Sanctuary Onslaught's Cave farming concepts should be removed from the game.

[Xzorn]

I'm not joking. It's one of the worst things in Warframe right now. Not the mission but what it represents.

Onslaught Forces meta conditions of kill rates and nothing more with complete disregard to modding and faction based combat by subjecting the players to random enemy types yet with the same objective, Kill. There's no premeditated thought behind this because the damage approach is essentially whatever works best against everything.

If this mission mode had not been abducted by DE as a Focus / Affinity grind admitted by themselves. I feel it would be played far less but at least I would not have such contempt for it's design. Instead I suggest Affinity and Focus gains be spread throughout the game in a more reasonable fashion as to not bottleneck player activities.

Focus should not be such an obvious grind. No Alternate Advancement system that's been implemented well should make the player feel forced into maximizing gains over simply playing. Obviously that happens but not to such an extreme as Warframe has made it. It should feel like a natural process for most of players.

• Focus Convergence needs to die.
• Large Affinity gains from objective completions
• Affinity gains from mission completions.
• Moderate Affinity gains from each stage of a bounty with bonus available.
• AABC Rotation Scaling Affinity gains.
• Altered curve of enemy Affinity gains. Less Quantity over Quality.
• * Bonus Affinity / Rewards from doing multi-objective missions as specified.

* Something I've mentioned in other posts. When you enter a Sab mission you have the choice of Fire, Cold, Magnetic, ect. The Lotus specifies a desired outcome but this is optional. If players choose the defined method they're granted bonus rewards and Affinity. Essentially taking the "Kill 10 enemies with a Melee weapon" and putting it on steroids with most missions types.

My point is stop with these spam grind caves for results and embrace a more global approach to gains of all types. If people won't play certain content then fix the content; don't bait players with crap like Ephemera. Onslaught can have a place in the game, I'm sure some like it but it's current implementation and what it represents is shameful.

Edited April 17, 2019 by Xzorn

[erny0507]

I actually like it...

[SECURATYYY]

Personally I love the game mode. However I do agree with you on the focus bottleneck issue.

 

If I could open relics in ESO, I would never leave.

[(XBOX)Erudite Prime]

It's an extremely efficient XP farm. Free Radiant Relics, too! What's not to love?

[Lobosandia]

41 minutes ago, Xzorn said:

I'm not joking. It's one of the worst things in Warframe right now.

It's an uninspired mission type putting together the worst parts of Survival and Diablo Greater Rifts.

Onslaught Forces meta conditions of kill rates and nothing more with complete disregard to modding and faction based combat by subjecting the players to random enemy types yet with the same objective, Kill. There's no premeditated thought behind this because the damage approach is essentially whatever works best against everything is what you pick.

If this mission mode had not been abducted by DE as a Focus / Affinity grind admitted by themselves. It would not be played just as Salvage, Defection and the other failed mission types of Warframe's past. Instead I would suggest Affinity and Focus gains be spread throughout the game in a more reasonable fashion as to not bottleneck player activities.

Focus should not be a grind. No Alternate Advancement system that's been implemented well should make the player feel forced into maximizing gains over simply playing. Obviously that happens but not to such an extreme was Warframe has made it. It should feel like a natural process for most of players.

• Focus Convergence needs to die.
• Large Affinity gains from objective completions
• Affinity gains from mission completions.
• Moderate Affinity gains from each stage of a bounty with bonus available.
• AABC Rotation Scaling Affinity gains.
• Altered curve of enemy Affinity gains. Less Quantity over Quality.
• * Bonus Affinity / Rewards from doing multi-objective missions as specified.

* Something I've mentioned in other posts. When you enter a Sab mission you have the choice of Fire, Cold, Magnetic, ect. The Lotus specifies a desired outcome but this is optional. If players choose the defined method they're granted bonus rewards and Affinity. Essentially taking the "Kill 10 enemies with Melee weapon" and putting it on steroids with most missions types.

My point it stop with these spam grind caves for results and embrace a more global approach to gains of all types. If people won't play certain content then fix the content; don't bait players with crap like Ephemera. Onslaught could have a place in the game but it's current implementation is shameful. A mission in a looter shooter where enemies don't drop loot; Genius. 

You forgot to mention that its a focus grind where you have a 60 second window to actually nuke as much as possible to get as much focus as possible while trying desperately to keep your abilities from being disabled. Followed by a few minutes of nuking at a moderated pace until the next map. 

[Xzorn]

23 minutes ago, SECURATYYY said:

Personally I love the game mode. However I do agree with you on the focus bottleneck issue.

If I could open relics in ESO, I would never leave.

 

8 minutes ago, (XB1)Erudite God said:

It's an extremely efficient XP farm. Free Radiant Relics, too! What's not to love?

 

I've edited to tone down my personal feeling about the mission a little and focus more on why it's bad for the game.

I'm willing to bet rewards are why many people like this mission. That's what I'm attempting the address.

The tactic of using bait to entice content is what I'm opposed to. Let the player do the mission because they like it. Spread the love around more. Focus is a global system and should be tied globally to the game, all it's mission types and play styles.

[SECURATYYY]

I really like ESO. If the rewards were removed, I would still play it. Its a fun endurance test that is a step above survival. How long can you go with nyx? What's your high score with saryn? Things like that.

 

If they removed the carrot on a stick, surely less people would play it. However those whom enjoy it will continue regardless. There are a lot of carrots in this game.

[Test-995]

So you are saying that affinity farming shouldn't be a thing and needs overhaul?

YES i completely agreed, i think there is almost no point in affinities for now.... just go eso, leech, forma, do it again.

Oh... but don't remove eso, please, i love it.

[Xzorn]

37 minutes ago, moostar95 said:

Do what I do. Camp for xp as mag by pressing her 3. Let the nukers work until you are fully ranked. Leave. 

 

I've no reason to play Onslaught. For the most part I only did it to farm Khora and never touch it. I'm posting because I feel this approach of cave farming and baiting content hurts the game as a whole. DE went out of their way to kill Draco and other cave farms yet then made one purposefully. They killed the Void so players could go to other tilesets... It goes against any logic they've used in the past. Things like Experience and Alternate Advancement should not feel so forced.

There needs to be competitive options for Affinity and Focus gains. "Hi Itzal Nerf excuse!"

[Kingsmount]

Strongly disagree with the title,  but I agree with the comments on focus gain and convergence. 

[Xzorn]

26 minutes ago, Kingsmount said:

Strongly disagree with the title,  but I agree with the comments on focus gain and convergence. 

 

Yea sorry, I just got to rewriting some things. The original draft was a bit vindictive while trying to get the main point across.

[Guest]

I could get behind the changes to focus gain suggested here since grinding with a Saryn in ESO sucks especially when a competing Saryn turns up.. The thing about ESO and SO being a good way to gain focus with Saryn/Equi makes it feel quite necessary, so it would be good if there would be more ways to get focus fast.

However, regarding making ESO completely lack incentive would be quite ... overdone, so perhaps make it the endless for void traces (like how we have Kuva Survival) and radiant relics. Something that you can get by playing the game normally.

[Autongnosis]

This ties into a more general troubling tendency warframe had for the past few years. 

Many new game modes are designed and executed in such a way that once you got the designated reward bait, you never touch them again. Which is a huge problem. 

ESO, arbitrations and nightwave are a glaring example of that. They all could be actually fun and could give long lasting player retention if only they were changed at least slightly. Ibstead they are thrown out with shiny stuff in there, you get the shiny and never touch it again. 

[Teridax68]

I have to agree with a lot of what's been said, as I also think Sanctuary Onslaught embodies some of the worst flaws of recent design in Warframe: we've been given far too many missions that have us stay for prolonged periods of time in static zones, and focus exclusively on combat to the detriment of stealth or parkour, and the combat itself emphasizes sheer crowd-killing power over all else due to the horde mode enemy setup. The mode itself isn't really challenging to geared-up players, but is designed to take up the player's time and be repeated a large number of times, to the point of tedium. Because this mode is its own isolated mission type, with no relation to the rest of the universe or reason to play it outside of its reward pool, the moment players have gotten those rewards, there is no real reason to return to SO or ESO until new ones get added. It's an incredibly short-sighted bit of mission design that makes no long-term contribution to the game or its universe, and makes the mistake of playing fully into the player mentality of optimization over fun, while contributing to a high-end metagame where only a limited number of player contributions have value, namely sheer radial killing power over, say, crowd control or stealth.

In this respect I fully agree that we need to kill some of our current modes of grinding, with particular emphasis on Affinity and Focus farming, because that just naturally encourages really boring styles of play, and thereby contributes to burnout. Sanctuary Onslaught as a mode I think could easily get either scrapped or changed to feature randomized game modes as well (e.g. some waves could be Survival, but others could be Spy, Rescue, Assassinate, etc.), and more generally I agree we need to shift Affinity rewards away from mass-killing enemies, and more onto completing mission objectives, so that players are pushed to actually play the game, rather than game its systems in some excessively reductive way (which the developers never should have encouraged to begin with).

The one risk I see to this, though, is that if it becomes less rewarding to kill enemies, many mission types that do not hinge upon enemies may end up having players ignore them entirely, which already happens in, say, Sortie missions when enemies have durability modifiers. Already, there is a long-standing issue in Warframe where higher-level players end up blazing through missions to focus purely on the objective, without really taking any opportunity to interact with anything else, a problem lesser Affinity rewards on kills may worsen. Thus, while I still agree with the OP's proposition, I also think care needs to be taken to make killing enemies still a worthwhile thing to do, perhaps by tying enemies more to the missions themselves: for example, if alarms were irreversible and had much more of an impact on the mission (e.g. entering a Spy vault or Rescue prison while the alarm is on could immediately start the countdown), that would encourage players to kill enemies who spotted them, but also potentially also encourage stealth more, especially if there are greater rewards for completing missions stealthily. Combat I don't think should be the main focus of Warframe all the time (though it certainly could be for some mission types), though we need to also make sure that combat is nonetheless something the player has an intrinsic reason to participate in, as opposed to an extrinsic one like the promise of Affinity.

Edited April 17, 2019 by Teridax68

[Steel_Rook]

Something to keep in mind: Warframe Sanctuary Onslaught is Diablo 3 Nephilem Rifts. If you want to explore its drawbacks, explore the history of difficulty in Diablo 3 and how that evolved into the concept of Nephilem Rifts.

With that said, I agree with the OP's principle conclusions. I find the whole concept of SO and ESO to be reductive in the extreme - the meta-game with as much of the actual game removed as physically possible while still keeping it functional. No story, no exploration, no theme, no tactics, just DPS and EHP. Kill as fast as possible, survive as long as possible, min/max as hard as you can. Admittedly, the majority of this game's high-level content pretty much boils down to a gear check, but at least there's effort apparent in giving those some thematic substance. SO and especially ESO barely need their graphical layer.

And while I come across as critical of those modes, I'm not necessarily saying they're bad. It's an option that some people enjoy, and more power to them. To each his own. Problems arise, however, when ESO becomes such a bottleneck of Affinity and especially Focus progression. Far as I'm concerned, the entire Focus system is ass backwards in the extreme and needs major changes. I'm with the OP here - I'd much rather make progress while playing "the game," or at reasonably large part of it, rather than put the game on hold and grind a niche activity as my sole source of progress. Progression and reward systems are powerful motivators, which makes them very easy to abuse and push people into activities they wouldn't otherwise take part in.

Generally speaking, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with ESO as a concept. It's a highly reductive game mode which fits mechanically-minded and performance-centric people's preferred playstyle in a lot of cases. It's the game's reward structure incentivising it heavily, in large part due to Focus being such a grindy, tedious mess.

[(XBOX)dude1286]

3 hours ago, Steel_Rook said:

Something to keep in mind: Warframe Sanctuary Onslaught is Diablo 3 Nephilem Rifts. If you want to explore its drawbacks, explore the history of difficulty in Diablo 3 and how that evolved into the concept of Nephilem Rifts.

The major difference between Nephilem Rifts and ESO is that the Rifts provide actual rewards that allow players to optimize their builds so that they can go to higher and higher difficulties. The rewards also allow the player to go further in the Rift on the difficulty they are on. Rifts are Diablo 3's endgame system. ESO has no rewards that are desired by Warframe's endgame players besides the one off rewards (Vandal Weapons, Ephemera and Peculiar Mods). An MR 27 has nothing to gain in ESO as most of them have thousands of relics they will never get rid of, focus schools are already maxed, and most of them don't have many weapons they need to relevel. I have gotten to a point where I just level weapons while doing NW challenges and speedrunning relics. ESO was being advertised as an endgame mode before release, and it disappointed on almost every facet of that hype.

[(PSN)AbBaNdOn_IGN]

My thought is that Focus Lens's should have been the be all END ALL of focus farming.   

Lens economy should be completely gutted and redone in terms of crafting them and how many tiers their are.   

I would like something along the lines of you arcanes or Diable 3 gems.   get 2 crappy len's and squish them to make a better one.   Take 2 better one and squish them to get a greater one.  2 greater = ??   etc etc etc......   

But start at like 5% and make lots of small steps towards something GOOD like 25-50%.    Get rid of those focus orbs.   Just make the level of our lens and how much crap we kill determine how much focus we get.   And by crap we kill I mean EVERYONE IN THE GROUP, not just the buttholes in affinity range.   If you run into leechs ignore them.   I hate them ALOT less than I do people who run off and kill on their own out of affinity range that DESTROYS all pretense of squad based combat.  

Affinity gain mechanics I would also love to see get reworked.   It would be nice if it didnt matter how many weapons you bring to a fight or which ones you used.   It would be nice the more focus len's you have equipped the more focus you could gain.    But unfortunately Affinity gets split up and only flows into stuff you use.    So if you go in with a primary, secondary, and melee with all 3 lens'ed its the same as going in with only one of those.    I guess I think splitting affinity needs to die.    

If you earn 500k affinity during a mission,  your frame should get 500k, your primary should get 500k, your secondary should get 500k, your melee should get 500k, etc etc.    Then you would actually be rewarded for having multiple lens's.  The more lens's you have on the more focus you are producing.   

The warframes I farm focus with only have 1 weapon because of existing mechanics.  I barely ever use primary or secondary weapons unless they are new and im trying to level them lol.   

[GrayArchon]

22 hours ago, Xzorn said:

stop with these spam grind caves for results

Warframe is a game about obtaining and achieving things. There will always be a loot cave. There will always be a most efficient setup to do a particular task, and players will eventually find it. If the loot cave gets nerfed, players will find the next most efficient way. Before ESO, players would do things like Berehynia or stealth runs on Adaro. Players want focus and they'll find the fastest way to get it. As I see it, there is no solution, and it is not a problem.

22 hours ago, Xzorn said:

Focus should not be such an obvious grind.

It is intended to be a grind. It is intended to take years to complete.

In the early days of the game, once you levelled up all the weapons and warframes and forma'd them to your satisfaction, you were done. There was no point in playing the game. You had acquired all the affinity and mastery rank you could get. With the small number of weapons in the game back then, this was a problem. DE's solution was the Syndicates. Now, the affinity you gained went towards something, even if your warframe was rank 30. However, because of the daily cap, this only gave you something to do for a few thousand affinity per day. So their next solution was focus. Something you would never truly finish, unless you devoted years of your life into the game. Now, there never needs to be wasted play. Now, you are always earning something.

With the current model of the game, the foundation of how Warframe is set up, there is always a goal. There are things you can sink years into. Once you have achieved all the goals, there is nothing left for you. DE wants to make sure you never achieve all your goals, that there is always something you are working on. Because otherwise, you might stop playing.

Focus was always intended to be an impossible grind. They said as much on the DevStreams when they discussed its development.

[TheGreenFellow]

ESO was always a strange idea to me. "Just kill stuff as fast as you can" ad nauseum for consecutive waves, really, that's it? No reason, no purpose, just mindless violence? Even Defense is at least slightly more exciting with an objective to defend.

It's a mode designed to bring out the worst in min/maxing. It's a mode that tries to bring "endgame content" to a game that has so much power spiking (mainly through modding) that any endgame content is either a joke or full of invulnerability waiting phases.

Like Rivens, the underlying motivation on DE's end is perhaps good, but the implementation is so very misguided and fails to address the core problem.

As soon as I got (or bought) all the exclusive stuff from this mode, I quit playing it and have never looked back - I find it to be that unappealing. (Much the same story with Defense missions, if I can help avoiding them.)
__

I very much like the OP's thinking regarding focus & affinity. I really disagree with DE's mindset with the Focus grind in general, albiet it's not all that difficult if one regularly does Eidolon hunting, but even that is a made a royal pain because of the night cycle nonsense.

Edited April 17, 2019 by TheGreenFellow

[Xzorn]

1 hour ago, GrayArchon said:

Warframe is a game about obtaining and achieving things. There will always be a loot cave. There will always be a most efficient setup to do a particular task, and players will eventually find it. If the loot cave gets nerfed, players will find the next most efficient way. Before ESO, players would do things like Berehynia or stealth runs on Adaro. Players want focus and they'll find the fastest way to get it. As I see it, there is no solution, and it is not a problem.

 

I admitted you cannot get rid of farming caves fully but they need not be so drastic. DE went out of their way to destroy those previous farming caves and they made one of their own. I don't get it. It's a really bad thing to promote and removing Convergence Orbs plays a key part.

If you don't go out of your way to specifically grind Focus you will get very little. How many times have you been at a Sorties Spy terminal it counts down 3, 2, 1, 0 then you get the hack in for nothing.  Focus should be ambient gains as you play. How long it takes isn't really the argument. It's more the difference of playing and doing chores.

Doing this will make players feel less forced into these Caves. Sure you can go if you want but I'm talking about the difference between nearly nothing or just a little better than normal. Affinity is a global resource of the game. It should not be limited to specific places for meaningful gains. It's not like farming a mod or parts for a frame and far as it lasting years. It was maxed out for many of us the moment they did Focus 2.0. It's essentially a dead system for now so they failed on making it a last as well.

Instead of treating each mission like it's own little corner of the game. Each can have it's perk over others but lets smudge the boundaries a little and make it more about the game as a whole. There are a lot of these corners in the game. ESO is just the easiest to point a finger at for an example of things that are wrong in design.

[Teridax68]

2 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

Warframe is a game about obtaining and achieving things. There will always be a loot cave. There will always be a most efficient setup to do a particular task, and players will eventually find it. 

I think there's a difference between an optimal setup and a loot cave: for sure, anything in the game can be played optimally, and in fact it's generally a good thing to encourage the player to find optimal strategies. However, a loot cave implies a setup that is optimal for gaining rewards, but not at all optimal for providing fun, and so to the point of absurdity. To go to the namesake in Destiny: for sure, removing the loot cave simply caused players to move to some new optimal farming strategy, but that new strategy was nonetheless far better than simply shooting into a cave to get loot. Thus, while reworking Affinity gains may certainly cause players to shift to a new optimal way of grinding for it, if the grind aligns better with, say, completing missions, as opposed to intentionally forcing the game into an extreme degree of repetition within the same mission, that would still be a net improvement. Thus, while there will always be an optimum somewhere, that should not excuse letting loot caves exist, much less having the developers outright intentionally design them.

2 hours ago, GrayArchon said:

With the current model of the game, the foundation of how Warframe is set up, there is always a goal. There are things you can sink years into. Once you have achieved all the goals, there is nothing left for you. DE wants to make sure you never achieve all your goals, that there is always something you are working on. Because otherwise, you might stop playing.

Focus was always intended to be an impossible grind. They said as much on the DevStreams when they discussed its development.

And yet there are plenty of people who've maxed out on Focus long ago. It's not actually that difficult, particularly at a time when Eidolon hunting allows for extremely rapid gains. Meanwhile, there are people who have stopped playing while they still had things to do, simply because the path towards those rewards was stretched so thin for them that they just gave up.

There seems to be this mistaken belief that grind is a metric that can be increased without any real limitation, and so without any negative consequences: as noted by player count variations, data on new player progression, numerous player stories, etc., this is simply not true, and in fact I'd say Warframe has suffered significantly due to a grind that is simply too much for many. Even those who tolerated some of Warframe's older grind have found themselves burning out on Plains of Eidolon or Vallis content, because the Plains introduced a new level of grind that we had thought to have long moved away from. Meanwhile, a ton of prospective players get put off, or quit very early, the moment they see how much time the game expects them to commit in order to get anywhere. Grinding works as a mechanic for extending play, but it only goes so far, and we keep seeing the negative consequences whenever DE tries to push the grind even further past the point of tedium, e.g. the Wolf of Saturn Six and his needlessly, intentionally diluted drop table. I can agree that DE needs to give players a reason to keep playing, but grinding towards some finite rewards simply doesn't work at the game's current pace of content releases, at least not for veteran players. Thus, it may be better to move beyond the grind, and look for ways to engineer replayability that are legitimately infinite, or at the very least long-lived.

[sam686]

The problem now is, most regular missions, especially high level Defense and interception, affinity and focus gains are now randomly slowed down by Wolf of Saturn six. When Wolf is finally defeated, I get a very tiny amount of affinity or focus for over 10 minutes of time mostly wasted. Sanctuary Onslaught never have any Wolf or Stalker, so it stays as a fast way to level up and gain affinity and focus.

I kind of partly agree that the Focus pick up and countdown sound effects is starting to get annoying, worst when focus pickups is sometimes at an unreachable places, at extraction area, or in multiplayer squads sometimes far away to the other side of the map.

[GrayArchon]

1 hour ago, Teridax68 said:

There seems to be this mistaken belief that grind is a metric that can be increased without any real limitation, and so without any negative consequences: as noted by player count variations, data on new player progression, numerous player stories, etc., this is simply not true, and in fact I'd say Warframe has suffered significantly due to a grind that is simply too much for many. Even those who tolerated some of Warframe's older grind have found themselves burning out on Plains of Eidolon or Vallis content, because the Plains introduced a new level of grind that we had thought to have long moved away from. Meanwhile, a ton of prospective players get put off, or quit very early, the moment they see how much time the game expects them to commit in order to get anywhere. Grinding works as a mechanic for extending play, but it only goes so far, and we keep seeing the negative consequences whenever DE tries to push the grind even further past the point of tedium, e.g. the Wolf of Saturn Six and his needlessly, intentionally diluted drop table. I can agree that DE needs to give players a reason to keep playing, but grinding towards some finite rewards simply doesn't work at the game's current pace of content releases, at least not for veteran players. Thus, it may be better to move beyond the grind, and look for ways to engineer replayability that are legitimately infinite, or at the very least long-lived.

I don't have access to any metrics or data on the subject. I can only speak for myself. I've been playing this game for 6 years, and I've never had any problems with the grind in the game. The fact that I don't have that last part of the Lato Vandal is the reason why I keep doing ESO, and I don't resent DE for that. I play this game because of the way it's structured, not despite it.

[Chaemyerelis]

I use it for focus farming because it works but yeah, ESO sucks and wish there was something better,

[MJ12]

2 hours ago, Teridax68 said:

I think there's a difference between an optimal setup and a loot cave: for sure, anything in the game can be played optimally, and in fact it's generally a good thing to encourage the player to find optimal strategies. However, a loot cave implies a setup that is optimal for gaining rewards, but not at all optimal for providing fun, and so to the point of absurdity. To go to the namesake in Destiny: for sure, removing the loot cave simply caused players to move to some new optimal farming strategy, but that new strategy was nonetheless far better than simply shooting into a cave to get loot. Thus, while reworking Affinity gains may certainly cause players to shift to a new optimal way of grinding for it, if the grind aligns better with, say, completing missions, as opposed to intentionally forcing the game into an extreme degree of repetition within the same mission, that would still be a net improvement. Thus, while there will always be an optimum somewhere, that should not excuse letting loot caves exist, much less having the developers outright intentionally design them.

A huge problem is that only 'loot cave' style missions actually spawn enough enemies often enough and in large enough numbers to make Warframe into a real horde shooter as it were. Worse, only those sorts of missions spawn enough enemies to allow for someone who isn't way up in the Mastery ranks to bring a weapon back to usefulness in a timely fashion. Sure, someone with MR25+ can probably take a r0 weapon into a Sortie with zero issue, but most people playing Warframe can't do things like that.

I like SO/ESO not just because they give you tons of focus, but because they feed you tons of kills. If you have a weapon good at engaging multiple targets, even without Saryn farming you can easily get an average of 2-3 kills a second or more in normal sanctuary onslaught, and that's fun in a power fantasy way.