Nightwave + alerts removal feedback

[SilverBones]

Hey Tenno,

Nightwave is here in all of it’s Nora Night-backed glory, and there has been a lot of back and forth (both on the forums and internally) about the challenges and how to accrue Nightwave standing. Series 1 of Nightwave is our first attempt at this addition to Warframe, and we want to thank you all for sharing your thoughts and requests. We will be using this thread to gather feedback from everyone on all Platforms! 

So at first pass, we are seeing some concerns rise to the top:

• Ayatan Challenges - too RNG dependent.
• Survival Challenges - too long in one sitting.
• Friend / Clan Challenges - "I have no friends/my friends don't play Warframe". 

For some of these Elite challenges, we were attempting to speak to the endurance runners, but it seems we may have missed the mark - if you liked it, or didn't like it, comment below. In the end, we wanted to make a series of challenges that spoke to every type of player, but we do not want to do so at the cost of enjoyment overall.

Nightwave is still new to the community and we are expecting to see more feedback come as the series progresses - you've only seen a % of all Acts, so as Series 1 progresses we need your feedback on the appearing Acts. We've seen players responding with some possible solutions that would make these challenges more piecemeal, balance the resources needed to complete some challenges, and assess social requirements to get your goodies.

We will be applying what we have learned to Nightwave Series 2 - but can only improve with constructive, detailed posts about what you like / didn't like about acts. Knowing what you like is just as important as what you don't like. 
 

[Voltage]

It was nice having something that was more than the usual "Rotation C and restart" structure. I hope more challenges are available to fill the "Elite" role for challenges.

Will there be dedicated missions like Syndicate dailies to be more interesting than capturing hundreds of fugitive groups? This would also be cool to have dedicated spawns for the Wolf through some additional linear grind.

3 hours ago, [DE]Bear said:

In the end, we wanted to make a series of challenges that spoke to every type of player, but we do not want to do so at the cost of enjoyment overall.

The majority of the playerbase who will participate in this system place challenges like "10 perfect conservation" as "Elite" (I am not trying to be rude, just realistic and observant). Trying to fill everyone's niche is impossible due to the variety of difficulties people play at, and the overwhelming majority of this game's playerbase being highly casual (again, not necessarily bad, just the target audience). If Elite challenges are to be truly elite, we should have way more challenges available so that the casual player can get 30 easily for the Umbral Forma (like they want) and the experienced can reach that same spot efficiently (as they should).

If the challenges are too hard/time consuming for the majority, there will be complaints until its mind-numbingly easy (see: the Profit Taker with Repeller Systems, Vauban Prime crafting costs in 2016, attempts at Hema reduction in 2016/2017, Focus grind since Update 18, Void RNG complaints for years, etc). Trust me, I used to be one of many to complain about grind. I have since learned that proper grind in Warframe is what keeps the game engaging, and although nothing is perfect, less grind will ultimately lead to less gameplay and more content drought.

With this in mind, and from my observations throughout the years, the majority don't want grind and want to be handed the items almost immediately. This is quite clear seeing complaints on the first day of a week long challenge.

It's nice to see an attempt from the development team, and thank you for the transparency [DE]Bear. I (and many others) await more changes to the Nightwave system. I do hope DE goes back to the drawing board and tries again with this "try to cater to everyone here and there" style of challenges.

It's just a shame that the community is quick to denounce any attempt at more gameplay. There is a reason we have long lengths of content drought, and it's because we ask for it.

Edited March 5, 2019 by Voltage

[PETI258]

Make the time/wave limited missions cumulative so we don't have to do it in 1 go (like capture targets).

[No1Eye]

hello.

nightwaves are a nice addition, but as a daily/weekly challenging system and not as an alert system.

it is a promising feature in game, but it needs to be adjusted to be more friendly and enjoyable to all kinds of players, old, new, casual, hardcore and so forth. and also, tweak a bit the rewards accordingly.

also, alerts should be returned in the game and be tweaked a bit to a point they will be more frequently poped up and stay longer when they pop up, so not to be missed so easily, for those who want to get a reward out of them.

everybody will be happy afterwards, i am sure of it.

thank you.

 

Edited March 4, 2019 by No1Eye

[tobascodagama]

5 minutes ago, [DE]Bear said:

For some of these Elite challenges, we were attempting to speak to the endurance runners, but it seems we may have missed the mark - if you liked it, or didn't like it, comment below.

That's fine, but you had TWO Elite weekly challenges dedicated to endurance running, which is something like 1/4 of all the possible standing that is earnable in one week. If you don't like endurance runs, you're missing out on a ton of standing and need to max out absolutely everything else (including all the dailies) for the week if you want to stay on schedule to "complete" the rewards track.

Not to mention that the whole idea of putting your gameplay on a tight "schedule" of activities, booked ten weeks in advance, that you may or may not enjoy that is anti-fun to begin with.

[Ailyene]

Overall I like Nightwave and I don't really mind that there's a 60 minute endurance challenge, but I don't like how there are two of them at the same time.

Admittedly this week's weeklies are a bit short since even with the 60m survival I finished them all in ~3 hours, but I feel it really shouldn't ever double down on the most annoying challenge that most people will probably not want to do, since that just takes away two challenges instead of one if we don't want to do a 60m survival regardless of the total time commitment required for the weeklies this week.

 

Edit: 3/5/2019

Incase it might give any ideas, this is how other games I've played over 2k hours in handled similar systems.

GW2:
Back when it had weeklies and monthlies...  (Yes, that was back in ancient times)

We'd have 20+ choices of challenges seperated into Daily/Weekly/Monthly split between PvE/PvP/WvW challenges and to get credit we only had to complete any 3 of our choice.

There would be 15 options for Dailies (need 3), 6 for Weeklies (need 2), and 3 for Monthlies (need 1).  This gives a lot of options to players while not overwhelming them.  These on average would take longer than Warframe's ones to complete.

PSO2:
While PSO2 has MANY Daily/Weekly systems, the BINGO system on PSO2 is probably closest.

In PSO2 each season we get a themed Bingo board that we fill out by proforming certain tasks: 24 challenges total to fill each board and as the board is filled the number of Bingos naturally increases.

Its seperated into an Easy one that give practical rewards that help everyone especially newer players and a Hard one that's unlocked after that gives rewards more tailored to Veterans.  

Both boards are available throughout the entire Season so players are not put under much pressure to rush. 

Ironically even though PSO2 makes Warframe look like the most simple, casual, non-grindy game ever by comparison, the Bingo board is really easy to fill out relative to both Warframe and GW2s system.

 

Edited March 5, 2019 by Ailyene
Ideas

[Spam661]

friend challenge is easy, add temp friend, removed when done, or keep around for later, whatev. but I litterally cant find a team for 60m survival cause everyone is doing kuva survival and it seems i cant. in fact i cant do half of them because they are locked behind content i have not done or grinded out yet and some of it is just soooo boring. I couldnt do half the stuff last time either. really terrible. got to 52/100 eximus and gave up was too tired to finish grinding them. this is a really HORRIBLE thing for people that dont play alot. I have to grind that stuff instead of actually have fun with the few hours i play. 

 

keep night wave if you want. but!! Please put aura mods and nightmare mods and important bps back on alerts.  and maybe nitain. just no visuals bps for fluff. 

with alerts i could take a few min to run  dat cap and go back to work, this takes to much time. 

[Kontrollo]

I still haven't done the Survivals, but I don't think you've missed the mark for the Endurance runners.

Although I do think 1 hour might be a bit much for some people. Just had an idea, though: How about a baseline of somewhere between 30 and 50 minutes, and a bit of bonus standing (credits?), capped at 60-90?

You know, some kind of stretch goal?

Edited March 4, 2019 by Kontrollo
elaborating

[(XBOX)Skippy575]

One of the larger gripes I have at least with this weeks challenges are the two survival ones, and it really just boils down to having to do an hour long survival for each challenge. I think if there was a way to make it cumulative time then players could do it in small chunks during the week and still complete it.
 

Also, what about the prison escapees giving small amounts of wolf creds alongside standing? Maybe 5 credits for capturing all 3 or something. It would help with earning a little more stuff from the store IMO.

[MagPrime]

8 minutes ago, PETI258 said:

Make the time/wave limited missions cumulative so we don't have to do it in 1 go (like capture targets).

This!  Exactly, this!

Most of the challenges are already cumulative and casual friendly.  What I've heard from my clan, friends and general community is that 1 hour is simply unreasonable to expect from a lot of people who have shaky connections or time constraints.  If the survivals were cumulative, it would reward people who can't do endurance runs just as much as people who can, just in smaller bites.

As to the friend/clan challenges; I adore these.  There currently is no incentive to really use your clan or friends list, to reach out to people on either list, and these have made a marked change in both for me.  I'm seeing more conversation taking place in clan chat, I'm getting more interaction from my friends list than I have in years, and clan members are even branching out into Alliance chat for the first time. 

I do understand that it puts a hardship on people who don't have subscriptions (console) or don't have stable enough connections to participate in this one and I'm honestly not sure how to compensate for that but I truly do like the friend/clan challenges. 

Edited March 4, 2019 by MagPrime

[DeMonkey]

Might be worth setting up a section on the forum dedicated to Nightwave, as was started with Fortuna.

In fact, are the Fortuna/Garuda sections even relevant enough to require their own dedicated space? Feedback will be easier to read.

Just now, Kontrollo said:

I still haven't done the Survivals, but I don't think you've missed the mark for the Endurance runners.

I'm just chalking that up to a brain fart. By their statement, "speaking to Endurance runners" was the mark. They accomplished that.

It's predominantly non-endurance runners that are annoyed, but they were never the mark and thus cannot be "missed".

[Hedasker]

il y a 23 minutes, [DE]Bear a dit :

• Survival Challenges - too long in one sitting.

Especially when the team gets the challenge achieved at the end of the mission when the host does not for obscure reasons... I've contacted the support for that but I guess they'll not help me as usual when they'll answer me, too late, in at least 18 days like the last time I contacted them, one year ago.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Hedasker

[Kontrollo]

6 minutes ago, DeMonkey said:

I'm just chalking that up to a brain fart. By their statement, "speaking to Endurance runners" was the mark. They accomplished that.

It's predominantly non-endurance runners that are annoyed, but they were never the mark and thus cannot be "missed".

But there's also this:

23 minutes ago, [DE]Bear said:

... In the end, we wanted to make a series of challenges that spoke to every type of player, but we do not want to do so at the cost of enjoyment overall. ...

Turns out these are conflicting goals in this system.

Edited March 4, 2019 by Kontrollo
formatting

[OvisCaedo]

Endurance runners do this stuff anyhow because they find it fun, as much as it may bewilder the rest of us. I think their requests for acknowledgement are based more on wanting something to be consistently beneficial about it, not random one-off challenges to do what they do anyhow that the rest of the playerbase will find absurd.

Spending 60 minutes in one mission doing the same thing is boring for the majority of people. And you guys know that, because you've repeatedly made choices to try to dissuade people from doing it, and have generally been extremely against giving scaling rewards or such for it.

I think some challenges (like this one) would be served by having there be actual alerts tied to it; Have an elite alert available for the whole week of a high-starting level Kuva Survival, for example, with the inability TO activate life support towers. Cut out the bulk of the twiddling and have people face off against the end stretch.

Edited March 4, 2019 by OvisCaedo

[Zahnny]

60 minutes feels too long for a single session of Survival. I'd be happy if it was at least half of what it currently is now at 30 minutes (similar to the relic alert recently)

I just don't trust my computer, my internet or the game not to mess up somehow doing something for 60 minutes. (and that's not taking into account doing it multiplayer where issues such as other players internet, computer, ping or client could mess up) I had attempted to do the Kuva one solo earlier, but only got as far as 48:50 before the life support ran out. Needless to say I was...upset. I'll admit I really wanted to use some colorful language after that.

[TooTired4This]

Please keep Endurance challenges. It's called a challenged for a reason. Its there for a week and we already have people complaining about it at the first day SMH.
People need to understand that this thing doesn't need to be completed within a day like everyone wants, it can be done within a WEEK.

Edited March 4, 2019 by --Q--Cumber

[Sean]

The problem isn't so much 60 minutes being spent within the survival, it's more with how small the reward is when compared to anything else for that amount of time.

Honestly though the whole system still needs streamlining, would be better just to let people earn Wolf Credits from the "Challenges" and remove Standing/Ranks and have everything buyable with Wolf Credits. A lot of the "Rank Rewards" are not really needed by all players, while it is nice to have Weapon Slots available without platinum, seeing them as an "upcoming reward" when having a ton of available slots is meaningless. Having Slots within the pool of items buyable with Wolf Credits would work well for everyone (though probably not at 50 WC).

Edited March 4, 2019 by Sean

[DeMonkey]

1 minute ago, Kontrollo said:

But there's also this:

Turns out these are conflicting goals in this system.

Indeed, to clarify however, the statement only refers to "some" of the elite challenges speaking to Endurance runners. Which it does, unequivocally.

No mark was missed, a brain fart was uttered.

1 minute ago, OvisCaedo said:

Endurance runners do this stuff anyhow because they find it fun, as much as it may bewilder the rest of us. I think their requests for acknowledgement are based more on wanting something to be consistently beneficial about it, not random one-off challenges to do what they do anyhow that the rest of the playerbase will find absurd.

I think requests for Endurance runners to not have any content for them is just as absurd. I don't like doing tiny little 5 minute missions in which more time is spent bullet jumping from place to place than actually fighting enemies. I don't like doing missions in which I just stand there and watch someone else do the objective for me because my presence is so utterly irrelevant that I'm just providing additional spawns for the DPS frame.

I consider people who enjoy those missions and want more of those missions to be absurd, but I certainly don't ask that they get nothing.

[peterc3]

4 minutes ago, OvisCaedo said:

Endurance runners do this stuff anyhow because they find it fun, as much as it may bewilder the rest of us. I think their requests for acknowledgement are based more on wanting something to be consistently beneficial about it, not random one-off challenges to do what they do anyhow that the rest of the playerbase will find absurd.

In other words, they'll never be happy unless they consistently are getting more from their preferred playstyle than other people, despite similar time investments.

[Killomatic]

They are all fine IMO. They are elite challenges after all. I think we should have more daily challenges though. I also wouldn't mind seeing some speedrun challenges as well like "Complete Ukko in 50 seconds or less" or "Defeat Sergeant in under a minute". 

[Senguash]

22 minutes ago, [DE]Bear said:

For some of these Elite challenges, we were attempting to speak to the endurance runners, but it seems we may have missed the mark - if you liked it, or didn't like it, comment below. In the end, we wanted to make a series of challenges that spoke to every type of player, but we do not want to do so at the cost of enjoyment overall.

You didn't miss the mark, it was good. I'm not even an endurance runner and I still liked it.

I like the idea of making challenges that speak to every type of player, but then you can't just back down the first time some guy whines that it's too hard.

People have an entire week to do it, so take anyone who complains on day 1 with a grain of salt.

Give people some time to adjust to the idea it's not going to be spoonfed to them.

[Xhobract]

One complaint about the long survival missions seems to be they take too long compared for the rep you get. That would be a valid complaint I feel if you couldn't do other challenges at the same time, but you can. Stuff like killing x elites and collecting y mods complete automatically, propably even in those long missions themselves without you having to do anything extra. If you are a bit smart about it you can do several other challenges simultaneously, equip a weapon that deals Cold damage, kill some enemies while sliding etc...

Friend/Clan challenges are fine as well. If you don't have either it's a good incentive to get one or the other. I actually really like that you try to get some people out of their shell.

On the Ayatan issue: While statues might be more reliably obtainable than in the past with the addition of Arbitrations, new players can't access those since you need to complete every single node in the star chart first. On the other hand I and propably many others burned through their horded stars as soon as we got access to so many statues with Arbitrations since even with over 1k hours in the game I'm still in the need of Endo. Maybe lower from 5 to 3 statues in the challenge?

In the end you can't appeal to every kind of player. I think it's fine to have harder challenges since we have excess on the amount of points we can earn to reach rank 30, though maybe that excess is not big enough since the harder "elite" challenges are the ones to reward the most points as well. But please don't remove everything that might be slightly challenging, it's called challenge for a reason. 

Edited March 4, 2019 by Xhobract

[God_is_a_Cat_Girl]

45 minutes ago, [DE]Bear said:

For some of these Elite challenges, we were attempting to speak to the endurance runners, but it seems we may have missed the mark

Well, it's no wonder really, content for everyone, only speaking to a minority. Still, you don't need to speak to everyone, else there would be nothing but "kill x amount of enemies", but still, 60 straight minutes is just too much, and if we are to have any challenge I'd say that 15~20 minutes with the level range you get between minute 40 and 60 would suffice, perhaps it could have the Wolf spawn on it so we could at least have something related to the nightwave itself instead of Nightwave being nothing but unrelated chores.

60 minutes by itself provides no challenge, it's just boring to waste a hour in the same exact mission, doing the same exact things without pause or any change, if challenge is to be considered it only comes from the last minutes of the mission, so like I suggested, only using the level range of those last minutes would accomplish the same "challenge" for the most part.

With that you can see I'm not asking for easier, just to make it less punishing while keeping it's actual challenge value intact.

 

Cumulative would work for non elite just fine.

 

45 minutes ago, [DE]Bear said:

We will be applying what we have learned to Nightwave Series 2

Too little too late.

Other concerns I have is how some weekly take far too much time for what they give in comparison with others. 10 perfect captures or 8 full bounties for 3k, which is the same for opening 3 relics which require no thinking, no effort and barely any time really makes them not feel worth the time. Those would be better "elite" than the 60 minute straight survival.

The whole "with friends/clan" is pointless if people can bypass it with extra steps, at that point it's accomplishing nothing because many are still playing with strangers they don't care about, and all it does is bother people with extra steps. If people are playing with "anyone" then "anyone" as the condition would suffice for human interaction.

If you want to promote people to play with friends or clan that isn't the way to go, because if people aren't playing with their friends or clan then it's because they don't want to anyway. It's not like I will socialize more because of the condition, I don't socialize because I don't want to spend time talking to start with, I want to play the game, just let me play the game, playing with others is fine, the condition is just pointless for 99.99999% of time.

And going back to one of my previous points, the lack of at least 1 custom mission for Nightwave really makes the system feel old before we even start doing anything because everything you do is just regular things that were already there. I don't mean it has to be all new, objectives are mostly fine except the things I mentioned, but at least something other than YET ANOTHER assassin (would be fine, if, again, we had at least a proper mission). We already had tactical alerts before, we know you can do something that would make my first suggestion work just fine, but sure, it requires a tiny bit more effort than just the acts themselves, but perhaps Nightwave would be more enjoyable than the dreadful 60 minutes straight you want to put us through and that should be changed ASAP, not on series 2.


Overall, concept sound great, execution is greatly lacking and some acts are nothing but boring chores, no one likes chores.

 

Edit: And do away with conditions like the "no life support towers", those are prime for griefing, sad but true.

Sadly this thread comes out as damage control because feedback about Nightwave is everywhere and we don't quite need another thread for that, it doesn't show any hopeful signs (because no one likes waiting 10 weeks or more for the easily griefed conditions to be removed), but instead shows very much the opposite, unwillingness to correct mistakes before they grow bigger, you had the time, aaaaand it's gone.

Edited March 4, 2019 by God_is_a_Cat_Girl

[Kylo.]

I liked all of the acts as of now, finally something to do, even if I didn't like the acts as much because I usually don't do those kind of missions, it was still fun and because my friends also have to do those mission we have something to do together. 

Didn't feel like the survival was long at all, as long as you keep it in the elite category it's fine.

[Zahnny]

29 minutes ago, PETI258 said:

Make the time/wave limited missions cumulative so we don't have to do it in 1 go (like capture targets).

Honestly please do this. It gives endurance runners the chance to do it all at once and for players like me a more fun experience that doesn't lead into burnout.