Why not improve the PvP of the game?

[FlyingDice]

It's not an efficient use of development time or resources. PvP in WF is and always has been played regularly by a tiny minority of the playerbase, but requires close to the resources of a distinct fork of the game, including the balancing and rebalancing of both new and existing content within the Conclave/Solar Rail/&c. environment.

The only thing more niche in WF than PvP is not complaining about content that requires you to think or put effort into playing the game the notion of Archwing PvP.

[Kontrollo]

2 minutes ago, FlyingDice said:

It's not an efficient use of development time or resources. PvP in WF is and always has been played regularly by a tiny minority of the playerbase, but requires close to the resources of a distinct fork of the game, including the balancing and rebalancing of both new and existing content within the Conclave/Solar Rail/&c. environment. 

You definitely have no idea what you're talking about.

Conclave has gotten a new map in Update 22, I think. The latest rebalancing was when? Somewhere in summer 2018? Read the patch notes; a few fixes here and there, but there's been no dev investment for close to a year now. From what I've gleaned it's suffering for it, yet people still play it.

Meanwhile the PvE crowd drones on about "Content Drought" if there hasn't been anything significant in a few weeks. And I'm no different, by the way. I expect continuous updates from the PvE side of the game.

[FlyingDice]

9 minutes ago, Kontrollo said:

You definitely have no idea what you're talking about.

Conclave has gotten a new map in Update 22, I think. The latest rebalancing was when? Somewhere in summer 2018? Read the patch notes; a few fixes here and there, but there's been no dev investment for close to a year now. From what I've gleaned it's suffering for it, yet people still play it.

Meanwhile the PvE crowd drones on about "Content Drought" if there hasn't been anything significant in a few weeks. And I'm no different, by the way. I expect continuous updates from the PvE side of the game.

You might want to work on your reading comprehension. I'm not saying that PvP is eating up development resources, I'm saying that the reason it isn't is because it's not economical for DE to do so.

PvP has always been played by a tiny handful of people, has always been wonky and full of cheese, and has never been a development priority.

That it wasn't the most questionable aspect of solar rail conflicts speaks more to the obnoxious nature of certain groups (*cough*ICE*cough*) than to the quality of PvP.

Edited March 15, 2019 by FlyingDice
.

[Kontrollo]

1 minute ago, FlyingDice said:

You might want to work on your reading comprehension. I'm not saying that PvP is eating up development resources, I'm saying that the reason it isn't is because it's not economical for DE to do so.

PvP has always been played by a tiny handful of people, has always been wonky and full of cheese, and has never been a development priority.

That it wasn't the most questionable aspect of solar rail conflicts speaks more to the obnoxious nature of certain groups (*cough*ICE*cough*) than to the quality of PvP.

You might want to come up with some actual facts when you're talking to me of all people, because I have a very good idea of what was going from the introduction of the new Conclave until I took a long break from the game in early 2017. At that point in time Conclave was actually in pretty good shape.

I'm not talking about Solar Rail Conflicts, those were with PvE gear, still. Of course they were full of cheese in a game that has literal aimbots as abilities.

Also, no one is arguing against PvP being a niche in this primarily PvE focused game.

 

You literally wrote: "It's not an efficient use of development time or resources. ... but requires close to the resources of a distinct fork of the game ..."

... and it doesn't. Try again.

[(PSN)FriendSharkey]

I wish they would invest in PVP that PVE players want to play...Duel teams fighting against hordes separate from each other while forcing bosses to drop on the other team's fight. Bungie definitely found a PVE PVP game mode in that...

They have thrown out Racing..I would say toss in an Indiana Jones death race variant as well..( That's where players have to get to the goal post before a massive rolling ball of death crushes them...You can use the environment to slow other players down...hence the old adage..I don't have to outrun the bear..I just have to out run you. )

There's lots of creative PVP that semi-PVE players would try if it was geared for them..If you can keep PVE players apart so it's not so personal they might find that the chase is a ton of fun..Like the game type Motorcycles Vs. Jet Planes from GTA..only it would be K-Drives vs Daraygns...maybe GTA's Tower to Tower rocket fights...

Conclave is always wanting the same old same old death match or Battle Royal to chase this trend that works here...but Warframe is a majorly a PVE attraction..It would be nice if DE would cater to the larger player count and try out ideas that could bring them in..because normal PVP is everywhere and done better...They need to focus on what makes them unique and go with what has drawn many to their main game and cater to that in the Conclave vein of the game if it's to stick around...

 

 

Edited March 16, 2019 by (PS4)FriendSharkey

[Oreades]

ROI the same reason they've been neglecting Archwing all this time. 

Practically none of the playerbase actually uses conclave. So it would be a lot of work for very little return. Especially when most people who would take advantage of conclave are just as likely if nor more likely to just get their PvP fix in another game that is actually PvP centered. 

[Tricky5hift]

First major improvement to PVP would be dedicated servers but from what I've seen they have little to no intention of bringing that to the game.

[taiiat]

because the 99% of the Community is highly toxic and complains when anything even acknowledges Conclave, let alone allows it be an option for progression in addition to the rest of the game.

2 minutes ago, Tricky5hift said:

First major improvement to PVP would be dedicated servers but from what I've seen they have little to no intention of bringing that to the game.

there are Dedicated Servers hosted by Players, in various locations around the world already. :)

Edited March 16, 2019 by taiiat

[Kontrollo]

2 minutes ago, Oreades said:

ROI the same reason they've been neglecting Archwing all this time. 

Practically none of the playerbase actually uses conclave. So it would be a lot of work for very little return. Especially when most people who would take advantage of conclave are just as likely if nor more likely to just get their PvP fix in another game that is actually PvP centered. 

Just now, Tricky5hift said:

First major improvement to PVP would be dedicated servers but from what I've seen they have little to no intention of bringing that to the game. 

I'd be happy to try and answer questions if you have them, but you'd have to at least read some of the posts that are already there.

They enabled the community to host dedicated servers in October 2016 and the top hoster alone has ~170k games to his name.

[TARINunit9]

3 hours ago, tyasonx said:

Warframe is a great game, but all news is for PvE.

Are developers not thinking about improving PvP ever ?

They probably aren't

See, Warframe is popular with a very distinct group of players: players who are sick of PvP. We don't play lobby shooters, we don't play battle royale shooters, we don't play survival shooters. We play PvE shooters

The downside is, a lot of these players get REALLY defensive about whenever DE starts talking about PvP again, to unnecessary extremes

[Oreades]

1 minute ago, Kontrollo said:

I'd be happy to try and answer questions if you have them, but you'd have to at least read some of the posts that are already there.

They enabled the community to host dedicated servers in October 2016 and the top hoster alone has ~170k games to his name.

Unless those games are concurrent, really can't say that I care. Much in the same way I don't care when a company flaunts their registered users. It's a really nice number, it sounds great but at the end of the day it doesn't convey anything of significance.

Assuming it's an even spread you're looking at what~200 games a day, I'd be a bit surprised if Warframe propper wasn't pulling in ~200 games in under a half hour. 

Then there is the whole DE allowing users to take on the burden of running dedicated conclave servers because they weren't going to. Which is admittedly fairly shrewd of them cause it saves a lot of money and bandwidth on their end for something that at present isn't really worth the investment. 

Now here is where I think they could really shine, if they went the TF2 rout. Let the players mod the everloveing snot out of Conclave. TF2 didn't take off because it was a great game,  It took off because Valve let the community run wild with it. The community does the bulk of the work and Valve just sits back and sells hats. 

[Kontrollo]

1 minute ago, Oreades said:

Unless those games are concurrent, really can't say that I care. Much in the same way I don't care when a company flaunts their registered users. It's a really nice number, it sounds great but at the end of the day it doesn't convey anything of significance.

Assuming it's an even spread you're looking at what~200 games a day, I'd be a bit surprised if Warframe propper wasn't pulling in ~200 games in under a half hour. 

Then there is the whole DE allowing users to take on the burden of running dedicated conclave servers because they weren't going to. Which is admittedly fairly shrewd of them cause it saves a lot of money and bandwidth on their end for something that at present isn't really worth the investment.

Moving the goalposts, and then trying to downplay it. 🙄

That's the number from a single person, you can see the other top hosters here (which is also linked in that dev workshop thread). These are the clearly verifiable part of the situation,  the Listen Server method (what people here usually refer to as P2P) still exists and is the fallback, in any case. But only DE knows the numbers of those games. The Dedicated Server method is only available to PC players, by the way.

Also, all of this is still is not to say that PvP is super popular, only to debunk that people aren't playing it.

 

Sure, and people are willing to do it. Side note: If you read the FAQ in that thread it might also at some point become an option for raids, when they're finally going to make a return.

[Oreades]

25 minutes ago, Kontrollo said:

Moving the goalposts, and then trying to downplay it. 🙄

That's the number from a single person, you can see the other top hosters here (which is also linked in that dev workshop thread). These are the clearly verifiable part of the situation,  the Listen Server method (what people here usually refer to as P2P) still exists and is the fallback, in any case. But only DE knows the numbers of those games. The Dedicated Server method is only available to PC players, by the way.

Also, all of this is still is not to say that PvP is super popular, only to debunk that people aren't playing it.

 

Sure, and people are willing to do it. Side note: If you read the FAQ in that thread it might also at some point become an option for raids, when they're finally going to make a return.

Not sure how I'm moving goal posts, mine has been and still is set at PvP not being significantly viable. Sadly don't really know how I can upspin things that just aren't there. I have visceral locating for feelgood number. 

Tho I am bored enough to roughly crunch through those numbers and assuming I'm not terribly far off you're looking at ~1,622 (rounding up) games per day. Which is about as far as I can get without being able to quantify exactly what a game consists of. A game could be 1v1 it could be 8v8 (I think that's as high as conclave goes) it could last a scant few minutes, it could last tens of minutes. For all I know it counts a game that starts and then everyone leaves which could mean that rough number is peppered with erroneous game values. 

It's also not shifting the goalpost to say that IMO if DE really wanted to do anything significant with Conclave they should shift the burden in totality onto those who want Conclave. People keep saying things like "I want Warframe Battle Royal", shift the burden to the community and there is a pretty good chance someone somewhere would code Orb Valis Battle Royal, where as the odds of DE doing the same are functionally nil. Personally I could go for some Warframe Prophunt but ey that's just me. 

Who knows maybe Conclave spawns the next big craze, most of todays "big games" came from Mods of other games, 

• TF2 (Quake)
• DOTA (Warcraft 3?) 
• PUBG (pretty sure it was spawned after Minecraft Hungergames)

Or...... maybe it just fades into oblivion but that's mostly up to the community at that point and little to do with DE. 

[Kontrollo]

Just now, Oreades said:

Not sure how I'm moving goal posts, mine has been and still is set at PvP not being significantly viable.

No you're right sorry, I've confused that. The other guy brought up the argument about dedicated servers, I was referring to that with the first part.

Yours was:

1 hour ago, Oreades said:

Practically none of the playerbase actually uses conclave. So it would be a lot of work for very little return.

As shown, there's not "practically none" who play it. Work has already been done in earlier years, and from what I've seen there's almost zero maintenance now.

 

No need to crunch the numbers here, we don't have the full picture.

And yeah, forget Battle Royale, the game engine is clearly not made for that kind of thing. You need ~1 MBps up-link bandwidth for one full lobby of 8 IIRC, and that's with the default settings. There are higher settings which consume even more.

Also from what I've seen, lobbies can fill up during a region's prime time, but otherwise 2+ are common, too, these days. They do usually last the full duration, because there's incentive to wait it out.

Finally, there doesn't seem to be a lot of willingness to move it farther anyway (e.g. a server browser and/or skill-based matchmaking have been common requests since forever), and there's significant push-back from the community, too. (Which is kind of a shame, because this is the studio that was involved in the UT series of old.) It's not going to be the next big craze I'd say, but it could at least be another way to enjoy the game.

It is up to DE whether to put in the bare minimum into it to keep it going. They could decide to disable new weapons by default, and they could deactivate things that are clearly not in a good spot right now. I can spot these things even today by simply looking at some numbers -- don't even need to be actively involved.

[Firetempest]

Poor community interest in pvp.

Need to improve pvp to drum up interest.

Need interest in pvp to set aside resources to improve it.

See the closed loop the devs have to work with? Then they tried to make a separate pvp game. A HeRo shooter with cards. It bombed and they canned it a week into open beta. DE just does not seem to have the luck to make lightning strike twice.

[Mr.SpookSpook]

Just go away and play one of the gazillion other games with a pvp focus.
This game is PVE and DE is not gonna waste their resources for the misplaced minority that does not realize they play the wrong game.

[Kontrollo]

8 hours ago, Kontrollo said:

... You need ~1 MBps up-link bandwidth for one full lobby of 8 IIRC, and that's with the default settings. There are higher settings which consume even more. ...

Quick amendment:

The second of 3 bandwidth settings is consuming about that much in a full lobby of 8 -- a bit more it seems. The default is the lowest one, however. Anyway, one can see how this might be problematic in a BR setting.

 

From here (although that was back in 2017, so things may have changed):

[Paradoxity]

11 hours ago, TARINunit9 said:

They probably aren't

See, Warframe is popular with a very distinct group of players: players who are sick of PvP. We don't play lobby shooters, we don't play battle royale shooters, we don't play survival shooters. We play PvE shooters

The downside is, a lot of these players get REALLY defensive about whenever DE starts talking about PvP again, to unnecessary extremes

I don't know if I'd call them unnecessary extremes, just because we've seen many, many games falter by trying to balance PvE and PvP under the same roof and have both suffer as a result. And most of us- all of us, probably- know that even really good developers like DE are notoriously hard of hearing when it comes to their player bases, so that kind of extreme reaction is just this side of hardwired for most of us because that's just what we're conditioned to have to do to get some kind of favorable outcome. Warframe has always been a PvE centric game- remember there wasn't any PvP for quite a while back at the start. Taking any dedicated resources to build a good, healthy PvP system into the game would be seen, rightly or wrongly, as pulling them from PvE content (especially given the amount of effort such an endeavor would likely require)- which, as you pointed out, is why we're here.  

[FlusteredFerret]

14 hours ago, tyasonx said:

Warframe is a great game, but all news is for PvE.

Are developers not thinking about improving PvP ever ?

 

Just do not make me battelroyale.

Probably not. They've tried a number of times already and none of the modes proved popular for very long.

Think anyone hoping for a new PvP mode will be in for a VERY long wait.

[bibmobello]

I have a big idea about a PVP style, practically it's already coded. I don't understand why they don't develop it... betting credits should be fun...

[FlusteredFerret]

26 minutes ago, bibmobello said:

I have a big idea about a PVP style, practically it's already coded. I don't understand why they don't develop it... betting credits should be fun...

My thoughts too.

Wouldn't take much to adapt Index to a PvP game. I think even I might play it.

 

Problem is, I think the majority of PvPers are after something rather different.

Edited March 16, 2019 by FlusteredFerret

[SenariousNex]

We had Dark Sectors, but people complained and now we don't. Welcome to a game designed by the community. All the people saying that no one wants it are wrong, there were massive alliances battling it out, but they all quit when the armistice arrived.

People who like PvP are just not playing warframe atm because there IS no PvP, build it and they will come. Not other way around.

[FlusteredFerret]

5 minutes ago, SenariousNex said:

We had Dark Sectors, but people complained and now we don't. Welcome to a game designed by the community. All the people saying that no one wants it are wrong, there were massive alliances battling it out, but they all quit when the armistice arrived.

People who like PvP are just not playing warframe atm because there IS no PvP, build it and they will come. Not other way around.

Unlikely. You just said it yourself.

People complained about Dark Sectors. People complained about Conclave...they also complained about Lunaro.

Problem is they complain...but don't give the devs any idea about what they WOULD play.

 

So while DE may not have ruled out any further PvP modes, I think it will be well down their list of priorities.

I think this is one case where the devs probably DO need some guidance / feedback from the community.

[SenariousNex]

Just now, FlusteredFerret said:

 

I think this is one case where the devs probably DO need some guidance / feedback from the community.

I think input from the community will do far more harm than good. It is exactly why we will never have endgame or hardcore content.

I think super unbalanced Dark Sectors and Old Conclave were just fine, they just needed refinement and a few cheesy things nerfed down a bit. New conclave is just a lobotomized version of that.

[Sloan441]

17 hours ago, tyasonx said:

Warframe is a great game

Yes, it is. 

17 hours ago, tyasonx said:

Are developers not thinking about improving PvP ever ?

They have, repeatedly. The community invariably rejects it. 

This is a PvE focused game. Much of the community came here for PvE gameplay. They don't want PvP and they especially don't want to be forced to PvP for PvE rewards. All attempts at introducing various schemes of PvP into Warframe have been met with profound disinterest from the community. Consequently, it withers on the vine.