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Going from intrinsic to extrinsic motivation in Warframe... Not sure it's the best thing in the long run...


(PSN)Stealth_Cobra
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Quick definition :

" Intrinsic motivation involves doing something because it's personally rewarding to you. Extrinsic motivation involves doing something because you want to earn a reward or avoid punishment. "

As a vet , Warframe has always been a game I returned to and got lost in for days. It was imho one of the best at giving you tons of things to pursue, but leaving you the freedom to do what you please, for the most part, and set your own goals. Granted, that open structure wasn't for everyone, but it worked for me and I believe most of the fanbase that stuck around with the game over the years.

As I remember when I started playing warframe , these self-imposed  goals kept evolving as i progressed. At first , I wanted to clear the starchart to have acccess to all alerts, then I started to want the coolest frames and weapons, then It evolved into trying to get all the frames, then all weapons ,getting all alt hemets, all mods, all kurias, maxing syndicates, putting a gazilion formas on my favorite weapons, getting rivens, improving operators, getting arcanes, getting MR27 the list went on and on and is no way exhaustive. I could spend weeks just trying new builds for fun, doing endless survivals , etc.

Which brings us to nightwing... And how it drastically changes the motivation style of the game. Now everyone's given the same goals as everyone else, refreshed weekly, like a chore list from an absent space mom. Do your dishers , make your laundry, kill 250 grineers with gaz damage, put three formas on a piece of gear even if you have nothing you want to forma, gild a weapon even if you already mastered everything... All of the sudden, the game is no longer about intrinsic motivation , but about extrinsic motivation.. Do it or you'll miss the big reward in like two months . And I kinda ...hate... this... The underlying idea behind this and how it makes me feel...

Spending half a week doing tasks just because I'm forced to instead of setting my own goals... It really sucks. Worse still ,when I do finish my chore list, I often feel drained and unmotivated to do my own tasks. Hell, I would even say I get discouraged from doing them because, sadly, i'm starting to think with the mindset of "it's probably going to be a challenge next week anyway, why bother doing it unrewarded now when I can wait for it to show up in nightwave".

So yeah , sorry for the mini rant, i'm just curious to see if you realized how much it switched the dynamic of motivation in game when you changed the system, and if you could perhaps consider adapting the current system to be more open in terms of tasks.

Here's my proposed solution:

* Instead of weekly tasks, give us all the possible tasks at the beginning of a season, with way more tasks than necessary to reach max level. (Allowing us to choose the ones we want to do, when we do them how we do them). This would also fix the annoyance of doing 10 Cetus bounties for fun on a Saturday, only to have to do 10 the next day because it's a weekly task now.

* Put a max weekly cap to avoid people burning out and doing 50 tasks a day.

* Refresh the large list every week (so people can find a set of weekly tasks they enjoy doing and do them each week based on their own desires and motivation). Can you imagine starting the week and saying , hmm this week I feel like doing tridolons, I feel like fighting profit baker,  I feel like doing an hour survival... Plus just getting random challenges done without even being aware they existed.

Congrats, you now have a system that proposes you tons of tasks you might enjoy each week, yet that allows player to choose the ones they want to do based on their own tastes, progression goals and desires... Instead of getting a list of chores by mom that wants me to farm 60 gems when I hate mining.

Edited by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra
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I have this same feeling. I really want Umbra Forma, but I nearly got burnt out by doing last weeks set. Looking at this week, it's asking us to gild a modular weapon and use a forma 3 times. I'm sorry, but I got all the modular gear I want and I refuse to waist time and resources to make a weapon I won't use. Goes for Forma too to less extent; all the weapons I care about are maxed, and I care not to find Forma Bp's, build the forma and then waist them on a weapon I didn't need to put any on.

This really is just feeling more and more like chores. The whole snooze you lose from old alerts are still technically here, because you'll have to keep up if you want to make good use of cred and get the high tier rewards from nightwave rank, and to do that you need to do this laundry list of tasks each week, some of which involve doing things you just don't want to do. It's getting more annoying the more it goes on.

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5 minutes ago, R34LM said:

I have this same feeling. I really want Umbra Forma, but I nearly got burnt out by doing last weeks set. Looking at this week, it's asking us to gild a modular weapon and use a forma 3 times. I'm sorry, but I got all the modular gear I want and I refuse to waist time and resources to make a weapon I won't use. Goes for Forma too to less extent; all the weapons I care about are maxed, and I care not to find Forma Bp's, build the forma and then waist them on a weapon I didn't need to put any on.

This really is just feeling more and more like chores. The whole snooze you lose from old alerts are still technically here, because you'll have to keep up if you want to make good use of cred and get the high tier rewards from nightwave rank, and to do that you need to do this laundry list of tasks each week, some of which involve doing things you just don't want to do. It's getting more annoying the more it goes on.

Couldn't agree more.

I'm in the same slow boat to AnnoyanceVille.

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I agree with the core criticism in this thread: while I personally enjoy Nightwave for the most part (when it's not pressuring me to spend valuable crafting resources, buy weapon slots, or make "friends"), I think it's also a symptom of a larger problem where Warframe has been struggling recently to provide intrinsic reasons to keep playing: many recent updates have added enjoyable and interesting content, but have also slathered a layer of grind on top that makes us repeat those same small bits of content over and over again, to the point where it stops being enjoyable. For sure, it keeps us playing for a time, but once we've gotten the rewards, there's no reason to keep going. Worse yet, if the grind is particularly unpleasant, it risks burning players out, causing them to leave for much longer, if not completely.

In this respect, I'd like to see systems that would encourage replayability in a manner that would be more intrinsic: personally, I think the way forward should be to generate actual stakes in the in-game world, and have us play to influence them. As it stands, currently there's no rhyme or reason to any of the missions we do, and I think giving those missions causes and consequences, if only as a framing device, would make for a much more immersive world, and much more intrinsically engaging play.

With regards to Nightwave in particular, I think there's a fundamental dissonance between the nature of the challenges, and Nora's whole tone: the character and voice acting are both excellent, but it feels super weird to be told that we're being "true to [our] truest selves" when we're going through content we strictly do not care about purely for the sake of extrinsic rewards. Similarly, it feels super fake to be told that we're making the System a better place or whatever when literally all we've just done is bullet-jump 150 times. These kinds of challenges would make more sense coming from, say, Teshin, as a means of having us flex our Tenno prowess. By contrast, Nora and her lines would work much better if we were genuinely pushed to help defeat the villain of her event, in this case by hunting down the Wolf, a bit of gameplay that has been conspicuously absent so far from this entire episode of Nightwave.

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9 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Spending half a week doing tasks just because I'm forced to instead of setting my own goals... It really sucks. Worse still ,when I do finish my chore list, I often feel drained and unmotivated to do my own tasks. Hell, I would even say I get discouraged from doing them because, sadly, i'm starting to think with the mindset of "it's probably going to be a challenge next week anyway, why bother doing it unrewarded now when I can wait for it to show up in nightwave".

I definitely echo these sentiments. I’ve been playing a lot less Warframe since the launch of Nightwave. There are a lot of things I might like to do in the game, but because Nightwave is time limited, getting Nightwave challenges done is the priority. I just try to get as much done simultaneously as I can as quickly as I can and end up feeling like I want to play something else, lol.

i don’t understand why some users on the forums think that Nightwave rewards really high-hour-per-week players. I’m missing out on way, way more Nitain... plus extra aura mods to sell... plus steady, quick infusions of oxium, etc. Not to mention the play time that could’ve gone to grinding what I actually wanted to grind that week instead.

Edited by (PS4)nekokujo
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I can relate to this.

Imo the extrinsic motivation has started in Fortuna. PoE felt like a chore to do, you just have to do bounties over and over again until you get everything, then never set foot there again (Except for sorties or Eidolons). Then Fortuna came. It was definitively an improvement, but it still felt like PoE 1.5. It was less grinding I guess, thanks to the standing the gems give, but it was still the same system. It even felt more of a chore because there are too many weapons and items related to Fortuna. I started playing less and less while I thought I would grind the sh*t out of it.

Then Nightwave came, which was my stopping point. DE took some old rewards from the alerts, hid them behind a huge grindwall, then labeled the grindwall as "challenges". Killing 1500 enemies just to grind a system that gives rewards that you used to get in an alert of 5-10 minutes is pointless, boring grind. There is litteraly nothing "Elite" about staying 60 minutes in a survival, except if by "Elite" you mean "Players able to withstand the boredom". This week,"Elite" means "People who have already grinded Fortuna". Guess that idiots will feel entitled if they can do an "Elite" challenge as they are "Elite" and "Hardcore gamers".

DE in 2014 : "We will reduce the grind." 

I truly used to think that DE was a great company that listens to its players, but after seeing I don't know how many matters are overlooked/ignored to DE (Universal Vacuum, Hema, the chat moderators...), I now see it as deceivers, successful because the community has a very short-lived memory. The Rahetalius fiasco litteraly lead to nothing after a petty answer from Steve/Rebecca/Mega because DE chose to ignore it.

But hey.

"We will reduce the grind".

Edited by Ultimatesoup
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For myself as an Endurance Runner Warframe has primarily been intrinsic in nature for years now.

It's not entirely by choice though that may sound odd. My choice is to min/max, make builds, test builds and push those builds. Unfortunately nothing Warframe has supplied since Update 10 or so has actually allowed for that and over time the amount of time investment required to get to that point has simply become unreasonable.

To make matters worse beyond ignoring these flaws within the game. DE turns to only rewarding content they see fit. Regardless that Warframe has been a community of many sub communities and many variations on how to play the game. This was something I downright mocked about Fortuna in a trash video post where eHP + DPS is objectively the best option every single time. DE is not only ignoring play methods but at this point forcing play methods into the game.

I haven't even gotten to the rewards yet.... I'm not sure I need to really. The game at this point has removed Intrinsic as an option. Which when you think about it; is truly a sad state for a video game to be in as most of us play them for fun.

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"Intrinsic vs. extrinsic rewards" is a really good way of putting it. Thank you for the terminology, I'm absolutely going to be using it moving forward! 🙂

 

12 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

* Instead of weekly tasks, give us all the possible tasks at the beginning of a season, with way more tasks than necessary to reach max level. (Allowing us to choose the ones we want to do, when we do them how we do them).

* Put a max weekly cap to avoid people burning out and doing 50 tasks a day.

If I may make a slight aside - does anyone remember the Steam Summer Sales? Initially, Valve tried to turn them into an event, where I think either every day or every week, different games would be on discount. Sometimes, the same game would go on discount multiple times, with multiple percentages. The end result was people like TotalBiscuit having to make summary videos of sales this day, plenty of people bought games only to refund them and re-buy them at a lower price, plenty of other people missed sales because they were waiting for the even large flash sale, etc. After two years of nonsense, Valve conceded and simply made all of the discounted games available at the same time during the entire event. I personally haven't heard complaints about Steam Summer Sales - or had complaints of my own on the matter - since.

This is a roundabout way of saying I agree. Make all challenges in a Season available at the start of and all throughout said season, set them substantially in excess of the expected goals, then let people pick-and-choose what they do and when. If there's fear of players gorging on content and burning themselves out - and there should be - cap the possible standing per week with excess standing from one week counting against the limit of the next (so players don't meta-game grabbing a 5000-point mission with 100 points left in the limit). You can have your Elite and Super Elite and whatever challenges, and those of us who don't like them can just pick other challenges without feeling like half of this week is going to be annoying crap I don't want to do.

And sure: that's going to diminish the aggressive compulsion the Nightwave system - being a Fortnite Battle Pass - is built around. Personally, I see that as a good thing. Pushing players to play beyond their runs a high risk of burning them out, and damaging the game's long-term viability. A happy community is going to be more active than a bitter community coming back jonesing for a fix.

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4 minutes ago, (XB1)Cubic Clem said:

Kind of weird that a video game which should or is supposed to be giving me entertainment makes me annoyed and moan about it being "Monday" (new acts).. never expected that from Warframe, but ok

Perhaps it never made you happy to begin with. Happiness and fun is subjective. It's only asking you to do what is part of the game already.

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15 minutes ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

Perhaps it never made you happy to begin with. Happiness and fun is subjective. It's only asking you to do what is part of the game already.

It's not really asking, more "forcing" your hand into doing stuff I would otherwise have never done.

Again, I think it's great there's a system with seasons , rewards and weekly objectives, I just wish the tasks were choosen by the player and not Digital Extremes.

Forcing veterans to go back and do old content they did a gazillion times when said content has had no new rewards or things added feels like wasted time. I spend the last few weeks doing bounties in cetus and fortuna while being already capped in both in terms of rep, farming gems I didn't need, doing stuff like Derelicts , Orokin Vaults, Lua Vaults , Syndicate missions, Invasions, closing fissure all off them I didn't need to do because I have all rewards that drop in said activities.

Meanwhile, I'm slacking off my own endgame goals (like getting new operator arcanes).

At first, it was kinda "Cute" , as it made me do stuff that I had not done in a while in the game, which I suppose gave variety... But the novelty of going back extinguished quickly after doing laundry lists of stuff like doing 10 syndicate missions and such, so now it feels more like chores than anything else... And the situation will only worsen in new seasons, once we start getting tons of repeat bounties we had in the previous few weeks over and over again... That is unless DE gives us tons of possible bounties and allow us to choose the ones we want to do each week, instead of shoehorning everyone into the same mold and expect everyone to like doing the same tasks every week.

Each player is unique and enjoy doing different things in the game. I might like doing long survivals, while the other guy loves cetus bounties. I might hate fishing, but the other guy loves mining.

A sustainable system would allow the user to choose his own tasks each week, in effect allowing the user's own intrinsic motivation to dictate what he does in game, while rewarding the player for it (that's the extrinsic part of the equation, not as a series of chores, but as a way to reward playing the game how we want to play it).

Edited by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra
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I also feel there's a couple unique problems with the new system.

1 - It kinda hurts when it comes to playing with friends. - The way the system is set up currently, if  I play and do all my weekly tasks early in the week, when my friends log in later, we're at odds because they have to "catch up" and do their tasks while mine were already done. This means I won't be playing with them until they catch up. With a system with more available bounties, it would be easyer to choose tasks we both have not done and play together. This would also remove the "I can't do this bounty problem cause too hard / etc" problem.

2 - Removal of the alert system and putting the rewards behind wolf credits also removes one of the big motivation for new players. I remember when I started playing warframe, one of the main reason I kept playing and logging in everyday was because I wanted all these cool looking helmets in alerts. By removing alerts, you also remove the incentive to log in constantly to check on said alerts... Which in turn means people are less likely to play for extended period of times. The game kinda feels "dead" now ,as there's very little popping up daily to make it exciting... Asides from a few gift of the lotus and invasions that might have a good drop, there's no longer the feeling the game is alive and constantly evolving. I still think alerts should be decoupled from nightwave and should now give wolf creds, allowing the player to buy what they want from a list . That would fix the feeling of having to be here at the right moment for the specific helmet you need and make it more about instant gratification. You do the alert, then you buy the thing you want the most, then comes the next alert and you buy the 2nd coolest thing... Etc.

Edited by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra
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24 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Do the chore or you're not getting paid at the end of the month . Maybe you can skip a few chores here and there, but that's the jest of it.

I guess I just don't understand what's the big deal when it comes to that. If you really really want those rewards, you have to put in effort to get them. Not everything will be handed to you. 

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43 minutes ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

I guess I just don't understand what's the big deal when it comes to that. If you really really want those rewards, you have to put in effort to get them. Not everything will be handed to you. 

You have to remember in the old alert system that, while you had to wait for the alert to come around for an item, one mission got you one item, such as one exterminate mission for one aura.

Now, to get the same aura, you have to do many more missions (such as three exterminated for 3k points) to rank up to the point of getting cred to get the aura. As it stands, it is too much work that people find it to be more like doing chores instead of tolerable grind.

I understand that we have to actually earn the items, but, especially now that we have to gild and forma items just for the sake of it, the work to get them is a bit intense and forced.

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35 minutes ago, R34LM said:

Now, to get the same aura, you have to do many more missions (such as three exterminated for 3k points) to rank up to the point of getting cred to get the aura. As it stands, it is too much work that people find it to be more like doing chores instead of tolerable grind.

Except, what if the aura you wanted showed up at 2am when you were asleep. You missed it and you don't know when it will come back. Yeah this may take longer but it is more reliable than alerts.

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4 minutes ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

Except, what if the aura you wanted showed up at 2am when you were asleep. You missed it and you don't know when it will come back. Yeah this may take longer but it is more reliable than alerts.

I can't disagree with you there. I think the trade off of availability for more investment was a bit much. I had this idea where rank up rewards could be sold for higher amounts of wolf cred in a separate store and every rank up would give cred. So an umbra forma would be 400 to 500 cred and every rank up would give 25 cred. Still around 20 ranks worth of work, but you can afford to miss on a few more challenges you don't want or can't do.

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2 hours ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Forcing veterans to go back and do old content they did a gazillion times when said content has had no new rewards or things added feels like wasted time.

 

I find this to be a key element in why it feels like doing chores instead of playing a game.

Invasions have a few cosmetic changes where terrain changes. Not even sure when because it's been so long but they're otherwise exactly the same as they were 6 years ago. They added Vandal and Wraith weapons but if you already own those it's hardly more reason to go back. I've mentioned this countless times in the past. When DE makes content they don't put any lasting quality on it. They need core systems that allows content to expand on it's own.

PoE / Vallis are dead-end content. They have to keep adding things to it and keep adding rewards to get players to go back when they could actually keep a portion of players interested by working with the core system. Scaling is one of them but there are others like added attacks, more dangerous telegraphed attacks, hazards and mini-bosses. Vallis did a better job of this than PoE but the scaling caps at 125.... Just when it starts to get interesting and we could easily do endless mode bounties.

Back to Invasions though. Why is this not an escalating chain of missions and objective with increasing reward? We're fighting a small War. Elite troops should be involved in this after a point. min-bosses like they key guards in Void Sab and with each fight we get paid more until the final battle to end the conflict (for that player).

I fully expect Infested Salvage to show up on Nightwave at some point because it's a dead mission and It didn't need to be. I found it decent enough but it never really got any tweaks or improvements. I also found the "Defend 3 stationary NPC Defense Mission" for Nidus' quest fun and was hoping that was the new mission. That one is easy to made rewarding. For each one standing you get bonuses and you lose when all 3 die forcing players to try harder and that might be dare I say, fun.

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4 hours ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

I don't see how its forcing you at all.

The "you don't HAVE to do it" argument is dead in the water to begin with. Warframe doesn't force you to do anything, up to and including playing the game in the first place. However, to view reward systems in this context is reductive to the point of being meaningless. Most games - and MMOs in particular - use a system of incentives to get players to keep laying and engage in content they otherwise wouldn't. Nightwave's design leans very heavily on rather disruptive psychology, basing its motivation around creating negative feelings of missing out. While that CAN increase player activity in the short term, the bad blood this creates is going to backfire over the long term.

I understand that YOU don't feel pressured, but that doesn't change the fact that the system is intentionally designed to apply pressure to players. I myself don't feel pressured, but that's largely because I more or less gave up on getting much of anything useful out of it. As a result, I find myself LESS likely to stay active the more contact I have with the system.

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4 hours ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

I guess I just don't understand what's the big deal when it comes to that. If you really really want those rewards, you have to put in effort to get them. Not everything will be handed to you. 

I want the rewards I was previously getting, I could easily pick up a few Nitian, some helmets and a couple aura's all in a day before at 5/10minutes a pop, now I have to get 6 ranks of Nightwave and wait weeks for the challenges and "Wolf Store" to refresh just to get one or two.

Nightwave would of been an awesome bit of fun if they hadn't used it to replace the alerts and they really should be ran side by side. Yes so what if we get a few extra rewards because of it, isn't that why we play?

Plus without alerts I find my game time has dropped massively and alot of my ingame time is spent with the game minimized now while I trawl the net looking for the motivation to run a mission, something I had no problem with before Nightwave.

All in all I can see me finishing the tasks I had set for my self, possibly completing this wave and then leaving for another game as its just not doing it for me anymore. Shame this really would of been a welcome update if the Dev's hadn't removed Alerts.

Edited by TheSkunkyMonk
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4 hours ago, (XB1)Shodian said:

Except, what if the aura you wanted showed up at 2am when you were asleep. You missed it and you don't know when it will come back. Yeah this may take longer but it is more reliable than alerts. 

It honestly wasn't that much of a problem, especially with many phone apps that could track alerts and notify you of alerts. Sure you got a few alerts while at work, and I did have to wake up at 3Am a couple of time, do an alert half asleep before going to bed, but I'll take that over farming bounties for three months to get what a fraction of what I used to get instantly by just logging in and doing a five minute mission a couple times a week when the alert showed up and I was available... And again , this would be fixed by making alerts that pay wolf credits, that way you can miss many and still buy exactly what you wanted when you do get one.

Edited by (PS4)Stealth_Cobra
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  • 2 weeks later...

Here we go again. Spend most of a day helping a friend do LUA drift rooms the day before the nightwave reset, now I have to do it again... I really hate this, at this rate I'll stop doing anything on my own, as I keep getting punished for taking initiative and trying to carve my own path in the game. I put five forma on my frames, the next day you ask me to put five more , I max out my syndicates, the next week you ask me to do 10 syndicate missions... It's so annoying.

NIghtwave 1 is nearing it's end, I really you hope you guys have been paying attention to the feedback given in all the forum topics and will propose a slightly altered formula for future seasons.

The more I think about it , just having 30 different tasks per week with a cap of ten you can do would "Fix" the issue, giving players way more task variety while allowing us to shape our own warframe experience to what we enjoy doing. Nightwave should be a system that rewards player for doing the tasks they like every week, not a system that forces everyone to do the same tasks each week. It would also help when it comes to playing with friends, cause right now, I do my tasks at the start of the week and when my friends log on later, I don't have anything to do with them cause they are doing the same tasks I did already.

I'm already kinda sick of most of the challenges after only a single season too... Please just allow us to choose our tasks from a wide list.

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51 minutes ago, (PS4)Stealth_Cobra said:

Here we go again. Spend most of a day helping a friend do LUA drift rooms the day before the nightwave reset, now I have to do it again... I really hate this, at this rate I'll stop doing anything on my own, as I keep getting punished for taking initiative and trying to carve my own path in the game. I put five forma on my frames, the next day you ask me to put five more , I max out my syndicates, the next week you ask me to do 10 syndicate missions... It's so annoying.

 

They did this hardcore with both PoE and Vallis.

They do similar with all content really. If you take initiative and go quickly it will most always be easier at a later date having wasted your time

Why the Hema excuse was so funny to me.

Take Exploiter Orb as an example. I took time and bought boosters to farm up all the rare fish and gems I might need for the future then this boss comes and drops tons with it's own booster in effect the entire time it's out. Pretty much made all the time spent fishing and mining in Vallis a complete waste of effort. A lot of games do this. They make things hard then ease off over time to give casual players access but they do it to a far less extreme and unlike those MMOs and various other games Warframe has nowhere else to climb to. It's just one static grind pit into another and so the player is ultimately better off not bothering with new content until months after it's been released. I have around 150 Eidolon Captures that now count as Kills because I did them before Eidolons dropped Arcanes. 150 no-Arcane kills that were just for rep. Less rep than you can get now even.

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