Is DE committed to taking the fun out of the game?

[(PSN)nekokujo]

3 hours ago, hazerddex said:

do you want a challenge or do you want cheese? PICK ONE

Sometimes I want challenge; sometimes I want cheese. Sometimes I want challenges that can’t be cheesed, and sometimes I want challenges so challenging that they require cheese. Most of the time, I just want a cheeseburger.

[Radu955]

13 hours ago, BlindStalker said:

Eh? Are we talking about spy sorties? Has there been a change where tripping an alarm will automatically purge the data immediately? I have not heard about this change and while there were spy sorties just these past days, I tend to play spy sortie solo with my huntress and we haven't tripped an alarm in forever so I wouldn't have noticed this change. Is this actually a thing now?

I did a spy sortie on March the 14th sometime in the morning and accidentally triggered the alarm, that's how i know. Also it was a grineer spy.

[Radu955]

8 hours ago, hazerddex said:

tonkor got nerffed because a lot of people  hated people bringing cheese into there missions.

its no diffrent then now with the tons of nerf saryn threads you wil see in warframe feedback.

i swear every time without fail.

people ask for more challenge. then throw a fit when DE takes there cheese away.

do you want a challenge or do you want cheese? PICK ONE

 

 

the people that ask for nerfs are not the same people that complain about nerfs.

[Kuldor]

10 hours ago, SordidDreams said:

It is changing a bit now with Melee 2.9. I'm really glad that DE has finally figured out what id Soft had known twenty five years ago, namely that switching weapons instantly is more fun than having a delay. Now if only they'd realize the other thing that the gaming industry seems to have forgotten, namely that having to reload magazines is also a pointless break in the fun...

Getting stuck in place doing weird animations is... so... fun...

Give me the old quick melee any day over the monster we have now.

Edited March 14, 2019 by Kuldor

[Steel_Rook]

So I had a massive rambling post in response yesterday, but then I realised it's 5 AM and I'm rambling, so let me again and hopefully get something concise 🙂

 

12 hours ago, blazinvire said:

So if I'm understanding you correctly, you're referring to some kind of permutational gameplay?  Change one thing and it can essentially put a new coat of paint on the entire game?  That's probably the ideal state for a game like Warframe that lives on updates, but I'm not 100% sure how you'd go about this without it feeling a tad lacking in... I'm not sure what word I'm looking for, but like, some kind of relevance to the activity you're doing.  Gravitas?  Purpose?  I unno.

More or less, yes. Best case scenario, new content additions should in some way enhance most if not all other pre-existing content, rather than replacing or displacing it. New Warframes and to some extent weapons should accomplish this as you can run all the old content in new way. However, the game's reward system heavily undermines this for two reasons:

Firstly, the vast majority of progression involved in a Warframe is spent on actually EARNING it, during which time the player is obviously using old Warframes. By the time you actually have the new Warframe, there's very little left to actually do, as getting it to 30 is trivial. Applying multiple Forma is a bit trickier, but most people won't bother unless the new Warframe displaces one of their favourites. Basically, by the time you earn your new toy and get to actually play with it, there's nothing left to DO with it. Instead, the game's progression system pushes you towards the next shiny, which typically involves going back to your reliable kit and throwing the new toy on a shelf.

Secondly, the vast majority of Warframes are earned from only a single source, like I said. What that means is a new Warframe's potential to alter the whole rest of the game doesn't manifest in practice, because the progression system doesn't encourage you to play "the whole rest of the game." Even if the new toy you just earned becomes by far your favourite as Inaros did for me, you're still only going to be using it in the single point of content that actually gives you progression. You can't experience the full scope of content in a new light when you're not experiencing the full scope of content in the first place.

"Permutational gameplay" is actually a really cool term that I'm going to keep using, thank you for that 🙂 And while that is what I want, Warframe's content bottlenecking approach heavily undermines that concept, I'd argue to the game's severe detriment.

 

12 hours ago, blazinvire said:

Like if you could farm Orokin Cells on every planet, it kind of means you'd just pick the most convenient location, rather than go out and find it somewhere, not really inspired to leave your nest, so-to-speak. I suppose if all locations were equally interesting, you could have a randomizer that throws you to random locations, but I think people eventually get bored and look for the optimal route. I'm wondering if all these problems boil down to the fact that the grinding isn't all that fun in the end, so it's harder to let ourselves get fooled by the 30 seconds of gameplay. Like if we feel like we're wasting our time, or everything feels exactly the same so your brain switches off, lacking that certain kind of satisfaction or interaction.

Let me go back-to-front a little bit here. No, the grind absolutely is not fun and I suspect that most longer-term Warframe players know this, deep down in their heart of hearts. Rewards are obviously going to matter, but if they're literally the only deciding factor then that speaks to fundamental design flaws in the core gameplay loop and/or player burnout. I've been playing MMOs for 15 years now, and I can say with certainty that navigating the obstacle course of burnout and grind is absolutely crucial to having fun in a video game long-term. If Warframe is driving people to resent their time with the game and gravitate solely towards the optimal path to rewards, then I'd point to my above criticisms as at least a few reasons why that might be happening. So yes, your concern is legitimate, but I also feel it's avoidable.

I can only speak for myself, but a mission randomiser would very much help enhance my enjoyment of the game. I say this from experience, because that's more or less what the old Alerts system was - random missions spawn, pick one and go. As a point of fact, losing the ability to just jump into a random mission the game picked for me has had a net negative impact on my experience, so replicating this essentially "Quick Play" would be very much appreciated. And while I'm sure that some would eventually gravitate towards the statistically optimal tasks for earning particular resources, "statistical optimisation" tends to have diminishing returns on player motivation. If the Orokin Cell / min stat on Ceres were 20 times higher than, say, on Jupiter then of course people would go to Ceres. If it were 1.5 times, though? I'm sure some people would still go to Ceres anyway, but I'd stick to Jupiter because I like that tileset a lot more. "Personal preference" is a major component of what players choose to do. As long as the rewards ratio isn't TOO far out-of-whack, I find that players will generally prefer stuff they enjoy over stuff with a minor benefit.

And while the game will eventually boil down into repetition 1000 hours in regardless of what you do, content variety can go a long way towards mitigating that. I'm as much a creature of habit as you're going to see, almost always using the same items and running the same content, and even I will eventually just go out and do new stuff when I'm bored of the old stuff. If Warframe could redistribute its rewards structure such that I can experiment with new content AND not be completely wasting my time from a practical standpoint, then that would help stave off my own personal burnout to a great extent. I mean, the Earth, Mars and Ceres tilesets are all exclusive to low-level missions which we never get to play once we've moved on from the planet, so that's a large amount of variety just thrown by the wayside. The key here is LETTING people try new things rather than FORCING us to. You want me to WANT to try new things when I'm bored, not RESENT trying new things when I'd rather be doing what I was already doing.

None of these solutions are perfect or fool-proof, but I'd argue they're still markedly better than the content bottleneck Warframe's going for right now.

[blazinvire]

17 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Firstly, the vast majority of progression involved in a Warframe is spent on actually EARNING it, during which time the player is obviously using old Warframes. By the time you actually have the new Warframe, there's very little left to actually do, as getting it to 30 is trivial. Applying multiple Forma is a bit trickier, but most people won't bother unless the new Warframe displaces one of their favourites. Basically, by the time you earn your new toy and get to actually play with it, there's nothing left to DO with it. Instead, the game's progression system pushes you towards the next shiny, which typically involves going back to your reliable kit and throwing the new toy on a shelf.

Yanno... I've long thought that each Warframe could practically have an entire game made around them, and now I'm wondering if there isn't some merit to that idea.
I guess ideal content in that regard would be 2-phased, where you're working to get the Warframe, and then almost like they could make a customized quest-tutorial-scenario thing that this particular Warframe kind of resonates with.  Almost like quest Warframes in reverse, like you get a quest after you get the Warframe, tailored to that Warframe's skillset.
Almost like you're starting the game again, with a different character, and you got a new campaign to run.

I dunno if that idea's viable, given the number of warframes and the frequency they're released, but it's certainly some food for thought.

 

17 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

And while the game will eventually boil down into repetition 1000 hours in regardless of what you do, content variety can go a long way towards mitigating that. I'm as much a creature of habit as you're going to see, almost always using the same items and running the same content, and even I will eventually just go out and do new stuff when I'm bored of the old stuff. If Warframe could redistribute its rewards structure such that I can experiment with new content AND not be completely wasting my time from a practical standpoint, then that would help stave off my own personal burnout to a great extent. I mean, the Earth, Mars and Ceres tilesets are all exclusive to low-level missions which we never get to play once we've moved on from the planet, so that's a large amount of variety just thrown by the wayside. The key here is LETTING people try new things rather than FORCING us to. You want me to WANT to try new things when I'm bored, not RESENT trying new things when I'd rather be doing what I was already doing.

So, you want the reason to play the new content, to be the new content itself rather than because it's holding content hostage?

That's kind of amusing how unintuitive that feels from a business-perspective, as companies would be wanting to motivate people to try the new stuff, and yet it kind of makes sense from a player-perspective since largely everyone just wants more freedom to how they game.
Kind of a weird dynamic, a more passive-style of game development; yet one DE could probably pull off, considering they have so many players sitting around waiting to devour new content without provocation.

So there needs to be some kind of grind/progression, but a sense of freedom or diversity on the delivery within individual progression tracks... but how do you do that without losing the character or flair to a given thing?  Like if you needed resources like plants that grow on the Plains of Eidolon, but you want to play in Orb Vallis instead?

I feel like there's an idea for an awesome fundamental grind overhaul in here somewhere... changing how you acquire things, somehow... stupid brain won't work...

[Steel_Rook]

6 hours ago, blazinvire said:

Yanno... I've long thought that each Warframe could practically have an entire game made around them, and now I'm wondering if there isn't some merit to that idea.
I guess ideal content in that regard would be 2-phased, where you're working to get the Warframe, and then almost like they could make a customized quest-tutorial-scenario thing that this particular Warframe kind of resonates with.  Almost like quest Warframes in reverse, like you get a quest after you get the Warframe, tailored to that Warframe's skillset. Almost like you're starting the game again, with a different character, and you got a new campaign to run. I dunno if that idea's viable, given the number of warframes and the frequency they're released, but it's certainly some food for thought.

Warframe-specific quests are likely no economically viable. DE seem to be using Warframes as a medium-cost / high-returns proposition for growing their business. The general idea of starting a new quest line as though you were starting a new character, on the other hand, might be doable. I'm still of the opinion that DE ought to just make more quests - A LOT more of them. They don't all have to be epic or cinematic or feature cutscenes with expensive freelance voice actors. Hell, I'd be fine with a purely text-based narrative, if that helps cut down on the cost and pump up the volume of them. As with a lot of things, I keep going back to City of Heroes because that game allowed me to progress from 0 to level cap entirely on story content and STILL miss out on over half of it.

And it's not like City of Heroes pulled off some black magic or alien technology to do it. Instead, they just added a lot of text to give basic context of what you're doing. Let's see if I can free-hand a Warframe-specific example of a basic written quest... So you get an e-mail from the Lotus about detecting odd energy readings on Mars that she couldn't track. It's probably nothing, but go investigate just to be sure. You're sent to a bog-standard run of Arval on Mars, which is a Spy mission. You get another e-mail that the data points to some kind of energy weapon project the Grenier are developing. This is unusual, but you definitely don't want them wielding energy weapons, so you need to stop it. This leads to an Ares Sabotage mission, which runs as normal. Upon your return, you get an urgent message - while your sabotage scuttled the project, a several energy weapons were already produced. You need to take them from the Grenier. This leads to a standard Ara mission with Grenier Caches - the primary weapon prototype being on the capture target, the rest are in the caches. This mission works different, however, in that both the capture target and the retinue of soldiers around him... Are corpus! Upon your return, you discover that he Corpus target has perished in captivity due to a hidden poison pill.

And that's your lot - three simple missions, a VERY basic story and even a bit of a story hook for later due to the unusual nature of the trade. Are the Grenier developing energy weapons? Are the Corpus trading with the Grenier? Why, and who could possibly have an interest there? More than anything else, though, this shouldn't require much more than someone sitting down to write a bit of text. It shouldn't need new mechanics or new artwork or voice acting or really anything beyond throwing some basic context for why we might be doing things. What I'm getting at is you could have hundreds of these done in fairly short order, and even perhaps hold contests for players to write and submit our own. Hell, Cryptic Studios went as far as to create a mission editor where players could do precisely that directly into the game's client and then share it with other players without any developer interaction whatsoever. Check out Neverwinter, if that's still running.

And sure, if all you care about is grinding out level or farming for resources, then you can just ignore these altogether and keep doing that. I feel there are a fair few people who'd appreciate having a bit more direction in our experience, however. It wouldn't feel like as much of "a grind game" if we could do stuff other than grind.

 

6 hours ago, blazinvire said:

So, you want the reason to play the new content, to be the new content itself rather than because it's holding content hostage? That's kind of amusing how unintuitive that feels from a business-perspective, as companies would be wanting to motivate people to try the new stuff, and yet it kind of makes sense from a player-perspective since largely everyone just wants more freedom to how they game. Kind of a weird dynamic, a more passive-style of game development; yet one DE could probably pull off, considering they have so many players sitting around waiting to devour new content without provocation.

More or less, yes. Developers tend to be so aggressive about getting feet through the door of new content that they end up hurting that content's long-term viability. Fortuna, for example, is new and people would have gone there regardless of the level of grind. But a year down the line? Two years when we've moved on past Railjack and are having The New War on Lua or whatever? Fortuna's still going to be there, and people are still going to be doing stuff in it because it's part of the game's broader body of content. Ideally, I should go there when I'm tired of close-quarters instances and want something more open or more free-form, somewhere I can spread my wings and fly.

Directing players to new content through progression is not necessarily a bad thing, but LOCKING players to new content just ends up wasting old content. Developing a Live Service game is an investment with cascading returns. The larger your game becomes, the more each new piece of content is worth because variety keeps players from burning out. By restricting rewards to JUST new content, DE are actively devaluing their old content and so wasting the time and money spent on making it. Give players more freedom and more of your content will end up seeing use while fewer people will complain about being bored. Yes, some will still gravitate towards grinding whatever's statistically optimal, but a lot of us would just pick the content we kind of like. Grind isn't grind if you're enjoying the process, and letting me pick which content I run helps with that substantially.

 

7 hours ago, blazinvire said:

So there needs to be some kind of grind/progression, but a sense of freedom or diversity on the delivery within individual progression tracks... but how do you do that without losing the character or flair to a given thing?  Like if you needed resources like plants that grow on the Plains of Eidolon, but you want to play in Orb Vallis instead?

Well, one dirt-simple way to go about it would be to create multiple blueprints for the same thing and sell said blueprints on the Market. Have, say, three Blueprints for Hyldrin. One would require the three components dropped from the event, another might require expensive components from Cetus (gems and fish guts and such) and another still might just require lots of Nitain, Detonite and Fieldron. Or let's look at the Larkspur Research. Currently, it requires a Profit-Taker Torid, two cut gems and Sluge. Instead, let's split the components into Advanced, Standard and Basic. You'd need a single Advanced component and the category would include a Crisma Toroid, a Brilliant Eidolon Shard, an Anasa Ayatan Sculpture or 10 Nitain. You'd need two Standard components, and that list might two separate cut Fortuna gems, two separate cut Cetus Gems, Forma or Tellerium. The component might be something simple like Thermal Sludge, Grokdrul, Rubideo, Ferrite or Plymer Bundles. So I could start the Larkspur Research with an Ansa, two Forma and whatever Grokdrul I had lying around. It still requires a decent amount of work, just not work specific to just the newest content addition.

And mind you, I'm throwing ideas off the top of my head here. An actual well-funded, professional development team could come up with a better system. Nightwave, for instance, WAS a system at least in theory designed to divorce rewards from content and remove the bottleneck which was Alerts. Whether it succeeded or not is immaterial - the core idea is absolutely solid. Let players play content they want at their pace and still earn rewards for it. Hell, Void Relics are a similarly broad system in that they're earnable from everywhere and openable practically everywhere, too. I mean, push players through new content while it's still new, by all means. Just make sure you don't abandon it when you move on. You don't want another Rathuum.

[BlindStalker]

On 2019-03-14 at 1:59 AM, Radu955 said:

I did a spy sortie on March the 14th sometime in the morning and accidentally triggered the alarm, that's how i know. Also it was a grineer spy.

So I finally got a spy sortie to come into rotation again, March 19th (as of writing this).

Currently there's a corpus spy in sortie and I purposely triggered the alarm and it still gives you time to try and finish the vault. It doesn't instantly fail. So perhaps something was just a bug and it has been fixed? Or perhaps it's only only connected to grineer spy sortie? I'll keep an eye out for a grineer spy sortie to check again.

Edited March 20, 2019 by BlindStalker

[Casey33]

Once i get the umbra forma from night wave i am taking a very long break maybe a year since i am a casual player this kind of grinding burns me out

[Ulvra]

You have a wierd image of what "fun" entails. I find very little fun about exploiting game mechanics to force grind gear, however blowing myself up by accident has gotten more than a few giggles out of me, particularly with weapons like the lenz where you not only do it but you do it in glorious slow motion while the commander that teleported you inside waves at you from the sideline.

In regards to PoE and Fortuna, yes PoE has a certain amount of grind, but the result is that even today I am not done with the content, I still have things to get and things to do, as for Fortuna, I'm done, been done for months, I have everything and I'm literally burning standing on fish bait because I have nowhere else to stick it. PoE still gives me things to do and it's literally my only gripe with Fortuna that I have nothing to use my standing for anymore, so I have very little reason to do stuff there anymore, however I still enjoy and have fun with the content, even if I'm just tracking down animals on my k-drive to get more floofs.

[BlindStalker]

On 2019-03-14 at 1:59 AM, Radu955 said:

I did a spy sortie on March the 14th sometime in the morning and accidentally triggered the alarm, that's how i know. Also it was a grineer spy.

Okay, me again. So grineer spy sortie up in today's rotation (March 22). Purposely tripped the alarm again, and I still got 30 seconds to still complete it. It doesn't instantly fail. So perhaps you experienced a very rare bug that instantly failed it? It could've been fixed though by now. I can't replicate it though, so spy sortie seems to be normal as far as I can tell.

 

On 2019-03-13 at 12:53 PM, Bipp said:

Most likely talking about OV spy section. iirc one of the Orb Heist missions has a spy section in it.

I haven't done orb vallis bounties in a while I'll admit. Busy with other stuff, but I suppose I'll check on this as well, whenever I get the time.

[NezuHimeSama]

I have seen spy vaults instantly fail before, so it could be a bug.

[Alaeacus]

On 2019-03-13 at 3:09 AM, Radu955 said:

Then Plains of Eidolon came out and it was fun for a few days, until you realized how much you needed to grind in order to get anything good from the vendors. About a year later Fortuna came out which is basically Plains of Eidolon but with corpus instead of grineer. 

Remember when DE specifically said they don't want to repeat the resource grind from POE in Fortuna?  Then when Fortuna launched, it was literally POE in snow.  I don't know.  Where I come from, that encroaches pretty close to "Lie" territory.  Maybe that's just me...

[Alaeacus]

On 2019-03-13 at 9:25 AM, (PS4)guzmantt1977 said:

Now, let's make it even simpler:

1) Are video games trivial?

If you answer yes, then you can recognise that you are in fact complaining quite a bit, about something trivial. At which point you may want to consider not bothering. 

If you answer no, then you probably have way more significant things going on that you are going to need to work on, and your time may be better spent asking why you feel that way about a video game, than trying to nitpick on the issues in Warframe. 

 

You see?

Ironic, how you call OP's opinion and complaints trivial, and you spend all this time trying to convince him of this triviality, when many would argue your entire diatribe is of the upmost trivial endeavor. 

In reality, you're just seeking ways to condescend and trivialize his interests while making yourself out to be more "in control" of your emotions.  Your words are nothing but veiled insults masked behind the appearance of "helping".  You would have made a far better point if you just agreed or disagreed and moved along.  Instead you decided to go on an immature crusade against his reasons for posting.  

[(PSN)guzmantt1977]

29 minutes ago, AlMcFly said:

Ironic, how you call OP's opinion and complaints trivial, and you spend all this time trying to convince him of this triviality, when many would argue your entire diatribe is of the upmost trivial endeavor. 

In reality, you're just seeking ways to condescend and trivialize his interests while making yourself out to be more "in control" of your emotions.  Your words are nothing but veiled insults masked behind the appearance of "helping".  You would have made a far better point if you just agreed or disagreed and moved along.  Instead you decided to go on an immature crusade against his reasons for posting.  

Pity some people can't actually figure out what I called trivial, despite the fact that they are able to quote me explaining it more than a week ago. 

The game, like all video games are trivial. If you are complaining about a video game, you are by definition, complaining about a trivial passtime. 

You can go all the way back and read through the thread if you need to get the context. Or hey, we can just pretend that you got that part of it and didn't engage in a bunch of ridiculous ad hominems. Up to you, mate.