck with the overpowered
gear I like the most, or if the game has fundamentally changed,
but it seems to me like people are now just playing this as more
of a racing game where you round the nearest corners to exit
rather than engaging in the exciting, fast tactical combat
that made up earlier Warframe. I haven't played
as often recently, so I'm just going by what I can
assume of the gameplay based on what little I've seen
of its current state.

What if enemies adapted to your dodge moves and parkour moves,
forcing you to be creative and use different ones if you wanted
to keep the their accuracy low? You could even have variables for
what just a crowd has learned and what the 2 strongest enemy types in the
area have seen and learned if it's too performance costing to make every enemy
memorize and adapt to every player's recently used offensive
and defensive moves. Blocking melee weapons could have more use too,
healing and / or giving you a limited offensive buff (counter-attacks.
I forget if this game already has those.) that's bigger the better
you time your block, and could surpass an enemy's block, or shield.
Maybe running or jumping away from
the direction an enemy aims has the chance to lower their accuracy
for a second (since this game is PVE, the more you make some things
chance based while leaving in static worst case scenario strategies
to pad and increase the learning curve, the more exciting it could get).
I'd be fine if enemies even had small or no accuracy penalties during
player movement. Darting for cover and planning safer routes behind it
was a big enough mental task itself to provide a challenge.

I'm directing a lot of this at the community.
There's a tactical side to every video game, fast paced ones,
even fighting games, and especially good shooters and hack n' slash games.
I'd rather see Warframe as the somewhat tactical actiony combat
game it started out as, and not as a racing game with a few
afterthought combat mechanics thrown to the side
(when they're clearly the forethought and foundation of the game).
I'd rather play a game than watch a movie with game mechanics,
and I'd rather play Warframe than 10 Second Ninja with better graphics,
because the maps in Warframe just don't last long enough for that to work,
and they're completely designed for playing Warframe in.
There's all this fancy cover strewn about for a reason.

Stamina made you more considerate over whether you use your speed
and acrobatics for area traversal or saved it for combat, melee,
blocking enemy melee and bullets and darting for cover or far or near platforms
that increased the distance non-parkouring enemies needed to reach you.
It gave this game faster and more stylish dark-souls tactics, while
also having cover and shooter tactics at the same time as almost being almost
similar to Prince of Persia or Mirror's Edge in terms of combat and parkour mixed gameplay.

Bullet-Jumping currently seems to make all other parkour useless. It's all anyone
uses. A harder difficulty mode could replace it with and / or also include the timed
sprint-slide long jump that required enough runway for take-off, and limit
your number of bullet-jumps (if we keep those) at a time, or just make it cost
all of your stamina. We also currently have these cool backflip and cartwheel animations
while aiming or blocking and dodging in a direction. I'm not sure what individual
uses those have. Maybe each time you dodge differently, you could get a small
damage buff and few seconds of enemy inaccuracy while shooting back.
(P.S. -I've also noticed that all wall-running has been replaced by awkwardly
hopping along the side of it to try and make it more flexible. Woah.
I personally prefer the previous kind that ran up or along the side
where you looked for moments that made that useful.)

Shoot-dodging bullet-time seems infinite? Limiting that so it's used
occasionally will make that feature more fun and challenging to use.
It gets old if it can just be used all the time, being another cheap
way to avoid playing the game.

Some extra feature suggestions is enemy accuracy slightly decreasing
the longer you're out-of-line-of-sight or behind cover, the more distance you've
gained from the last few positions they engaged you at (make use of the whole map to
increase your chances and don't keep dodging around the same spot for a whole minute),
and if you've taken a route that lets you sneak up behind them
(with maybe a chance they know that route and catch you trying to get the drop).
A similar effect to these was simply enemies advancing on your position to eventually
try and overwhelm you, but this might add an extra layer.

I'd love to see more suggestions from people who
know what kind of game this was supposed to be.
I can't play anymore because I've got all the specific
items I want. If I went to level new gear,
I'd end up trying to engage in a more interesting,
heated and deliberate hybrid of tactical and stylish
combat with wall-running, that might make me traverse the
entire map a bit slower, but fast enough through its details
to keep things exciting, see more of it, and see it as more chaotic
and interesting, while other players who are playing
a more casual game would zoom ahead to the exit
before I do and wait for me because the cool and
intense game that had players contemplating and tactically
assessing the area and communicating when they'll
pop their 4 I once played just isn't in the code anymore,
and it's been replaced by a walk in the park
accompanied by a quick and slightly visually hypnotic
scroll through a zoomquilt image, and players
who don't want to play the actual game, and take pride in that.
This wouldn't be bad if just a few segments were like
this and it weren't the whole game.

I don't care for just cosmetics. To me, they're nothing
without heart-pumping, brain bending gameplay at the
end of the day. I think other players might want it easier so
they could progress faster in the free-to-play
model. Since having difficulty modes has the chance to cause
a bigger divide, I slightly doubt they'd leave if the game
as a whole were suddenly more complicated and interesting
since you can just buy progression.

New players who actually want to play a hardcore
hack n' slash shoot 'em up with parkour would agree with me,
and many of them are going out the door as soon as they come in
because there is no challenge to keep things interesting.

[AdunSaveMe]

10 minutes ago, L4D3M said:

What if enemies adapted to your dodge moves and parkour moves,
forcing you to be creative and use different ones if you wanted
to keep the their accuracy low?

The game would get tedious very quickly and/or people would just ignore it entirely. That might work in a different game, but not Warframe.

10 minutes ago, L4D3M said:

Shoot-dodging bullet-time seems infinite? Limiting that so it's used
occasionally will make that feature more fun and challenging to use.

That's a huge "no" from me. Your suggestions for changing parkour are basically suggestions for making Warframe not be Warframe anymore.

Edited November 29, 2018 by AdunSaveMe

[DreisterDino]

vor 18 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

Challenges are important. They create memories, especially
when working in teams with friends. If you play a video game,
it's to have your abilities tested, and feel accomplished
for succeeding with them, especially if the reward was
adequate for your limits being pushed, or for memorizing

I completly agree with this.

I would go as far as saying that it doesnt have to be super difficult in Warframe,

it would be enough if sometimes players have to either communicate a bit or simply pay attention to what other players do to succesfully make it through a mission.

Because right now, in every mission, you barely can fail even if all players are completly ignoring everything the other people do.

vor 18 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

Nobody wants a participation award.

One would think so, but seeing the 100 threads about leeching players each month, this might actually not be true.

vor 18 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

Nobody wants to fall asleep at a keyboard just rolling their face on the keys.

Again, one might think so, but i had to learn that it seems like the majority of the community doesnt want any kind of challenge.

Only a few players look for a decent amount of challenge. Most are somehow happy with semi-afk farming,

even if the exact same people are bored by the game and dont play it as soon as there is nothing to farm for anymore.

 

And tbh, this evening i have lost all faith that DE might implement something challenging.

They reduced the excavator number in a 4 player bounty from 5 down to 3.

Just...why????? Has this been already too hard to manage? Has this really been too much for the players to handle?

5 excavators close to each other while we are having all kinds off cc frames and dmg dealers?

- First we have strong enemies, then every enemy gets nerfed on Fortuna.

- then we get back a few stronger enemies

- then the missions become more easy to do

- this is just a back and forth we little tweaks here and there that change absolutly nothing at the end of the day

 

 

 

Lastly, i guess maybe 5 people read this, because people in the forums seem to enjoy flaming each other in general discussion way more than talking about actual ideas.

 

Edited November 29, 2018 by DreisterDino

[Chaosdreamer]

Révélation

https://warframe.fandom.com/wiki/EMP_Aura

I'm lazy to make full answer , I did'nt read much of it but you should look the link for this mod , I think you will understand what I mean 😉

[AdunSaveMe]

8 minutes ago, DreisterDino said:

it seems like the majority of the community doesnt want any kind of challenge

This is quite a bold assumption to make, and I don't believe it's true at all. The situation just isn't as simple as you think it is.

[L4D3M]

Maybe there's a way to somehow let an individual player tweak their own difficulty while keeping everyone's mission progression up to an agreed upon speed. There's probably tons of ways to go about this.

[DreisterDino]

vor 3 Minuten schrieb AdunSaveMe:

This is quite a bold assumption to make, and I don't believe it's true at all. The situation just isn't as simple as you think it is.

You have some posts on your account already, so i guess you have read a bit in the forum^^

The ones that are looking for a challenge are constantly called "salty Vets" and "a loud minority".

And i notice this aswell playing with the people i play regulary with. Most prefer the easy and fastest way to do something.

 

Yes, there are people in the forums that want a challenge, but we get shouted down (with sometimes stupid assumptions)

If we are really that many and my assumption is false - that would be awesome!

But we should make more posts then and show everyone that we are not just a loud minority.

Sadly most topics that suggest anything of value in the feedback section get completly ignored,

and in general discussion etc it gets shutted down and flooded with "arguments" why any kind of challenge doesnt belong in Warframe.

[Walkampf]

vor einer Stunde schrieb L4D3M:

Some might find some humor in the inclusion of a difficulty option,
and you might or might not take it more seriously in a second.

How about simply take off some mods?

Personally, i hardly use Riven or Primed mods. this makes thge game a lot more interesting for me and the doesn't split me from other players like difficulties whould.

This is basically what peculiar Mods where supposed to teach people, but there are a lot of people who are.... kinda slow....

Edited November 29, 2018 by Walkampf

[imbressive]

vor 53 Minuten schrieb DreisterDino:

You have some posts on your account already, so i guess you have read a bit in the forum^^

The ones that are looking for a challenge are constantly called "salty Vets" and "a loud minority".

And i notice this aswell playing with the people i play regulary with. Most prefer the easy and fastest way to do something.

 

Yes, there are people in the forums that want a challenge, but we get shouted down (with sometimes stupid assumptions)

If we are really that many and my assumption is false - that would be awesome!

But we should make more posts then and show everyone that we are not just a loud minority.

Sadly most topics that suggest anything of value in the feedback section get completly ignored,

and in general discussion etc it gets shutted down and flooded with "arguments" why any kind of challenge doesnt belong in Warframe.

the "community" is very diverse and people want different things and have different opinions and preferences. you have the ones content with what warframe has to offer, people interested in the most efficient ways of getting things (farming usually), people that want challenging content without having to do 1h endurance run until it starts getting challenging, people interested in fashion, also every one is in a different "progress" stage and there are simply things that dont feel rewarding or worth doing and others are "overwhelmed" by the amount of content in front of them.

i find that we have a huge power creep in warframe, with the modding and "formaing" of weapons/frames and it increases with every new addition (new prime mods/new prime weapons,zaws,kit-guns), but we lack the need in the form of content for this power creep, we are constantly fighting enemys ranging from 10-130 and they pretty much get obliterated. some like this power play, feeling invincible and destroying hordes of enemies, some find it boring after a while.

 

i find it a bit sad that atm there is no way to challenge yourself and your builds other then endurance runs with the scaling of enemies, which personally i find boring.

vor 28 Minuten schrieb Walkampf:

How about simply take off some mods?

Personally, i hardly use Riven or Primed mods. this makes thge game a lot more interesting for me and the doesn't split me from other players like difficulties whould.

This is basically what peculiar Mods where supposed to teach people, but there are a lot of people who are.... kinda slow....

why mod and use forma at all? people handicapping themselves is not a solution.

Edited November 29, 2018 by imbressive

[Walkampf]

vor 13 Minuten schrieb imbressive:

why mod and use forma at all? people handicapping themselves is not a solution.

Of course it is.Let's see how your point whould play out, if DE implemented a difficulty slider:

If you had easy, normal and hard difficulty, then according to your logic nobody whould use something other than easy, since you whould make it just harder for yourself, aka you are handicapping yourself.

 

P.S.

Tempering with your own mods does not necessarily change the way your build works. The key here are the mods refered to 'mandatory mods'. If you, for example, reduce the rank of your Hornet Strike the overall build of your secondary doesn't impact your builds features in any way, except for the final DPS. Status chance, critchance, they all stay exacly the same. So, literally the only thing that changes is the actuaql time to kill, which is the exact same result you whould get as you whould, when choose a higher difficulty which whould make enemies have more health.

[L4D3M]

47 minutes ago, Walkampf said:

How about simply take off some mods?

I checked my frame and I don't think I have any enemy inaccuracy mods. Removing some won't stop them from missing me while I'm in mid-air, and if I'm hit from a tiny chance I'd like seeing the health bar as a warning system over being one-shot.

Maybe add a difficulty mode players in the same mission can choose differently, and maybe a teleport option that's 1 or 2 use after doing enough battle. Maybe add rewards that are very slightly higher for players choosing harder modes. I don't think it has to be high to increase the incentive, it could just be 10% more at the highest, and those players have to having better timing and coordination with combat interactions to survive, and sometimes get holed up in an ambush they have to escape before they can use their teleport.

For some people here, including me, just having a bigger challenge is probably rewarding enough.

[Walkampf]

vor 8 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

Removing some won't stop them from missing me while I'm in mid-air,

This is a specific mechanic... this is literally how it is supposed to work... because DE wants players to jump around thus jumping grants evasion.

vor 12 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

I checked my frame and I don't think I have any enemy inaccuracy mods

Agility Drift

vor 14 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

For some people here, including me, just having a bigger challenge is probably rewarding enough.

 

vor einer Stunde schrieb Walkampf:

How about simply take off some mods?

Personally, i hardly use Riven or Primed mods.

 

vor 15 Minuten schrieb L4D3M:

Maybe add a difficulty mode players in the same mission can choose differently(...)

If players choose different paths, they aren't playing the same mission anymore... at this point you are overcomplicating the whole issue for no reason. And yes, I purposfully ignored the point about increased rewards, since this should not factor into the difficulty and DE thinks so as well, if you look at the reasoning for the Kuva survival reward scaling.

[Chaemyerelis]

The way this game works it can't do challenge without just inflating enemy stats or nerfing the player. 

 

I mean look at the combat everything is just spammy.

 

Too add the same thing i added in another thread.. dark souls 3 was on sale. 

Edited November 29, 2018 by Chaemyerelis

[L4D3M]

8 minutes ago, Walkampf said:

This is a specific mechanic... this is literally how it is supposed to work... because DE wants players to jump around thus jumping grants evasion.

For the 10nth of a second I land on the ground before I jump again, I'm not in the air. This gives them a 0.1% chance to hit me. I suggested dodging and jumping creatively. It could be zig-zags, in different directions, or different moves. cover is there to be used. maybe there's a way to give it a tighter timing gate so that the timer or meter for how long you can keep all this dodging up in a single row is your own mental stamina.

Edited November 30, 2018 by L4D3M

[(PSN)CodyXSavageX]

I like the idea of putting emp aura on trinity as a viable option, I’m genuinely interested in the idea of enemies having better accuracy. Imagine that emp aura being an viable aura pretty scary honestly but in a good way.

[imbressive]

vor 2 Stunden schrieb Walkampf:

Of course it is.Let's see how your point whould play out, if DE implemented a difficulty slider:

If you had easy, normal and hard difficulty, then according to your logic nobody whould use something other than easy, since you whould make it just harder for yourself, aka you are handicapping yourself.

 

P.S.

Tempering with your own mods does not necessarily change the way your build works. The key here are the mods refered to 'mandatory mods'. If you, for example, reduce the rank of your Hornet Strike the overall build of your secondary doesn't impact your builds features in any way, except for the final DPS. Status chance, critchance, they all stay exacly the same. So, literally the only thing that changes is the actuaql time to kill, which is the exact same result you whould get as you whould, when choose a higher difficulty which whould make enemies have more health.

i disagree with your proposal simply because [de] gives you the means to reach this power level,so they are the ones who should provide you with content balanced around this power level.

i see ranking up mods, using forma as a way of progression in this game, like other games have their gear items and "gear scores" or what not. in those games you need this gear so you can fight harder content (raids/bosses) and continue to progress and in the same time you are being challenged. this type of element is missing in warframe. except endless runs with endless scaling,but i find this mode boring. why is there not a planet with enemies starting at lvl 100+ where we can do all of the mission types available (spy/assassination etc)? why do we find those enemies only in endless missions and sortie (once a day).

 

"If you had easy, normal and hard difficulty, then according to your logic nobody whould use something other than easy, since you whould make it just harder for yourself, aka you are handicapping yourself."

i never said anything like that, there are games with different difficulty levels of the same encounter (dungeon/raids) and people do play them, be it because there are better/rare rewards you don't get anywhere else or because people simply enjoy the difficulty, or maybe a mix of both.

 

Edith:

Eidolons: they could have been a good challenge, if it wasn't for the fact that we can burst them down.

Edited November 30, 2018 by imbressive

[Walkampf]

vor 9 Stunden schrieb imbressive:

i disagree with your proposal simply because [de] gives you the means to reach this power level,so they are the ones who should provide you with content balanced around this power level.

Well, everybody has the right to have their own opinion, even if it's factually wrong.

I refer to my previous statments about difficulty setting. If you were right, nobody whould ever play anything other than easy mode. This still holds up. Even with tis argument. You fail at understanding the purpose and the way difficulty settings are achieved. And you fail to realise that Warframes enemy scaling is already a huge problem even when there is only "easy mode". Adding harder modes whould only increase the current scaling problems even more.

Also, comparing your mod ranks to World of Warcrafts item level system shows how fundamentally difficult it is for you to grasp the way Warframe is designed. WoW is designed to feature an ever increasing power level and Blizzard has the manpower to handcraft fitting challenges. DE, a fraction of the size of Blizzard, has to rely in automatic scaling enemies because they simply lack the manpower to handcraft moibs which grow ever stronger. Powercreep in Warframe is a huge issue instead of a feature. Warframe is a lot closer to the first Guildwars triologie than to WoW, meaning that the system is actually expanding your experience with sidegrades instead of regulary profiding new content through upgrades. This is for the reason that in the latter system content get's obsolete.

[L4D3M]

I love the convincing level of detail
put in the game already, and I feel some of or a lot of
things described below might already be in it.

If you haven't coded something like this already,
what you could do for harder, smarter gameplay, or a harder difficulty mode is:

GoldenEye 007 for the N64 has an invisible regenerating meter that represents
your chance to get hit and goes down faster the closer you are to enemy fire.
At the top, you don't take a single graze.

Of course, one thing that should be established is the minimum and maximum
amount of danger the player is in at any given time. If there's the slightest
chance to get one-tapped with no warning or reason why, the experience could
be ruined mid-game or as soon as they get in the front door.

You could have an evasion or 'luck' meter representing both
your chance to get hit and how many times you have a
chance to get hit per second or two or four seconds before the rest automatically miss
(could vary by rate of fire and damage. a sniper would know they should try
their hardest with their one shot at a time) and maybe how many enemies could hit
you per second as well.

This meter could even be a pyramid stack of meters or a constantly updating
line-graph that represents amount of safety in one dimension, and
the time left for that safety or amount of error the player can make in the other.
And it doesn't have to update that often or be that performance costing,
it could just be enough to assess a general score.

It could drain with time based on the lack of good actions, regenerate
with time and drain with player errors, or do both and have a middle ground
- whichever is better. Good actions would include mixing up your moves
and style, getting behind enemies or to the side of where they aim and putting
cover and concealment between as many lines of sight as possible,
staying out of enemy view or detection longer or popping out of cover that's different
or far from the one you last went in. Also, being far away or moving
off the beaten path on the map could help. The last one's a stretch, considering
how complicated it could be to put on maps though.

There's also telegraphing. Snipers have a long one, others quickly raise or turn their
gun, and Corpus plasma have slower non-hitscan travel speeds. Moving away from
the trajectory's path at the last split second could give you a small bonus or just
void getting hit by that shot entirely. Maybe your chance to get hit by it while doing that
goes up if you do it consistently without hitting other enemies with your attacks.

You could generate miss zones behind where the player was and in front of where they're going,
but I think I've already seen this in action while playing.

You could even just make the meter one-dimensional and remove enemy aim penalties
while you're dodging once it reaches the bad part.

Also, it would be neat if cheap strategies had a chance to not work,
or worked once or the first few times before the game adapted to it.

Also slightly off topic, but it would be cool if missions had a rare
chance to include more character or enemy encounters like assassins
(The Stalker, Grustag Three) without any prerequisite actions, or maybe
just after some play hours after getting out of the game's tutorial.
They don't even need voice-lines, they could just be something slightly
different like a guy with a grenade launcher, or an agile specialist
who blocks off a path with good aim and thrown grenades.

And a last one for this reply: Maybe you could help new or
underperforming players by scaling received damage based on their performance
or how much they've learned. Put pressure on overperforming ones
or ones who had it easy for too long by adding lots of different
enemy types and obstacles.

Edited November 30, 2018 by L4D3M