A little feedback about Nightwave : Hell of a good job DE.

[Stonehenge]

  Hi there,

Just wanted to say all the good things i saw in the recent Nightwave system.

- I have time to do things. I have five years and thousands of hours in the game now, i have a job, irl stuff to do, etc. Having a week to plan my missions is really cool, if i can play 30 mins one day, i know what i will do, and if i need one hour for an elite weekly survival, i'll do it on the week-end, saturday or sunday. I keep them for dessert.

- Those 'one hour' survival are cool challenges by the way. Not a newbie stuff, and not broken-meta-endgame. In fact you managed to regroup the largest player panel possible for the weekly and daily challenges, and that's a good thing. IF one or two challenges really bother me, i ll just skip them. 60% achievment is really managable in 10 weeks. That's fair. 

- Encouraging people to socialize ("with clanmate or friends") for elite challenges is also, a really good thing. Nightwave is meant to be in the core game i guess, and it's a coop game. If i want to do solo stuff, i can go in any other mission, or any other game. I played last week with a mate i didnt see ingame for a while, that's a good thing for the game.

- Rewards are good. I didnt see anyone speaking about this, but adding warframe and weapons slots in the ladder is a really, good, thing. New players reaaly needed this. Smart move.

- The lore looks promising. If you really add on a regular base a few pages of cool stories and/or artwork, DE, well, this would be amazing. Nora Night herself felt kinda..."out of lore" in the first hours, but why not, i'm sure she could be a major character if you write something fitting in Warframe universe. And the tribute to The Warriors is pretty nice.

 

In a few words, you did a real. Good. Job.

Thank you for that.

Edited March 7, 2019 by Stonehenge

[doominator10]

I like the ability to plan.

The one hour challenges should be half hours at most. Too many people can't commit that kind of time at once, and frankly they're boring after a while unless you're a specific kind of masochist who likes that. The rewards for doing them do not justify that time spent. I want to enjoy doing a 1 hour survival at some point, but just the standing isn't enough for me to justify them. Give me orokin cells, argon, rare resrouces, forma, bonus standing, SOMETHING to make me feel good about doing this tediousness for an hour.

Clanmates / friends is more annoying than anything. It's just an extra step for a lot of people to go into recruiting to ask someone to friend up first. More tedious. Rewards seem alright. Creds should be more constant than the weird level breakpoints (it's not every 3 levels for cred, it's kinda random). 

I'm down with the lore.

[Steel_Rook]

19 hours ago, Stonehenge said:

- Encouraging people to socialize ("with clanmate or friends") for elite challenges is also, a really good thing. Nightwave is meant to be in the core game i guess, and it's a coop game. If i want to do solo stuff, i can go in any other mission, or any other game. I played last week with a mate i didnt see ingame for a while, that's a good thing for the game.

This bit I strongly disagree with. Any time video games go the route of forcing me to play with friends, the effort comes across like a zookeeper locking two Giant Pandas in a cage and hoping for them to mate. This is in no way conducive to actually forging meaningful friendships, and only tolerable if your actual friends happen to be online and feel like running that particular bit of high-level content with you. Rather problematic if your friends happen to be new, inexperienced or badly undergeared. The net result is best summed up by the advise you'll commonly see given to these problems - just slap a random pubbie on your friends list for the duration, then kick them out afterwards. This does the opposite of encouraging people to socialise, as far as I'm concerned. Most forced team content does.

[Stonehenge]

Il y a 21 heures, doominator10 a dit :

The one hour challenges should be half hours at most. Too many people can't commit that kind of time at once.

Hi there.

Okay, that i could agree with. I like some time to time one hour running, not shorter, not longer because it's my taste and it can fits in my planning but not everyone can block this on their agenda, and you can have multiple other issues like bad connections,  etc.

Two solutions, and people could have to choose for the same reward : 1/ Running 30 mins, but with mobs starting at level 85-90. Like the last 30 mins of a standard one hour survival. 2/ Having the possibility in a week, to do 3 x 20 mins that count as an hour in total. But with a higher level for mobs, or else there would be no challenge at all anymore, once again.

 

Citation

The rewards for doing them do not justify that time spent. I want to enjoy doing a 1 hour survival at some point, but just the standing isn't enough for me to justify them. Give me orokin cells, argon, rare resrouces, forma, bonus standing, SOMETHING to make me feel good about doing this tediousness for an hour.

Well, i d like to say there are many ways to combine rewards : You can run a syndicate or fissure mission, or endless arbitration while completing a weekly or a daily. Or anything else. (Scans to complete, Sentients mods or exilus, or crafted forma on Lua etc..)

If you decide to do an elite weekly on a special x2 affinity or x2 ressources week-end, it can be really rewarding. I obviously bought a x2 ressources for the one hour Kuva survival, the plat will be easily refund in selling anything.

 

Citation

Clanmates / friends is more annoying than anything. It's just an extra step for a lot of people to go into recruiting to ask someone to friend up first. More tedious. Rewards seem alright. Creds should be more constant than the weird level breakpoints (it's not every 3 levels for cred, it's kinda random).

I would be agree with more creds. For clanmates and friends, i disagree, i think it's a necessary move. I try to explain my point below.

 

Il y a 20 heures, Steel_Rook a dit :

This bit I strongly disagree with. Any time video games go the route of forcing me to play with friends, the effort comes across like a zookeeper locking two Giant Pandas in a cage and hoping for them to mate. This is in no way conducive to actually forging meaningful friendships, and only tolerable if your actual friends happen to be online and feel like running that particular bit of high-level content with you. Rather problematic if your friends happen to be new, inexperienced or badly undergeared. The net result is best summed up by the advise you'll commonly see given to these problems - just slap a random pubbie on your friends list for the duration, then kick them out afterwards. This does the opposite of encouraging people to socialise, as far as I'm concerned. Most forced team content does.

Well. We have first to define and agree on what 'encouraging' and what 'forcing' mean. Imo, the recent Nightwave doesn't force you to do anything. Firstly, and most important, you have to complete 60% of the total challenges to get all the season rewards. 60%. That gives you a large margin, if you don't have time or the motivation for some of them. Or if you are a new player, and experiencing hard time finding good gear and good teams. Secondly once again, you have a week to plan, and organize it. In tchat, discord, forums, etc.

I think this way to encourage pandas people to bound is healthy for the game. Maybe it could benefit some arrangments and QoL fix, (okay 2 survival elite weekly was a bit weird) but the philosophy is good. Remember the clip from Mashed when Fortuna came out ? Was fun and cartoon, but that's the spirit, I reaally want this feeling of teamplay, trust, relying on each other. BUT, like any other lazy pandas, i go too often on pick up groups. Wich can be great, but also trolling, dont even knowing what to do, etc etc. With these challenges, i took the time to find people, we failed, i found other people, old mates from long ago, new mates, we did it, we were a bit pride of it, and i know they will ask me for help if they need it in the future. I have to admit i needed this kick in the ass to really socialize in game ( i'm a one-player-clan, for example, ) and when i want to solo, i have ...70% of the actual game doable alone (if not 90% in real). But again, i wasn't force to do anything. I just thought this was a good opportunity and a smart move for the long term.

 

Edited March 9, 2019 by Stonehenge

[Steel_Rook]

27 minutes ago, Stonehenge said:

I think this way to encourage pandas people to bound is healthy for the game. Maybe it could benefit some arrangments and QoL fix, (okay 2 survival elite weekly was a bit weird) but the philosophy is good. Remember the clip from Mashed when Fortuna came out ? Was fun and cartoon, but that's the spirit, I reaally want this feeling of teamplay, trust, relying on each other. BUT, like any other lazy pandas, i go too often on pick up groups. Wich can be great, but also trolling, dont even knowing what to do, etc etc. With these challenges, i took the time to find people, we failed, i found other people, old mates from long ago, new mates, we did it, we were a bit pride of it, and i know they will ask me for help if they need it in the future. I have to admit i needed this kick in the ass to really socialize in game ( i'm a one-player-clan, for example, ) and when i want to solo, i have ...70% of the actual game doable alone (if not 90% in real). But again, i wasn't force to do anything. I just thought this was a good opportunity and a smart move for the long term.

I strongly disagree that "the philosophy is good." The philosophy is based around the idea that I can't take care of myself and the game knows what's good for me better than I do. Not only is that patronising, it's also objectively false and actively detrimental to my experience. I'm glad that it worked out for you, but that doesn't necessarily make it good. It's buying into that old idea that introverted people who play by themselves are just extroverts who need help "getting out of their shells" and being pushed "out of their comfort zone" because what YOU like is clearly what everybody else would like if only they were given the chance. I can tell you from experience that that's simply not how it works. Forcing me into playing with other people when I don't feel like it isn't going to spark social interaction. Rather, it's going to spark a conflict because - and you might have noticed this if you've seen my post around these parts - I'm not a pleasant individual to be around when I'm irritated or doing something I don't want to be doing.

Look, I've been doing this "why solo in an MMO" thing for 15 years now. I've been told repeatedly that playing on a team somehow improves the lives of everyone around because "everything's more fun with friends." What you get when you muscle me onto a team against my will is a whiny, sarcastic, unappeasable team-mate who's at best going to make your experience as miserable as mine and at worse is going to actively sandbag you, leech or outright sabotage your efforts if I'm feeling particularly vindictive at the time. I remember playing Space Marine, asking team-mates to help me with the capture objective and then simply walking out to let it fail when they insisted on not doing so. Forcing people to make friends only works if those people actually want friends. You do, and that is fine. I absolutely don't, and typically resent every pubby I end up accidentally teaming with. Sometimes even for good reasons.

And sure, we can argue semantics about what's "forced" and what's "encouraged" and parrot that "60-65% of all challenges" that's vague enough to see whatever we want to see in it. My point is that trying to "encourage" people to make friends predominantly doesn't work, because the best case scenario it can hope for is typically Facebook Friends. Again - I have something like 150 people in my Steam Friends list. I actually know maybe a dozen of them and actively play stuff with about five of them. If I could be arsed, then I could potentially add a few total strangers to my friends list, do the challenge and boot them right back off of it, but would that really accomplish the goal of "making friends?" Because I'd argue that - no, it wouldn't. You can provide incentive for people to exhibit specific behaviour patterns, but you can't provide incentive for people to - as David Cage would say - "feel emotions." Friends are not - or rather, should not be - a gameplay mechanic. Trying to turn them into one will have the predictable result of players gaming the system and undermining its core intent.

You want me to play with friends? Maybe un-#*!% the new player experience and make it easier for me to bring my existing friends into Warframe. Because I've been trying to recruit a friend of mine for probably 6 months now, and the terrible new player experience he went through trying the game in the past is making that really difficult.