Exploration in Warframe is Bad and Needs Improvement

[MJ12]

With the Nightwaves that emphasize going around and exploring maps in Warframe (e.g. the Sabotage cache/Apothic Nightwaves), the Buried Debts event and its requirement to search the entire Orb Vallis for hidden messages, and the possibility of similar events/challenges in the future, I think it's necessary to point out to DE a very important and unfortunate fact:

Exploration in Warframe is bad. It feels bad, it's a slow and frustrating slog, and even the 'best' 'exploration' challenges in Warframe are pretty mediocre. Why is Exploration bad? Let me lay out the reasons.

1. Exploration Kills the Game's Pacing: Pacing is extremely important for a game, and Warframe is a fast paced, 'arcadey' game in spirit. You move fast, the game's primarily end-of-mission reward structure emphasizes finishing objectives as fast as possible, and the game's grindy nature emphasizes replaying content repeatedly. Meanwhile, exploration in Warframe? You need to either memorize likely spawn points of randomly generated maps, or you need to spend time looking in each nook and cranny, walking slowly through the tile, to find 'hidden' rooms and caches. Adding insult to injury, a lot of tiles are laid out in ways which have tons of nooks and crannies and are not fun to navigate. What this means is that the moment you start exploring in Warframe, you're going to slow down the mission drastically. Mission rewards seem to be balanced heavily around the idea that the average non-endless mission will take maybe 10-15 minutes max. Exploration can easily double that. Maps are absolutely sprawling compared to the actual content inside them (which is kind of funny because the tiles themselves are generally pretty claustrophobic) and there is a relative dearth of tools to make exploration easier. Even things like plant scanning or whatever is clunky because you have to stop and notice the plant, take out your scanner, scan the plant, and then take out your weapon. It's not smoothly integrated with the game itself.
2. Exploration Requires Absurd Amounts of Effort for Mediocre Rewards: Not only does exploring take forever, but the rewards it gives are almost always crap. In other words, exploration just feels bad. And even more amusingly, the ones which give better rewards (Grove, Kuva Siphons, Simaris Scans) are also all the easier ones to actually complete. In Warframe exploration is you spending a lot of time for very little reward-and at least for sabotage caches, the best rewards for exploring are backloaded, so you either ignore the caches or waste time scouring the map for all three.
3. Exploration is Actually Fairly Trivial: There's nothing interesting about exploration, either. You just... go and scour every corner of a room to find something, then press X to pick it up or open it, most of the time. 
4. Exploration is Repetitive & Random: Again, once you've found your first cache, you've found them all, as far as the experience goes. You go looking into every nook and cranny of the map and you find a shiny thing that hums. It's a repetitive experience-but worse, it's not as if the repetition makes you much better at finding them. There are so many possible cache spawn points, and mission maps are so large and filled with so many random detours, that repetition doesn't radically reduce the amount of time needed to scour the map. As a bonus, your map doesn't fill in based on what your teammates are looking at (and because not only are exploration rewards hidden in out of the way areas but they're also hidden in nooks in out of the way areas it's very possible for a teammate to miss what you're looking for), so it's not easy to coordinate a sweep of the map even with four players.
5. Trivializing Exploration is Impossible: At the very least, Spy Vaults and most puzzles have some sort of Warframe that can trivialize them, effectively letting you skip them if you don't like playing them. If you're like me and hate having to memorize the shortcuts for spy vaults and deal with timing puzzles and 'stealth' minigames with zero margin of error, you can take Ivara, Loki, or even Ash and trivialize them (and memorizing the shortcuts in the first place is a method of trivializing them). Even better, all three of these frames are actually viable in content besides trivializing stealth puzzles. There's nothing that lets a player go "I hate finding caches/the Silver Grove/Simaris Scans/whatever the thing you need to scour the map for, I'll take this gear item/Warframe/weapon/pet to basically get to ignore that system entirely."

Procedurally generated games which emphasize exploration are rare-the only one I can think of off the top of my head is No Man's Sky, which is much more like Vallis/Plains than the actual missions-you explore by finding resource deposits and building stuff with them, and resource deposits are super common and relatively easy to find. Looter shooters generally don't have much exploration-again the Borderlands 'secrets' are just off the critical path, don't require significant detours, and can be memorized (because it has a fixed map). 

If DE wants to have more exploration in Warframe and require people to knock out exploration-related challenges, exploration should be faster and more fluid, gives much better rewards, and there are ways to avoid it for players who are only here because Warframe is the closest they'll get to a western musou game. However, I am increasingly suspecting that you can't make exploration interesting in Warframe-the open world zones are the closest you get to that because there's actually some interesting things and rewards for exploring them-but all the interesting lore rewards and just the sheer joy of seeing the art and architecture are only new and fresh once. So I think DE really should ask itself, given the evolution of the pacing of Warframe into a much faster, more actiony game than the slower-paced singleplayer sci-fi DarkSector, whether exploration is actually a good fit for Warframe in general. 

I'm increasingly thinking that DE should eliminate these sorts of exploration objectives and basically just mark all secondary objectives. You can make them actually secondary objectives by having them generate extra objectives, increase the difficulty of the main mission by adding twists to it (kind of like Hive Sabotage, maybe? The more caches you open, the more dangerous security in the mission becomes), or in the case of Kuva siphons/Simaris scans, there's also at least a little bit of challenge in beating them and getting their rewards (sure, you can use a kinetic-siphon trap on a synthesis target, but if you want to scan the target unaided it's actually kind of interesting gameplay). This would keep the substantive part of exploration-seeing the sights, learning to traverse the map, getting more rewards-but tie it directly into the core gameplay of Warframe rather than a boring scavenger hunt.

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Exploration Kills the Game's Pacing: Pacing is extremely important for a game, and Warframe is a fast paced, 'arcadey' game in spirit.

I strongly disagree. I get that a lot of people prefer to bullet-jump past all the content just to get to the exit, but I personally find that sort of pace exhausting and unfulfilling. Not that I blame players for it, of course. The game's critical path simply excludes pretty much the majority of its gameplay. It rather reminds me of an otherwise really fun game by the name of Helldivers. "Doing well" in that game means sounding no alarms, which in turn means that you run around the map clicking on things unmolested because you're preventing enemies from spawning in. Warframe's critical path is entrance -> objective -> exit with everything else in-between (i.e. "the game") just getting in the way and slowing you down.

I'm not sure you can really encourage exploration, but a good first step would be to stop discouraging it.

 

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Exploration is Actually Fairly Trivial: There's nothing interesting about exploration, either. You just... go and scour every corner of a room to find something, then press X to pick it up or open it, most of the time. 

For me personally, the methodical approach of going down every hallway, checking every locker, shooting every blip on the Loot Radar and sweeping through all of the places I know loot is likely to spawn IS the whole point of exploration. The rewards are mostly ass (even if I end up with far more Amber Stars than I have use for), but the pace of it is something I find very "zen" for lack of a better term. Then again, I typically don't disable alarms (and heavily resent the Moa Precept which auto-hacks consoles for disabling them) so it's not like I'm running through empty hallways. Years ago, Payday 2 perfected the "scavenger hunt while being shot at" approach to game design, and that's what I typically get out of it. Even if it means playing solo because nobody seems to have patience for anything in this game...

Point being, that IS interesting to some of us, even if I wish they'd increase use key interaction range by a few meters.

 

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Trivializing Exploration is Impossible: At the very least, Spy Vaults and most puzzles have some sort of Warframe that can trivialize them, effectively letting you skip them if you don't like playing them.

Trivialising content is generally bad design because it leads to one of two situations. Either people over-farm trivial content and break the economy with its spoils or (usually AND) developers eventually nerf the rewards to the point where it's not worth running in the first place. Exploration already has pretty S#&$ rewards. Making it trivial on top of that runs the risk of having those slashed on top of it. I mean, we already lost a source of basic resources when Alerts went away, so now lockers and containers are my primary sources for those.

[LoneWolf9989]

On 2019-03-25 at 9:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Warframe is a fast paced, 'arcadey' game in spirit

No, Warframe is a looter with space ninjas. looters often have slow elements just due to their nature. The game isn't "arcadey" either.

[MJ12]

19 hours ago, LoneWolf9989 said:

No, Warframe is a looter with space ninjas. looters often have slow elements just due to their nature. The game isn't "arcadey" either.

"Looters often have slow elements" is true, but those slow elements are generally breaks from the action, rather than how Warframe exploration works, which is that if you engage in it, you're basically spending a lot of time dealing with extremely low enemy density while simultaneously going on a pixel hunt.

And I've already said why I call it "arcadey"-it's very fast paced, movement is quick, enemies are relatively simplistic, and most content emphasizes relatively fast completion. Which is why I point it out-how Warframe 'exploration' works directly kills the most attractive thing of Warframe, which is its very fast in-mission pacing.

[(NSW)Jakdarsan]

So reading through all the above comments, it clearly shows that each player has their own opinion on what the game is and how they play it. 

I am still fairly new to the game but from what I have seen, there are mods to help find loot which i think is awesome (anything to help highlight hidden items is appreciated).

Getting back to the topic (my 2 cents), I say it depends on the mission. Some missions are fast pace and should be run quickly however I find others feel better when taken slower. 

[(XBOX)THANOTOS OMEGA]

Honestly i would prefer it if the enemies just weren't there when i'm searching they all have annoying sound design and are to loud so it makes listening for the caches annoying, just like the environments the sound in the game is cluttered in a way that only hurts, and leads to the issue of the entire game being mastering the speed run to avoid the gameplay as much as possible while trying to get the rewards,

[Steel_Rook]

12 hours ago, MJ12 said:

"Looters often have slow elements" is true, but those slow elements are generally breaks from the action, rather than how Warframe exploration works, which is that if you engage in it, you're basically spending a lot of time dealing with extremely low enemy density while simultaneously going on a pixel hunt.

You can always just leave the alarm going. That'll give you decent enemy density while you search. Sure, it's not as much as in, say, a 40-minute Survival, but then few missions are like that to begin with. And frankly, if your view of how Warframe should play is bullet-jumping past everything to the objective anyway, you're already experiencing low enemy density as enemies don't seem to despawn once you've run past them. You end up with the Payday 2 problem of a map's worth of enemies trying to catch up to you, whom you can just keep kiting. The whole reason a majority of game modes either anchor you to a point or require you to kill enemies is because you can otherwise simply outrun them. Thus, if enemy density is your goal, the slower and more methodical exploration the game offers is the way to go.

[Xzorn]

I actually find things like Syndicate mission and their mark hunts fairly enjoyable.

Full map clears instead of spam missions, follow the marker & aim with your minimap which is pretty much this game in a nutshell.

Far as rewarding, I've filled my Orbiter with Ayatan three times over. Sold it all for about 6k plat. Could be better but Full clears / Map exploration was common in Diablo 1&2. It wasn't until Diablo 3 that it was discouraged and that was to the game detriment. A player's ability to bullet through missions in 2 min or less more shows flaws in the game where trivial things like locked doors or breaking air locks slow us down more than the enemies.

Oh and doing it a lot does make you better at finding those spots. I often spot Ayatan on my map just because I notice a box out of place. To me randomly generated Tilesets and bonus items hidden within simply work. Now if other aspects of the game get in the way. That's not a fault of the concept.

Edited April 1, 2019 by Xzorn

[Tiltskillet]

On 2019-03-25 at 2:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Exploration Kills the Game's Pacing

It alters the game's pacing, sure.   Personally, I'm ok with only nearly all of the content consisting of frantic horde killing and/or careening to extraction.  I don't feel there's a need to make it 100%

There's some truth in everything you said, even though the only thing I unequivocally agree with is that the rewards are mediocre.

Anyway, I'd like improvements to exploration without radically changing its tempo.

 

[NezuHimeSama]

I think, if anything, there should be better loot distribution in exploration. I still find it quite fun to scour a map for loot, but the things you get are either trivial, or require scouring a map for one or three things, with everything else being trivial. But, I think there are good ways to fix this.

In particular, making different tiers of containers, that spawn regularly in different locations, and have different drop tables. For example, you could have common containers that are just right there in the open, containing primarily ammo and credits, with occasionally common resources, health, energy, or affinity drops, and then slightly different uncommon containers that spawn only in treasure rooms and hidden rooms, and have a more traditional reward-centric loot table, with common and uncommon mods, uncommon resources, and cyan stars, and then rare containers(not like the current ones) where you get a guaranteed rare container in certain tiles, and a high chance of spawning one in others, which would always give some kind of good drop, be it endo, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, cyan and sometimes amber stars, even occasional blueprints for market weapons or specters, or maybe a relic or two. These would have, say, a 10~20% chance to spawn one in a hidden treasure room, a 1~2% chance to spawn in a regular treasure room, and a 100% chance to spawn one at the end of a parkour/super treasure room.

Then, something similar with the lockers. Normal common in-your-face lockers contain health or energy orbs and larger amounts of ammo than you get from containers, but require more effort to open. Uncommon lockers, sometimes spawning in treasure rooms, and always spawning in hidden treasure rooms, have a higher chance to drop things like endo, amber(not cyan) ayatan stars, maybe even a low-tier ayatan statue, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, ect. Rare lockers would have a very low chance to spawn in treasure rooms, decent chance to spawn in hidden treasure rooms, and a guaranteed one or two at the end of a parkour, and would always contain something like an amber star, a large endo pile, a small amount of kuva, or a useful rare mod, stuff like that. Each locker would drop multiple things, like a common locker could drop two sniper ammo pickups and an energy orb, or a shotgun ammo pickup, a health orb, and a common resource, and a rare locker could drop, say, an amber star, 150 endo, and a relic.

 

By mixing it up like this, you increase the chances of the player feeling rewarded for exploring by giving them a "rare container", but since the drop table contains things that aren't broken to give out at that frequency, and there's no guarantee of any one specific drop, it doesn't immediately become irrelevant after you do it one or two times. On the flip side, because it's not super uncommon, and the rewards are things that you can afford to miss, the player doesn't feel forced into always searching for it in every mission. This would provide a good balance of time vs reward vs compulsion that would encourage players to explore without forcing them into it, and would reward exploration without breaking the game balance.

[MJ12]

8 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

You can always just leave the alarm going. That'll give you decent enemy density while you search. Sure, it's not as much as in, say, a 40-minute Survival, but then few missions are like that to begin with. And frankly, if your view of how Warframe should play is bullet-jumping past everything to the objective anyway, you're already experiencing low enemy density as enemies don't seem to despawn once you've run past them. You end up with the Payday 2 problem of a map's worth of enemies trying to catch up to you, whom you can just keep kiting. The whole reason a majority of game modes either anchor you to a point or require you to kill enemies is because you can otherwise simply outrun them. Thus, if enemy density is your goal, the slower and more methodical exploration the game offers is the way to go.

I actually kill most enemies on the way to the objective, and it's still much faster and less frustrating than Warframe exploration. Leaving the alarm going doesn't help, especially not when you're having a four-player group try to scour the map for that last dumb pixel you need to find to get your nightwave progress because DE decided that exploration and puzzles are what people play Warframe for. You just get a tiny handful of spawns, which means that it's actually worse because not only are you bored, but enemies spawn just often enough that you can't AFK and hope someone else finds the last cache for you while browsing Youtube or whatever.

22 minutes ago, NezuHimeSama said:

I think, if anything, there should be better loot distribution in exploration. I still find it quite fun to scour a map for loot, but the things you get are either trivial, or require scouring a map for one or three things, with everything else being trivial. But, I think there are good ways to fix this.

In particular, making different tiers of containers, that spawn regularly in different locations, and have different drop tables. For example, you could have common containers that are just right there in the open, containing primarily ammo and credits, with occasionally common resources, health, energy, or affinity drops, and then slightly different uncommon containers that spawn only in treasure rooms and hidden rooms, and have a more traditional reward-centric loot table, with common and uncommon mods, uncommon resources, and cyan stars, and then rare containers(not like the current ones) where you get a guaranteed rare container in certain tiles, and a high chance of spawning one in others, which would always give some kind of good drop, be it endo, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, cyan and sometimes amber stars, even occasional blueprints for market weapons or specters, or maybe a relic or two. These would have, say, a 10~20% chance to spawn one in a hidden treasure room, a 1~2% chance to spawn in a regular treasure room, and a 100% chance to spawn one at the end of a parkour/super treasure room.

Then, something similar with the lockers. Normal common in-your-face lockers contain health or energy orbs and larger amounts of ammo than you get from containers, but require more effort to open. Uncommon lockers, sometimes spawning in treasure rooms, and always spawning in hidden treasure rooms, have a higher chance to drop things like endo, amber(not cyan) ayatan stars, maybe even a low-tier ayatan statue, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, ect. Rare lockers would have a very low chance to spawn in treasure rooms, decent chance to spawn in hidden treasure rooms, and a guaranteed one or two at the end of a parkour, and would always contain something like an amber star, a large endo pile, a small amount of kuva, or a useful rare mod, stuff like that. Each locker would drop multiple things, like a common locker could drop two sniper ammo pickups and an energy orb, or a shotgun ammo pickup, a health orb, and a common resource, and a rare locker could drop, say, an amber star, 150 endo, and a relic.

 

By mixing it up like this, you increase the chances of the player feeling rewarded for exploring by giving them a "rare container", but since the drop table contains things that aren't broken to give out at that frequency, and there's no guarantee of any one specific drop, it doesn't immediately become irrelevant after you do it one or two times. On the flip side, because it's not super uncommon, and the rewards are things that you can afford to miss, the player doesn't feel forced into always searching for it in every mission. This would provide a good balance of time vs reward vs compulsion that would encourage players to explore without forcing them into it, and would reward exploration without breaking the game balance.

Loot literally isn't the problem. In fact, better rewards for exploration (as Nightwave has provided us) actually make it worse because the problem is exploration in and of itself. The problem is that exploration is repetitive and painful. It's repetitive because you're exploring the same tiles in a tileset again and again scouring them for a handful of tiny hidden bonus spots. It's painful because it's very much all-or-nothing, the maps are way too large for the amount of hidden content that actually exists, and the mechanics for finding said hidden content are pretty aggravating because you have to look into a ton of nooks and crannies, literally slowing down to a snail's pace. And to add insult to injury the all-or-nothing exploration "mechanics" create a ludicrous amount of sunk cost fallacy wherein if you find 2 of 3 caches or whatever you're going to be frustrating yourself spending 30 more minutes in a mission that already took a lot more time than it should trying to hunt down the last cache.

Either exploration should be set up to be more Crackdown style (hidden stuff is everywhere, you don't need to get all of it, or even most of it) or more like most modern games (hidden stuff is often put there in plain sight, the difficulty is finding a way to get to it). The problem is that maps are far too big for the amount of stuff in them, caches and other exploration 'rewards' are too well-hidden for their actual value, and forcing people who don't like pixel-hunting to pixel-hunt is a lot more frustrating than not catering to pixel-hunters.

[NezuHimeSama]

Literally, that is why tiered rewards. It makes the loot rooms exactly as rewarding as they should be, making it so the effort to explore isn't greater than the reward, it's a constant stream of varying reward for exploration that more accurately represents the effort invested in finding it.

Like other people have said, slowing down to explore isn't the problem. In fact, it's usually not that slow in the first place, because you can quickly and easily access almost any corner of the tile, but not everything is plainly visible from every direction, so it requires a little exploration. But, if that exploration/going off the main path was more regularly rewarded with more consistent rewards, people would feel like it was worth it to do so.

[MJ12]

3 hours ago, NezuHimeSama said:

Literally, that is why tiered rewards. It makes the loot rooms exactly as rewarding as they should be, making it so the effort to explore isn't greater than the reward, it's a constant stream of varying reward for exploration that more accurately represents the effort invested in finding it.

Like other people have said, slowing down to explore isn't the problem. In fact, it's usually not that slow in the first place, because you can quickly and easily access almost any corner of the tile, but not everything is plainly visible from every direction, so it requires a little exploration. But, if that exploration/going off the main path was more regularly rewarded with more consistent rewards, people would feel like it was worth it to do so.

So in other words, you want to punish the people who don't like to pixel hunt by making it so that they have the choice of either frustrating themselves or losing out?

I actually remember when we had "tiered rewards" for Void Sabotage where you got double the prime parts if you found all three caches. It was still completely awful. The only thing was that if you were doing Void Sabotage you were forced into the awfulness because otherwise you got half as many rolls for the loot per void key.

So no, slowing down to explore is the problem, because I don't play Warframe for the frustrating pixel hunting, and giving pixel hunting better rewards won't somehow make the pixel hunting more fun. It'll just make me even more angry about the game.

[Steel_Rook]

15 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Loot literally isn't the problem. In fact, better rewards for exploration (as Nightwave has provided us) actually make it worse because the problem is exploration in and of itself. The problem is that exploration is repetitive and painful. It's repetitive because you're exploring the same tiles in a tileset again and again scouring them for a handful of tiny hidden bonus spots. It's painful because it's very much all-or-nothing, the maps are way too large for the amount of hidden content that actually exists, and the mechanics for finding said hidden content are pretty aggravating because you have to look into a ton of nooks and crannies, literally slowing down to a snail's pace. And to add insult to injury the all-or-nothing exploration "mechanics" create a ludicrous amount of sunk cost fallacy wherein if you find 2 of 3 caches or whatever you're going to be frustrating yourself spending 30 more minutes in a mission that already took a lot more time than it should trying to hunt down the last cache.

The whole #*!%ing game is repetitive and painful, not to put too fine a point on it. And after being told to "man up" and "git gud" and "well, just don't do it then" so many times when criticising 60-minute Kuva Survival or "with friends" achievements, I find it incredibly hard to feel sympathetic when the roles are reversed. Doubly so when all you really need to find all three caches is loot detection of some kind, even as little as Animal Instinct. And while I get that you find it not fun, I find ESO substantially less fun. Yet here we are. Nightwave's whole stated purpose is to get players to play content they otherwise wouldn't - make all the players play all the things. By definition that's going to upset everybody because nobody likes every aspect of the game.

As to the Hidden Caches themselves - they aren't that hidden. There are fairly few spots on the map they can spawn in - same ones as Cephalon Fragments, Syndicate tokens, etc. While map layouts may be randomised, the loot spawn points within each individual tile don't move around, nor do the secret areas. Grab enough loot detection, track down every blip on the map and eventually you'll find all the caches without risking going away empty handed or hoping someone else stumbles upon them.

[MJ12]

1 hour ago, Steel_Rook said:

The whole #*!%ing game is repetitive and painful, not to put too fine a point on it. And after being told to "man up" and "git gud" and "well, just don't do it then" so many times when criticising 60-minute Kuva Survival or "with friends" achievements, I find it incredibly hard to feel sympathetic when the roles are reversed. Doubly so when all you really need to find all three caches is loot detection of some kind, even as little as Animal Instinct. And while I get that you find it not fun, I find ESO substantially less fun. Yet here we are. Nightwave's whole stated purpose is to get players to play content they otherwise wouldn't - make all the players play all the things. By definition that's going to upset everybody because nobody likes every aspect of the game.

As to the Hidden Caches themselves - they aren't that hidden. There are fairly few spots on the map they can spawn in - same ones as Cephalon Fragments, Syndicate tokens, etc. While map layouts may be randomised, the loot spawn points within each individual tile don't move around, nor do the secret areas. Grab enough loot detection, track down every blip on the map and eventually you'll find all the caches without risking going away empty handed or hoping someone else stumbles upon them.

And have I ever told you to "man up" or "git gud" about 60-minute survivals? I'm pretty sure the answer is no. In fact, my only comments about Nightwave were that:

1. Nightwave should be designed so that someone who literally started playing that week could reasonably max out their Nightwave rank with a few hours of play a day without needing a guide;

2. Nightwave should be designed so that you can skip anything you don't want in a week and still be reasonably capable of maxing out your weekly standing.

And the core gameplay of Warframe might be repetitive and painful for you, but I think that of the people who play Warframe, that's distinctly a minority opinion because most people are here for the core gameplay. Meanwhile, 'search for the Sabotage cache' isn't what brought anyone to Warframe, I bet. Which person says "I came to Warframe because I heard it had hidden caches in a specific mission type?" Acting like there's some equivalency in DE telling you to go and play this core mission type which emphasizes the core gameplay loop (kill things, use the energy/health resources they drop to kill more things) and DE telling you to go play something that is completely outside of this core gameplay loop (scour map for random interactable objects) is silly. Oh yeah, and let's talk about the differential time investment.

3 waves of ESO: 7.5 minutes.

3 sabotage caches: easily over an hour. Possibly per mission, if you're unlucky and don't spend your time memorizing the map because why the hell would you need to in normal gameplay? I play Warframe because my job requires me to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it and I don't have the effort left to do things like this anymore.

And yes, I'm aware that eventually you'll find all the caches if you crawl through the map poking every single blip. The problem is that by the time I finish doing that, I want to strangle someone. Acting like your "git gud" advice is useful or worthwhile is hypocritical as hell.

[Kontrollo]

Sorry, I don't feel like engaging in this thread more than that, so I'm just going to use this statement as a hook:

18 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

...

3 sabotage caches: easily over an hour. Possibly per mission, if you're unlucky and don't spend your time memorizing the map because why the hell would you need to in normal gameplay? I play Warframe because my job requires me to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it and I don't have the effort left to do things like this anymore.

...

Yeah no, that's not how long it takes. When you're missing a cache in a map and have already visited all the tiles, just start a new one. It sucks of course, had that happen to me, too, just today. But on the other hand, the other two of three I've done this week got completed before the main objective.

You can do these "passively", too. Run a few sabotage missions where they coincide with your other goals (Fissures, Kuva, Nightmare, ...) then simply not go out of your way to find them. Worst case is you're missing out on 3k for the week. And that's hardly a big deal, either.

 

I'm sure there's room for improvement, but I don't actually dislike these. Only as a side dish, of course, but there are definitely less enjoyable things in this game. Exploration is fine-ish.

[Steel_Rook]

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

And the core gameplay of Warframe might be repetitive and painful for you, but I think that of the people who play Warframe, that's distinctly a minority opinion because most people are here for the core gameplay. Meanwhile, 'search for the Sabotage cache' isn't what brought anyone to Warframe, I bet. Which person says "I came to Warframe because I heard it had hidden caches in a specific mission type?" Acting like there's some equivalency in DE telling you to go and play this core mission type which emphasizes the core gameplay loop (kill things, use the energy/health resources they drop to kill more things) and DE telling you to go play something that is completely outside of this core gameplay loop (scour map for random interactable objects) is silly. Oh yeah, and let's talk about the differential time investment.

That's a straw man and you know it. Exploration is just as much a part of Warframe as combat is, whether you personally enjoy it or not. Citing popularity is all fine and good, but I'm going to ask you to cite sources and make specific claims, rather than what amounts to "I'm right because I'm in the majority and you're wrong because you're in the minority." Hell, by that reductive logic, I could argue that the game is entirely about exploration because "sit in one spot and shoot" isn't what brought nayone to Warframe either, I bet. These kinds of spurious arguments are fairly easy to make once we abandon all pretence of making them actually meaningful beyond a cudgel with which to beat down opposing viewpoints.

 

3 hours ago, MJ12 said:

3 waves of ESO: 7.5 minutes.

3 sabotage caches: easily over an hour. Possibly per mission, if you're unlucky and don't spend your time memorizing the map because why the hell would you need to in normal gameplay? I play Warframe because my job requires me to spend a lot of time and effort thinking about it and I don't have the effort left to do things like this anymore.

Again, that's a straw man, doubly so when you coach your examples to this extent. Three waves of ESO might be 7.5 minutes FOR YOU if you happened to bring the correct gear and have experience in that mode. Running three waves of regular Sanctuary Onslaught for last week's Nightwave took me closer to 15 minutes, personally. And that's still cherry-picking an example of an activity criticised for reasons other than taking too long. What about 60 hours of Kuva Survival? I have it on good authority that that takes easily over an hour, assuming you succeed on every attempt. And there have been multiple of those challenges. Meanwhile, I can say with confidence that finding 3 Hidden Caches takes ~20 minutes, because I tend to keep an eye on my mission timer and that's about what it tends to take me typically. And that's solo. Doing it on a team and splitting up cuts down the time significantly.

Again, I'm not saying you have to like exploration. However, my point stands - when you go out of your way to tell me how my playstyle is aberrant and bad and you absolutely hate engaging in it, I tend to lose my sense of solidarity. Doubly so when you react to suggestions on easing the process with aggression. If you want to propose changes to Nightwave such that you can more easily ignore aspects you don't like, then great! I'm in full agreement. But that's not what your OP is about. When you say stuff like:

 

On 2019-03-25 at 11:02 PM, MJ12 said:

I think DE really should ask itself, given the evolution of the pacing of Warframe into a much faster, more actiony game than the slower-paced singleplayer sci-fi DarkSector, whether exploration is actually a good fit for Warframe in general. 

Then I feel compelled to step in because you're proposing the removal of something I like, for no reason greater than the way you play the game is not conducive to it. And when your response to pushback is what amounts to "Yeah, but you don't matter!" then don't act surprised when I assume the same stance. Actual dialogue requires some degree of compromise, and I'm not seeing any here.

[NezuHimeSama]

6 hours ago, MJ12 said:

So in other words, you want to punish the people who don't like to pixel hunt by making it so that they have the choice of either frustrating themselves or losing out?

I actually remember when we had "tiered rewards" for Void Sabotage where you got double the prime parts if you found all three caches. It was still completely awful. The only thing was that if you were doing Void Sabotage you were forced into the awfulness because otherwise you got half as many rolls for the loot per void key.

So no, slowing down to explore is the problem, because I don't play Warframe for the frustrating pixel hunting, and giving pixel hunting better rewards won't somehow make the pixel hunting more fun. It'll just make me even more angry about the game.

I already explained in my post how it wouldn't do that; the rewards just aren't so significant that they can't be skipped, but are significant enough to reward exploration.

Did you actually read any of what I wrote?

[TinFoilMkIV]

On 2019-03-25 at 5:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Exploration Kills the Game's Pacing: Pacing is extremely important for a game, and Warframe is a fast paced, 'arcadey' game in spirit. You move fast, the game's primarily end-of-mission reward structure emphasizes finishing objectives as fast as possible, and the game's grindy nature emphasizes replaying content repeatedly. Meanwhile, exploration in Warframe? You need to either memorize likely spawn points of randomly generated maps, or you need to spend time looking in each nook and cranny, walking slowly through the tile, to find 'hidden' rooms and caches. Adding insult to injury, a lot of tiles are laid out in ways which have tons of nooks and crannies and are not fun to navigate. What this means is that the moment you start exploring in Warframe, you're going to slow down the mission drastically. Mission rewards seem to be balanced heavily around the idea that the average non-endless mission will take maybe 10-15 minutes max. Exploration can easily double that. Maps are absolutely sprawling compared to the actual content inside them (which is kind of funny because the tiles themselves are generally pretty claustrophobic) and there is a relative dearth of tools to make exploration easier. Even things like plant scanning or whatever is clunky because you have to stop and notice the plant, take out your scanner, scan the plant, and then take out your weapon. It's not smoothly integrated with the game itself.

While you're not completely wrong, not everyone considers travelling at the maximum possible speed at all times the normal pacing of the game. Also once you familiarize yourself with some of the more hidden spaces where the better loot would theoretically be found, it doesn't actually take that long to go in and grab if your goal is to not slow things down too much. Now finding the hidden spaces in the first place will most certainly slow down any given mission a ton, and I will absolutely agree that it's not an appropriate thing to do in most public matches. Full exploration similarly is probably not a great thing to do if your team isn't taking things at a more leisurely pace. More a matter of courtesy and respecting that public games with randoms are probably going to be focused on just getting the mission done.

On 2019-03-25 at 5:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Exploration Requires Absurd Amounts of Effort for Mediocre Rewards: Not only does exploring take forever, but the rewards it gives are almost always crap. In other words, exploration just feels bad. And even more amusingly, the ones which give better rewards (Grove, Kuva Siphons, Simaris Scans) are also all the easier ones to actually complete. In Warframe exploration is you spending a lot of time for very little reward-and at least for sabotage caches, the best rewards for exploring are backloaded, so you either ignore the caches or waste time scouring the map for all three.

I totally agree and it's one of my biggest complaints about the level design in Warframe. There's quite a few really well hidden loot rooms and neat things to discover, but they're ultimately pointless beyond the personal accomplishment of having found them and having a more complete map knowledge. Which is nice, but it doesn't change the fact that the game itself gives these virtually zero value.

On 2019-03-25 at 5:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Exploration is Actually Fairly Trivial: There's nothing interesting about exploration, either. You just... go and scour every corner of a room to find something, then press X to pick it up or open it, most of the time.

I disagree. Some people, like myself, enjoy knowing all the out of the way places that might have a slightly better chance to have something shiny in it. Granted as above, the actual value of these is extremely lacking. However I wouldn't be surprised if most players don't enjoy that sort of thing. So matter of preference that I don't expect everyone to agree on.

On 2019-03-25 at 5:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Exploration is Repetitive & Random: Again, once you've found your first cache, you've found them all, as far as the experience goes. You go looking into every nook and cranny of the map and you find a shiny thing that hums. It's a repetitive experience-but worse, it's not as if the repetition makes you much better at finding them. There are so many possible cache spawn points, and mission maps are so large and filled with so many random detours, that repetition doesn't radically reduce the amount of time needed to scour the map. As a bonus, your map doesn't fill in based on what your teammates are looking at (and because not only are exploration rewards hidden in out of the way areas but they're also hidden in nooks in out of the way areas it's very possible for a teammate to miss what you're looking for), so it's not easy to coordinate a sweep of the map even with four players.

I'll agree the caches are not great. Partially because their reward pools are very sub-par (with a few exceptions.) for what's often a significant detour from the objective. Another part is that all of the extra goodies you potentially pick up during the search basically amount to spare change and a couple extra rounds in your gun you probably won't use. So I would agree in terms of cache hunting that it's generally not the most enjoyable activity. Even for someone like me who wants more reasons to explore.

On 2019-03-25 at 5:02 PM, MJ12 said:

Trivializing Exploration is Impossible: At the very least, Spy Vaults and most puzzles have some sort of Warframe that can trivialize them, effectively letting you skip them if you don't like playing them. If you're like me and hate having to memorize the shortcuts for spy vaults and deal with timing puzzles and 'stealth' minigames with zero margin of error, you can take Ivara, Loki, or even Ash and trivialize them (and memorizing the shortcuts in the first place is a method of trivializing them). Even better, all three of these frames are actually viable in content besides trivializing stealth puzzles. There's nothing that lets a player go "I hate finding caches/the Silver Grove/Simaris Scans/whatever the thing you need to scour the map for, I'll take this gear item/Warframe/weapon/pet to basically get to ignore that system entirely."

I get where you're coming from, but I personally don't find it good design to give out a tool that just removes part of the game. Not the way Warframes co-op is designed at least. If the rewards are worth spending a fair bit of effort on, then it quickly becomes the expectation that you bring these tools that make the task trivially and basically non-existent, otherwise you're "playing it wrong". Though I suppose it comes down to how much time it saves. As long as it doesn't push the "proper" way to beat the challenge into obsolescence, then I'm fine having crutches for people who just want the thing done and over with.
 

21 hours ago, NezuHimeSama said:

I think, if anything, there should be better loot distribution in exploration. I still find it quite fun to scour a map for loot, but the things you get are either trivial, or require scouring a map for one or three things, with everything else being trivial. But, I think there are good ways to fix this.

In particular, making different tiers of containers, that spawn regularly in different locations, and have different drop tables. For example, you could have common containers that are just right there in the open, containing primarily ammo and credits, with occasionally common resources, health, energy, or affinity drops, and then slightly different uncommon containers that spawn only in treasure rooms and hidden rooms, and have a more traditional reward-centric loot table, with common and uncommon mods, uncommon resources, and cyan stars, and then rare containers(not like the current ones) where you get a guaranteed rare container in certain tiles, and a high chance of spawning one in others, which would always give some kind of good drop, be it endo, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, cyan and sometimes amber stars, even occasional blueprints for market weapons or specters, or maybe a relic or two. These would have, say, a 10~20% chance to spawn one in a hidden treasure room, a 1~2% chance to spawn in a regular treasure room, and a 100% chance to spawn one at the end of a parkour/super treasure room.

Then, something similar with the lockers. Normal common in-your-face lockers contain health or energy orbs and larger amounts of ammo than you get from containers, but require more effort to open. Uncommon lockers, sometimes spawning in treasure rooms, and always spawning in hidden treasure rooms, have a higher chance to drop things like endo, amber(not cyan) ayatan stars, maybe even a low-tier ayatan statue, small amounts of kuva, rare resources, rare mods, ect. Rare lockers would have a very low chance to spawn in treasure rooms, decent chance to spawn in hidden treasure rooms, and a guaranteed one or two at the end of a parkour, and would always contain something like an amber star, a large endo pile, a small amount of kuva, or a useful rare mod, stuff like that. Each locker would drop multiple things, like a common locker could drop two sniper ammo pickups and an energy orb, or a shotgun ammo pickup, a health orb, and a common resource, and a rare locker could drop, say, an amber star, 150 endo, and a relic.

 

By mixing it up like this, you increase the chances of the player feeling rewarded for exploring by giving them a "rare container", but since the drop table contains things that aren't broken to give out at that frequency, and there's no guarantee of any one specific drop, it doesn't immediately become irrelevant after you do it one or two times. On the flip side, because it's not super uncommon, and the rewards are things that you can afford to miss, the player doesn't feel forced into always searching for it in every mission. This would provide a good balance of time vs reward vs compulsion that would encourage players to explore without forcing them into it, and would reward exploration without breaking the game balance.

This is something I've personally wanted for a long time. There are actually a lot of really neat hidden loot rooms to find, but the "loot" you usually get is worth basically nothing. There are a select few things that can make exploration looting somewhat worthwhile, but they're so rare that the vast majority of the time it's basically a scavenger hunt for a lottery ticket where everything else is just loose change. It's a lot of wasted potential and effort in my opinion. And I entirely agree that it shouldn't be to the point where scouring the map is a must for maximum efficiency, but it shouldn't be a total loss like it is now.

 

[MJ12]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

That's a straw man and you know it. Exploration is just as much a part of Warframe as combat is, whether you personally enjoy it or not. Citing popularity is all fine and good, but I'm going to ask you to cite sources and make specific claims, rather than what amounts to "I'm right because I'm in the majority and you're wrong because you're in the minority." Hell, by that reductive logic, I could argue that the game is entirely about exploration because "sit in one spot and shoot" isn't what brought nayone to Warframe either, I bet. These kinds of spurious arguments are fairly easy to make once we abandon all pretence of making them actually meaningful beyond a cudgel with which to beat down opposing viewpoints.

The only person trying to beat down opposing viewpoints here is you. Exploration isn't just as much a part of Warframe as combat is. Warframe doesn't advertise itself as an exploration game. Exactly zero of Warframe's trailers show exploration. What they do show, though, is murdering a lot of people in close quarters combat. And if you look at the history of Warframe, the core Warframe gameplay loop of murder enemies->use things enemies drop to murder more enemies has existed since 2012.

Exploration was a tacked-on addition to the game and it kind of shows. I mean, I unironically liked Archwing until they implemented inertia and that's also similarly tacked-on, but I'm not a fan of forcing people to play Archwing because it's not part of the core gameplay loop.

Quote

 

Again, that's a straw man, doubly so when you coach your examples to this extent. Three waves of ESO might be 7.5 minutes FOR YOU if you happened to bring the correct gear and have experience in that mode. Running three waves of regular Sanctuary Onslaught for last week's Nightwave took me closer to 15 minutes, personally. And that's still cherry-picking an example of an activity criticised for reasons other than taking too long. What about 60 hours of Kuva Survival? I have it on good authority that that takes easily over an hour, assuming you succeed on every attempt. And there have been multiple of those challenges. Meanwhile, I can say with confidence that finding 3 Hidden Caches takes ~20 minutes, because I tend to keep an eye on my mission timer and that's about what it tends to take me typically. And that's solo. Doing it on a team and splitting up cuts down the time significantly.

Again, I'm not saying you have to like exploration. However, my point stands - when you go out of your way to tell me how my playstyle is aberrant and bad and you absolutely hate engaging in it, I tend to lose my sense of solidarity. Doubly so when you react to suggestions on easing the process with aggression. If you want to propose changes to Nightwave such that you can more easily ignore aspects you don't like, then great! I'm in full agreement. But that's not what your OP is about. When you say stuff like:

Then I feel compelled to step in because you're proposing the removal of something I like, for no reason greater than the way you play the game is not conducive to it. And when your response to pushback is what amounts to "Yeah, but you don't matter!" then don't act surprised when I assume the same stance. Actual dialogue requires some degree of compromise, and I'm not seeing any here.

Okay so here's what I actually want, which is why I said it's 'bad and needs improvement' rather than 'exploration should be gone period.' I'm just incredibly angry about its current implementation and it seems to be bleeding into my tone:

1. A much wider and more visible signifier of 'there is a special thing here, look for it if you want' that lets you know roughly where you should be looking at all times. Also, tiled maps should be somewhat smaller if you actually want exploration to be interesting-I don't want to have to run a kilometer to and fro if I missed something and need to double back. I don't actually mind the last bit of finding something as much as I mind the part where I have to scour the entire map to do it.

2. No backloading of rewards. Instead of 'find all three caches in 3 sabotage missions,' it should be 'find 9 caches in sabotage missions.' There shouldn't be A/B/C rewards, it should just be a single, better loot pool for any caches. If you can't find everything you should never feel pressured to look for the last thing.

3. Anything involving exploration shouldn't have a random spawn chance, or if they do randomly spawn, you should immediately be alerted at the start of the mission so you don't waste time searching for something that doesn't exist.

4. If this makes certain things (like rare containers) 'too easy' to find, add actual secondary objectives if you find one or something to make them less trivial.

My issue is that a lot of what people are suggesting is 'make exploration more rewarding' versus 'make exploration less painful for the people who don't enjoy it.'

Edited April 2, 2019 by MJ12

[Steel_Rook]

17 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

Okay so here's what I actually want, which is why I said it's 'bad and needs improvement' rather than 'exploration should be gone period.' I'm just incredibly angry about its current implementation and it seems to be bleeding into my tone:

Fair enough, and apologies for being aggressive with you. I tend to be pretty defensive when it comes to exploration and loot collection, so I might have overreacted, as well. To your actual points:

 

2 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

1. A much wider and more visible signifier of 'there is a special thing here, look for it if you want' that lets you know roughly where you should be looking at all times. Also, tiled maps should be somewhat smaller if you actually want exploration to be interesting-I don't want to have to run a kilometer to and fro if I missed something and need to double back. I don't actually mind the last bit of finding something as much as I mind the part where I have to scour the entire map to do it.

I don't disagree at all. My question here, though, is about loot detection - is that not enough? I realise that not everyone wants to equip a Loot Detector aura or even an Exilus Mod, but even just the basic Animal Instinct on a pet does most of the work. The majority of the exploration myself and my friends do is (or was, until we memorised the maps) done by chasing loot markers on the minimap. Lockers aren't marked, granted, but Hidden Cahces are - they use the same icon as regular loot. It just seems like what you're describing is already in the game. Or am I reading you wrong?

I wouldn't be opposed to a bit finer granularity in loot detection, of course. Marking Hidden Caches, Rare Containers and maybe even Rare Resources differently from "bulk cargo" loot might not be a bad idea. I mean, Ayatan Stars already have their own unique waypoint and map marker. Hell, I'd personally like to see lockers show up on the map, since some secret areas don't have containers and so don't show up on the map. Would these things help, or did you have something else in mind?

 

7 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

2. No backloading of rewards. Instead of 'find all three caches in 3 sabotage missions,' it should be 'find 9 caches in sabotage missions.' There shouldn't be A/B/C rewards, it should just be a single, better loot pool for any caches. If you can't find everything you should never feel pressured to look for the last thing.

On the first part, agreed completely. I don't see why it has to be finding all three caches when I don't have to do all three waves of ESO in one sitting. Don't have to kill 1500 enemies in the same mission, either. Hell, maybe the 60-minute Kuva Survival itself might not be as annoying if I could do it in smaller (even 20-minute) chunks across multiple days. So yeah - no argument there.

Second bit, I don't know... On the one hand, I genuinely don't have any love for reward "rotations." It's just an artificial way to increase scarcity. On the other hand, I think what DE were trying to do there was to introduce similar rotations to a non-endless mission by creating staggered, cumulative objectives. But yeah - beyond speculating on why it exists, I see no reason to disagree here.

 

10 minutes ago, MJ12 said:

3. Anything involving exploration shouldn't have a random spawn chance, or if they do randomly spawn, you should immediately be alerted at the start of the mission so you don't waste time searching for something that doesn't exist.

I'm assuming you're referring to stuff like Ayatan Sculptires and Rare Containers? If so, I agree that we ought to be notified when one is on the map, same as with the Caches. Just have a Lotus/Ordis quip about them and add it to our secondary objectives. The broader problem, though, is I feel both are just too rare. They show up so rarely that nobody bothers to search for them, and by the time they DO show up... Nobody's used to searching so people don't find them anyway. I do a lot of exploration so I know most of the hidden spots by now, but playing on any kind of team sees people running past Sculptures, Rare Containers, Caches, Stars, etc., simply because nobody even thinks to look at this point.

So, no disagreement on announcing truly rare resources, but I'd like to make them a bit less truly rare. Maybe introduce less valuable versions of Ayatan Sculptures to ensure that one shows up on nearly every mission (same as a Cephalon Fragment) and split the rewards in Rare Containers up but make those spawn more often, too. People aren't going to explore if the valuable items they want are almost never there. I genuinely feel that less valuable loot but more of it is a better incentive for exploration than really valuable rewards once in a blue moon. You want players finding something most of the time so it doesn't feel like a waste of their time.

[MJ12]

17 minutes ago, Steel_Rook said:

I don't disagree at all. My question here, though, is about loot detection - is that not enough? I realise that not everyone wants to equip a Loot Detector aura or even an Exilus Mod, but even just the basic Animal Instinct on a pet does most of the work. The majority of the exploration myself and my friends do is (or was, until we memorised the maps) done by chasing loot markers on the minimap. Lockers aren't marked, granted, but Hidden Cahces are - they use the same icon as regular loot. It just seems like what you're describing is already in the game. Or am I reading you wrong?

Loot detection is like, 40-50 meters at most. What I ideally want is a big ol' yellow circle on the map or a highlight encompassing like, a couple of tiles that says 'hey there's a point of interest here' and if you go into it Lotus or Ordis can tell you if it's an Ayatan, Rare Container, or Sabotage Cache or something. You still have to search those tiles, but this gets rid of the worst part of exploration pretty much instantly, which is the part where you scour the massive map wondering where the hell something is.

Quote

On the first part, agreed completely. I don't see why it has to be finding all three caches when I don't have to do all three waves of ESO in one sitting. Don't have to kill 1500 enemies in the same mission, either. Hell, maybe the 60-minute Kuva Survival itself might not be as annoying if I could do it in smaller (even 20-minute) chunks across multiple days. So yeah - no argument there.

Second bit, I don't know... On the one hand, I genuinely don't have any love for reward "rotations." It's just an artificial way to increase scarcity. On the other hand, I think what DE were trying to do there was to introduce similar rotations to a non-endless mission by creating staggered, cumulative objectives. But yeah - beyond speculating on why it exists, I see no reason to disagree here.

Staggered cumulative objectives make sense when you want to keep people in-mission for a certain amount of time. The AABC (or the Void Relic endless bonus rotation) keeps people in-mission for 20-30 minutes in general, which means that your average endless mission takes a little while and can ramp up a little more gradually but isn't so long as to start boring people. It's a soft pacing device.

But you don't actually want that for exploration, because the fewer things left to loot on the map there are, the more boring it is. You want them to be able to give up if finding the last bit is too hard or annoying because sunk cost fallacy is a thing and you should plan around it. 

Quote

I'm assuming you're referring to stuff like Ayatan Sculptires and Rare Containers? If so, I agree that we ought to be notified when one is on the map, same as with the Caches. Just have a Lotus/Ordis quip about them and add it to our secondary objectives. The broader problem, though, is I feel both are just too rare. They show up so rarely that nobody bothers to search for them, and by the time they DO show up... Nobody's used to searching so people don't find them anyway. I do a lot of exploration so I know most of the hidden spots by now, but playing on any kind of team sees people running past Sculptures, Rare Containers, Caches, Stars, etc., simply because nobody even thinks to look at this point.

So, no disagreement on announcing truly rare resources, but I'd like to make them a bit less truly rare. Maybe introduce less valuable versions of Ayatan Sculptures to ensure that one shows up on nearly every mission (same as a Cephalon Fragment) and split the rewards in Rare Containers up but make those spawn more often, too. People aren't going to explore if the valuable items they want are almost never there. I genuinely feel that less valuable loot but more of it is a better incentive for exploration than really valuable rewards once in a blue moon. You want players finding something most of the time so it doesn't feel like a waste of their time.

Honestly most Ayatans are marginal enough for late-game Endo needs that you could have them spawn much more often and it wouldn't be a big deal. Same with rare containers, because a 30 minute booster is really neat but also not that much in the grand scheme of things.

Edited April 2, 2019 by MJ12

[Steel_Rook]

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

Loot detection is like, 40-50 meters at most. What I ideally want is a big ol' yellow circle on the map or a highlight encompassing like, a couple of tiles that says 'hey there's a point of interest here' and if you go into it Lotus or Ordis can tell you if it's an Ayatan, Rare Container, or Sabotage Cache or something. You still have to search those tiles, but this gets rid of the worst part of exploration pretty much instantly, which is the part where you scour the massive map wondering where the hell something is.

Loot detection is 40-ish, yes. The Loot Detector aura and Animal Instinct are 30, Thief's Wit is 42, though you can stack them. Even 30 meters is quite a lot for indoors, though, as that's the majority of most rooms. Not so much for the "Free Roam" maps, but those have a host of issues of their own. The reason I keep bringing that up is I'm not a huge fan of quite as much signposting as you're proposing. While there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it, what you're describing is less "exploration" and more "an objective." Hive Sabotage, Grenier Caches on the plains, etc. I'd personally prefer the kind of exploration which requires players to pay attention throughout a mission, rather than for a minute or two every time the game says "OK, explore now."

That's why I proposed notifying players that an Ayatan Sculpture or Rare Container exists ON THE MAP, but then letting players find it themselves. Provided those show up in a different colour or with a different icon on the map (i.e., so they don't blend in with all the Ferrite and Rubedo crap), then I don't see it as too much bother for players to keep their eyes open as they go through the map. Hell, maybe even have them make a sound and flash the minimap when they pop up, like spotting an enemy tank does on World of Tanks, just to alert players that something happened. In general, though, I feel that loot detection itself works well enough for finding rare stuff, and that the most prominent issue there is telling the rare stuff apart from the common stuff. Well, and losing your Sentinel, if you rely on Animal Instinct like I do.

 

1 hour ago, MJ12 said:

But you don't actually want [staggered cumulative objectives] for exploration, because the fewer things left to loot on the map there are, the more boring it is. You want them to be able to give up if finding the last bit is too hard or annoying because sunk cost fallacy is a thing and you should plan around it. 

That's a fair point. Exploration is fun when there's stuff to find, and there's progressively less stuff left to find the longer you explore. Makes sense to avoid creating cumulative exploration objectives, then. To be perfectly honest, the whole Hidden Caches mechanic seems like a fairly undercooked creation - like a proof of concept that didn't pan out but they didn't want to take out of the game. Sort of like Rathuum. I'd personally like to pull it from the few specific mission types it shows up in and make it a game-wide mechanic (at least for standard instances) with better signposting and some more variety. Maybe have 1-3 Hidden Caches available in ALL of the rooms and just put either rarer resources or or mods in them, instead of making them a mission objective - something that's neat to have but that's not NECESSARY in order to enjoy the mission.

 

2 hours ago, MJ12 said:

Honestly most Ayatans are marginal enough for late-game Endo needs that you could have them spawn much more often and it wouldn't be a big deal. Same with rare containers, because a 30 minute booster is really neat but also not that much in the grand scheme of things. 

So I checked the Wiki. Rare Containers hold Mantis blueprints, Detonite/Fieldron/Forma, a meaningless amount of Endo/Credits, a blueprint or a Booster. For how rare those things are, that's frankly utter garbage. In that case, my reservations are withdrawn and I fully support making them more common. I mean, what's the harm? Worse come to worst a new player gets a temporary booster.

As to Ayatan Sculptures... I don't know. I don't actually use a terribly high amount of Endo and certainly haven't spent much time farming for it, so Ayatan Sculptures were legit my primary means of earning it. I explore maps pretty thoroughly, so I end up with a lot of Sculptures and Stars, which is why I was reluctant to propose just dropping more of them. If you're confident that it's not going to inflate the "endo economy" too much, though, then I'm willing to trust your judgement on the matter. Don't have too much of an opinion on the matter. I'd certainly want to find sculptures more often, since they're something of an exploration highlight.

In general, though - better or at least more consistent rewards for exploration are needed. Regardless of what changes we do to the activity itself, it does need to offer enough rewards to feel at least like I'm not wasting my time doing it.

[SableSonata]

Here's a couple ways they can very easily improve the exploring/looting experience:

1) Make the hitboxes for containers much larger, so they're easier to break with things that aren't beam weapons.

2) Containers don't stop shots. The shots continue on uninterrupted as they break the container.

3) Facing no longer matters for opening lockers. If you are in front of them, hitting the action key/button will open them. Alternatively, no input is required, and simply runnign in front of a locker will open it.

[Steel_Rook]

17 minutes ago, SableSonata said:

3) Facing no longer matters for opening lockers. If you are in front of them, hitting the action key/button will open them. Alternatively, no input is required, and simply runnign in front of a locker will open it.

I'll do you one (of two) better. Either:

Increase locker interaction range to 5 meters, relative to camera and not character model or...

Make Lockers open automatically if we stand within current standard interaction range of them.