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K-Drive Feedback


Danjal777
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I really hope you guys get to read this and it doesn't get lost in a sea of posts. 

K-Drives...sigh. 

Lets start with the positives:

1.  Its fun.  Not the most fun I've ever had in Warframe, but they're pretty cool, and speeding around on a hoverboard with rockets on it is as 'Warframe' as it gets.

2.  Scrawls are awesome.  I would love it if you allowed the community to make them and gave us some stickers that can go anywhere on the board.

3.  Effects look great.  

Okay here's the laundry list of gripes that I had:

1.  All of the K-Drives are the same.  Normally this would be no big deal but you forced me to grind mastery for what equates to a cosmetic...four times.  It feels like you had intended to give special stats for each part.  You should absolutely do that.  At least then I have a reason to want different parts.  Some ideas in the spoiler box below.

Spoiler

You guys love to shake things up, so i thought it was strange that you would just put a mods system on there, you had all these parts that could have unique attributes.  Well you still could:

Boards- affects verticality moves (jump height, hang time, falling speed, radial damage on landing)
Bad Baby- Slow fall speed, grabbing board causes hang time (like aim gliding but with a k-drive) You can shoot your secondary weapon in this state.
Flatbelly- Powerful radial explosion when landing, fall height affects range and damage, also falls really fast like a ground slam.
Needlenose- Can double jump, triple jump with mods, and has a high jump rating.
Runway- Creates shield like Volt under the board when grabbing in air.  Has good stats all around.

Reactors- enhances various effects of other parts.  Determines cooldown of special abilities.
Arc twelve-  Good all around enhancements, has 4 second cooldown rating.
Coldfusor-  High enhancement to Jets, has 8 second cooldown rating.
Hothead-  High boost to all damage effects, has 2 second cooldown rating.
Highbrow-  High boost to verticality, has 5 second cooldown rating.

Nose- applies special ability activated by the reload button.
Beaky- fires a horizontal disc of plasma that explodes 1 second after hitting terrain, K-Drive can get a jump boost if it manages to ride over while it explodes, also coats the K-Drive in flames that cause a fire proc on enemies it contacts.
Dink-A-Donk- launches a tractor beam, an enemy hit by this will be dragged behind the K-Drive in a ragdoll state until death or the K-Drive comes to a stop.  Enemies keelhauled in this way receive damage as they are dragged, they are also tethered to the K-Drive, so jumping off of it sends the enemy careening off with the K-Drive.  Only three tethers can be active at a time and grabbing a fourth enemy will release the first one.
Wingnut- creates an energy plow in front which will stop all projectiles and will violently ragdoll anything it hits doing damage based off of velocity, activating it has a meter that will refill based on the cooldown rating so it can be used in bursts as needed.
Two sloops- allows sentinel weapons to be mounted to the front of the K-Drive.  Can be fired with the reload button, automatically reloads based on double the cooldown rating, can be sped up by doing tricks.

Jets- controls top speed, acceleration, and boost speed
Fat Boys- high top speed and acceleration. Arial tricks are performed 30% faster.
Step Tens- all around stats, moves faster while jumping, upward movement is much faster.
Twin Kavats- extreme boost speed, heat up the longer boost is held eventually spewing flames behind the K-Drive that also leaves a molten trail that damages enemies.  Lowest unboosted speed and acceleration.
Thugs- highest unboosted speed and acceleration.  Boost is replaced by a short teleport dash that cools down based on (you guessed it) cooldown rating.  Electrocutes enemies that you dash through.

This is what I would expect, is it harder to implement, yes.  But it makes these things useful, more fun, and worth investing in.

2.  The grind is excessive.  Most people that did this just spent ~30 minutes grinding on the pipe outside of Fortuna or the ring around the Pearl.  There is no joy in this activity.  The rewards are so low for casual use that your average player will never see the third tier of Ventkids standing.  The 3,000 point cap plus the daily standing limit is really restrictive as well, I would think that one or the other would be sufficient.  Is it really a big deal if people grind the entire thing in one day?  It would be an unbearable task and most people wouldn't do it, but the ground work is the same.  On the other hand if there is not max point score, you would reach daily standing cap quickly, but at a higher risk of botching your insane high score.  Ultimately you would still be hamstrung by the daily standing cap. Speaking of the score, it is strange that the standing is 33% of the score, this is misleading and personally I would rather have it read the actual amount of standing my trick got.    Spoiler below for my suggestions:

Spoiler

Due to the monotonous nature of Ventkid standing grinding, and the fact that people just exploit the most efficient terrain to reach max score, why then limit it to the Vallis?  So you should be able to adopt a Ventkid to live in your Dojo and build a skate park room similar to the obstacle course.  You get full standing in these skate parks, and as you rank up with the Ventkids you can research and buy new obstacles and adopt more Ventkids (they live in an air duct...come on, I have a giant empty Dojo), it would be awesome if they would populate all over the Dojo as I keep adopting them.

3.  Archwing is a superior method of travel and likely to be obtained first.  Progress through the star chart requires that you get and archwing, you have access to the archwing launcher at MR 5 through the Dojo.  This completely undermines the K-Drive as a method of travel and results in players avoiding them altogether in favor of more efficient means.  My suggestions in the spoiler below:

Spoiler

I can't use a K-Drive in an archwing mission, so too should be the reverse.  K-Drives need a reason to exist.

Mission: High speed chase.  Players have to chase after a Coildrive to prevent it from escaping, they can only use a K-Drive and at least one player must stay within 30 meters of it as it tears through the Vallis.  Each player within 5 meters saps energy from the Coildrive.  Dropships and other vehicles assail the players throughout mission, Corpus will set up roadblocks in an attempt to stop them. The Coildrive can not be destroyed with any other means than the sapping from proximity.  The mission fails if no player is within 30 meters of the Coildrive for 20 seconds.

Conclave: K-Drive Grand Prix.  8 players racing on a track in the Orb Vallis or the Plains of Eidolon.  The tracks are marked with light on either side of the boundary.  Being out of bounds for more than three seconds teleports you back to the point of the track that you breached and places you fully stopped in the middle of the track facing the right direction.  Players are encouraged to breach the boundaries in order to exploit shortcuts in the track, but failure is a huge setback.  Power up items are scattered throughout the track, these range from shields, to speed boosts, missiles, land mines, banana peels, you get the point.  This must be done on a DE server.  Make championship tournaments, the sky is the limit.

Places that can only be reached by K-Drive with incentives like lore unlocks.  This can be achieved by having caves in lakes with low ceilings (although Titania and Wukong could get through that...maybe a Zephyr).  You could have barriers that only a K-Drive could breach, like a waterfall that you have to jump though.  Anything else is carried down with the current.  You could have a huge gorge with a metal rail that you have to grind across on.  There are clever ways to make them useful.

What if a K-Drive could be slammed into an Eidolon or and Orb by jumping off of it and sending it flying off like a rocket.  This could stagger and interrupt its current attack, but renders the K-Drive unusable for a five minute cooldown.  

This is a common problem with Warframe, things get implemented and never reach their potential.  How many man-hours went into designing and programming these things?  What is truly sad is all of that time was wasted on an unused gimmick, when all it needed was some creative input and polish.  Archwing is the same way, Conclave, Rebuilding the relays, the list goes on...and soon I fear Railjack will join them as unused gimmicks.

Finally...I just want you picture tearing through the Vallis chasing a Coildrive at max speed while dodging explosions from the cannons of a drop ship all while three Corpus are keelhauled behind your K-Drive and being cooked by your white-hot Twin Kavats belching hellfire in your wake.  That is the true potential of K-Drives.

-Danjal777

Edited by Danjal777
I suck at writing without typos.
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11 hours ago, Danjal777 said:

2.  The grind is excessive.  Most people that did this just spent ~30 minutes grinding on the pipe outside of Fortuna or the ring around the Pearl.  There is no joy in this activity.  The rewards are so low for casual use that your average player will never see the third tier of Ventkids standing.  The 3,000 point cap plus the daily standing limit is really restrictive as well, I would think that one or the other would be sufficient.  Is it really a big deal if people grind the entire thing in one day?  It would be an unbearable task and most people wouldn't do it, but the ground work is the same.  On the other hand if there is not max point score, you would reach daily standing cap quickly, but at a higher risk of botching your insane high score.  Ultimately you would still be hamstrung by the daily standing cap. Speaking of the score, it is strange that the standing is 33% of the score, this is misleading and personally I would rather have it read the actual amount of standing my trick got.    Spoiler below for my suggestions:

I find that races are a lot better. Just find the current active races and try one. Plus I find them fun.

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Just now, (PS4)Elvenbane said:

Too bad the races aren't shown on the map or anything and you're expected to fly around like a dofus to actually locate one.

Agreed. Why do I have to use two websites, one for the updates and one for the map of races. Why do i have to check the wiki to find anything useful. Warframe has a huge reliance on outside inputs and something needs to change.

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6 minutes ago, (XB1)DA ZACHYZACHY said:

Agreed. Why do I have to use two websites, one for the updates and one for the map of races. Why do i have to check the wiki to find anything useful. Warframe has a huge reliance on outside inputs and something needs to change.

Yup, got a new kdrive using the 4th plank that has zero reason to exist, wanted to try some races today for a change of pace, ended up turning the game off after flying around for 5 minutes. Seriously not fun...

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If any devs read this, please send me a PM with feedback, I love to do stuff like this but it feels like talking into the void. A lot of energy goes into organized well thought out feedback and if it never gets to where it needs to be then it is all wasted.  So if there are things that you like or dislike about this, I look forward to your correspondence.  Thanks.

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2 hours ago, (XB1)DA ZACHYZACHY said:

I find that races are a lot better. Just find the current active races and try one. Plus I find them fun.

They may be more fun, but terribly inefficient and, like every other method of ranking up for K-Drives, will get repetitive and boring before you reach the daily cap.

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1 hour ago, (PS4)Elvenbane said:

Too bad the races aren't shown on the map or anything and you're expected to fly around like a dofus to actually locate one.

Even if they were, they feel tacked on.  If they really wanted to do it, then you speak to Roki and you would join a mission with Ventkid NPC's on a much larger track, instead of the drive through the magic rings thing that we have now.

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1 hour ago, (XB1)DA ZACHYZACHY said:

Agreed. Why do I have to use two websites, one for the updates and one for the map of races. Why do i have to check the wiki to find anything useful. Warframe has a huge reliance on outside inputs and something needs to change.

Yeah, maybe I make some feedback on that as well.  A good example: what does the Buzlok's secondary feature do?  Unless you go the wiki, you not find out.  It is only mentioned in flavor text that it causes your bullets to seek your target.  

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