Affinity range is a horrible anti-fun mechanic that should go away.

[RedDirtTrooper]

I understand the behavior that it is intended to curb, but honestly, players leeching would be less toxic than the way affinity range forces us to farm affinity. I'd love to be able to play some random survival, or interception, or whatever instead of being locked into onslaught or defense missions if I want to be efficient. I'd love to get a chance to play archwing missions other than mobile defense once in a while. Instead, we have this horrible game mechanic that literally punishes anyone trying to rank things up efficiently if even a single teammate isn't onboard, aware, or forced into sticking close enough to share affinity by the mission layout. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of being pissed off at teammates just because they don't want to play in an "optimal" unfun way. I'm tired of sticking to the same few mission types while ranking up gear. I'm tired of playing in an "optimal" unfun way just because I like being efficient. All of these problems would go away if, instead of affinity range, teammates just shared affinity. 

[peterc3]

Then shared Affinity goes away or gets cut down. The goal is to get people to play with their team. If Affinity range goes away, some other mechanic, likely more heavy handed, gets put in its place.

37 minutes ago, RedDirtTrooper said:

I'm tired of being pissed off at teammates just because they don't want to play in an "optimal" unfun way.

This, however, is entirely on you.

[Xzorn]

All problems with affinity branch from how it is attained in Warframe.

We need to gain considerably more Affinity from completing objectives, missions, defense waves, bounty stages and other in-mission tasks.

Only reason ESO is a good farm is the sheer number of trash it throws at you. That's not something I feel should be encouraged.

[RedDirtTrooper]

1 minute ago, peterc3 said:

Then shared Affinity goes away or gets cut down. The goal is to get people to play with their team. If Affinity range goes away, some other mechanic, likely more heavy handed, gets put in its place.

1

If the mission design and even warframe design doesn't encourage proximity to the team, then why actively punish the whole team for even one player not staying in proximity? Also, if that is the intended goal, then it is definitely not working reliably. 

2 minutes ago, peterc3 said:

This, however, is entirely on you.

 

No, my response to it is on me, like restraining myself from being rude to people about it, my emotional response to someone actively, even if unintentionally, working against my goals is perfectly normal and involuntary.

[RedDirtTrooper]

11 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

All problems with affinity branch from how it is attained in Warframe.

We need to gain considerably more Affinity from completing objectives, missions, defense waves, bounty stages and other in-mission tasks.

Only reason ESO is a good farm is the sheer number of trash it throws at you. That's not something I feel should be encouraged.

It's the number of trash, in close proximity to other players, that it throws at you. As for affinity from kills vs affinity from objectives, while I don't disagree that task completion could be considerably more rewarding, I also don't find clearing hordes of enemies being rewarding offensive in a player vs horde game.

[Xzorn]

7 minutes ago, RedDirtTrooper said:

It's the number of trash, in close proximity to other players, that it throws at you. As for affinity from kills vs affinity from objectives, while I don't disagree that task completion could be considerably more rewarding, I also don't find clearing hordes of enemies being rewarding offensive in a player vs horde game.

 

Much of Warframe is a horde shooter true. It's that ESO serves no other purpose as a mission type that I find offensive.

I had hopes for something interesting but it's quite disappointing. I'm curious who thought it would be a cool idea to take the loot part out of a loot focused game.

[Teridax68]

8 hours ago, peterc3 said:

Then shared Affinity goes away or gets cut down. The goal is to get people to play with their team. If Affinity range goes away, some other mechanic, likely more heavy handed, gets put in its place.

... why? Why is any of this true? The OP themselves stated that they understood the intent of the mechanic, but the implementation simply does not make sense when, in some modes, the proper way for players to "play with their team" is to stay out of Affinity range, e.g. Interception. In modes like Survival, it strictly does not matter where players are so long as they fight, and in fact pushing players to stick together is a major contributing factor to camping strats players dislike so much, coupled with the game's spawn algorithms. In large levels such as the Plains of Eidolon or Orb Vallis, not only is the Affinity range limitation either too restrictive relative to the map's scale (and nobody pops Fosfors just to reduce that inconvenience), or similarly useless or counterproductive in the case of kill/Credit generation bounties, it is visibly entirely ineffective in curbing leeching behavior. On top of all this, the very fact that there exists a consumable that quadruples Affinity range (and so in any mission) defeats the very intent of those imposed limitations. Affinity range has therefore not only generated substantial problems of its own, but has quite simply failed to achieve its intended goal of preventing people from leeching in missions.

Should any alternative need to be more heavy-handed to succeed? Maybe, but if that alternative does what it's supposed to, and generates fewer to no side-effects, it would be worth it. As it stands, we need some sort of system in place to detect bounty leechers, which Affinity range doesn't cover at all, and could probably do with some stronger AFK detection. As for the issue of hallway heroes, not only has this problem lessened to the point of becoming fairly rare, this has happened for reasons entirely unrelated to Affinity range (players generally try to speedrun missions when they can). As such, removing Affinity range in this current state of the game would be unlikely to generate many negative consequences, if any at all.

At the very least, though, even someone hard-set in keeping Affinity range (for whichever reason) should be able to see that there is room for compromise, and alterations to the way it works in certain situations: Interception, for example, could give its radio towers shared Affinity zones, such that any player standing on a point would share Affinity with every player also on a point, regardless of distance (which would be truer to intent than the current implementation). Similarly, modes like Mobile Defense, Excavation, etc. could localize shared Affinity radii around their objectives, rather than around players, so that players would experience no loss in Affinity so long as they played around the objective (which, again, would be truer to intent than the current implementation). There is a lot of room for change here, as Affinity range demonstrably has issues, to the point where it often fails to fulfil its intended goal.

Edited January 19, 2019 by Teridax68

[(XBOX)KayAitch]

16 hours ago, RedDirtTrooper said:

I understand the behavior that it is intended to curb, but honestly, players leeching would be less toxic than the way affinity range forces us to farm affinity

I don't think it is designed curb leeching.

Warframe doesn't render that many enemies in a level - you'll notice this if you sneak through scanning everything you see with a solo prowling Ivara (best way to max out Simalris rank) as enemies you scan but don't kill turn up as already scanned in the next tile. Warframe reuses them to save loading new ones, and moves any enemies left in empty tiles into the current one.

This is a problem in some missions - if another tile has all the enemies and another player is still in it none will spawn near you, stalling your excavator, survival or relic opening.

Affinity range is to try and hide this: push players to stay on the same (or adjacent) tiles so that it always feels like a wave of them are coming at all of you.

Modern hardware could probably handle many more enemies at once (though maybe not Switch?) but they'll need to change that fairly low level functionality before they could remove affinity range.

 

[AnatharsWrath]

i dont mind affinity range being a thing but i wish it were a bigger range. so many times i've denied affinity by defending a console in mobile defense cause someone wanted to be a hallway warrior 1 or 3 full rooms away to hog all the kills.

problem is if they changed it, harrow's and trinity's affinity based range on skills may need to be altered