Life Support - A discouraging factor for Late Game

[DustyFlash]

Life Support is a mechanic that exists in Survival and some other missions under diffrent shapes (ex: liberation missions on the plains have a similar system, same for onslaught, except there the only annoyance is not dealing enough damage or enemies not spawning fast enough) it exists to discourage people from going afk in an unreacheable area for 3 Hours+ and leave with tons of resources, however at the same time it is a discouraging factor for people who want to fight stronger enemies.

By itself life support is pretty bad for when someone wants to go 4h or more, mindlessly slaughtering everything, why is that? It is because here unlike onslaught and liberation, RNG decides whether you go further than 20 mins, because all life support drops (except for life support from the lotus) comes from enemies in very small quantities and it can sometimes become very scarce, cutting away from the fun and making the whole thing really tedious and hard to enjoy without a nekros or camping in one spot waiting for enemies to slowly make their way to you. It is also harder to get life support in diferent circumstances such as having 4 players in a squad spread everywhere, as the spawns will only be at one player, (despite having a higher enemy cap, you can still struggle).

Where am I going with this? Time and time again I do survival only to leave early because there was no life support (pub and solo).

Life support as a mechanic has agged poorly and needs to be looked at ASAP. It currently is (in my oppinion) a discouraging factor to go late game.

I'd rather fail because I couldn't play well enough or by one of my own mistakes rather than getting kicked out because a mechanic decided I was "bad".

A place where you could try "Survival" but with no life support stress is in the "Orbs in the Vallis" open world area, go to the temple of profit, get full alert and you are bassically in an endless survival where you are limited by skill and damage alone, not some RNG mechanic. (Enemies also do scale overtime so watch out for whoever is going to try this, in 20 mins lvls go from 30 to 80, which is really fun)

EDIT: I came up with a replacement as well. Life support is now replaced by a kill counter, get "x" kills for the next reward, enemies scale overtime the more you kill. Makes more sense as a "Survival" type of gameplay rather than a "Hold out" type of gameplay.

Edited December 10, 2018 by DustyFlash
Found a Replacemet for LS

[Phatose]

What's your evidence that it wasn't simply "There was no life support because you couldn't kill fast enough."? 

[peterc3]

A game mode without some outside mechanic to go on top of kills is not worth any rewards. For the majority of frames and weapons, this mode would functionally be a loot pinata.

19 minutes ago, DustyFlash said:

Life support is now replaced by a kill counter, get "x" kills for the next reward, enemies scale overtime the more you kill. Makes more sense as a "Survival" type of gameplay rather than a "Hold out" type of gameplay.

There is no realistic fail state here, with invisible frames that can sleep and frames that can open enemies up to finishers with weapons that are instant kill. An Ivara with a CL dagger would be able to go forever.

[DustyFlash]

4 minutes ago, Phatose said:

What's your evidence that it wasn't simply "There was no life support because you couldn't kill fast enough."? 

If I kill too fast I could end up with no life support at all, and if I kill too slow I sometimes end up with full life support. The only evidence you can have is the evidence of self-experience. If you know what I'm talking about you probably have experienced life support issues as well in the past and present.

[DustyFlash]

1 minute ago, peterc3 said:

A game mode without some outside mechanic to go on top of kills is not worth any rewards. For the majority of frames and weapons, this mode would functionally be a loot pinata.

There is no realistic fail state here, with invisible frames that can sleep and frames that can open enemies up to finishers with weapons that are instant kill. An Ivara with a CL dagger would be able to go forever.

An Ivara can already go forever, she even has additional life support drops from her 3rd pick pocket.

Besides, what I said was some small bits, one could always add some negative effects the later you go such as energy drain, increased eximus spawns and more, all as long as its my fault I failed.

[peterc3]

2 minutes ago, DustyFlash said:

An Ivara can already go forever, she even has additional life support drops from her 3rd pick pocket.

Besides, what I said was some small bits, one could always add some negative effects the later you go such as energy drain, increased eximus spawns and more, all as long as its my fault I failed.

For a ton of people, it would be literally impossible to kill them. Inaros essentially doesn't need energy. Ivara, Loki, Octavia can be invisible indefinitely.

Have you considered that every endless mode is not determined solely by kills? Do you really think they haven't thought about it?

[DustyFlash]

2 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

For a ton of people, it would be literally impossible to kill them. Inaros essentially doesn't need energy. Ivara, Loki, Octavia can be invisible indefinitely.

Have you considered that every endless mode is not determined solely by kills? Do you really think they haven't thought about it?

And do you have a better idea? Because my edit was just a suggestion. (The LS issue still stands however.)

If we keep adding mechanics that locks us out of the fun part of things will we ever get to have some fun without a mechanic telling us "no you can't do that here, that is too much fun".

Still, I'm open to sugestions.

[Dabnician]

They could make life support refill between 50-75% of the gauge instead of 30% it would be less of an issue. Ive had enough kills to get life support, only to have it go into the void or the endless floor of some of those tilesets.